Using UDDI for Publishing Metadata of the Semantic Web

Although UDDI does not provide support for semantic search, retrieval and storage, it is already accepted as an industrial standard and a huge number of services already store their service specifications in UDDI. Objective of this paper is to analyze possibilities and ways to use UDDI registry to allow utilization of meta-data encoded according to Semantic Web standards for semantic-based description, discovery and integration of web resources in the context of needs of two research projects: “Adaptive Services Grid” and “SmartResource”. We present an approach of mapping RDFS upper concepts to UDDI data model using tModel structure, which makes possible to store semantically annotated reso…

Modeling Static Aspects of Mobile Electronic Commerce Environments

Mobile phones and other small and powerful portable devices have revolutionized personal communication and affected the lifestyles of the people in the industrialized world. Following credible estimates, in a few years there will be one billion of such portable devices. An emerging trend is the electronic commerce performed using mobile terminals, often called mobile commerce. Mobile commerce environments are characterized by high complexity, including myriads of technical and organizational aspects. This property makes it difficult to distinguish the more fundamental issues, structures, and concepts in mobile commerce from the hype. To capture the fundamental aspects of mobile commerce env…

Content quality assessment and acceptance testing in location‐based services

In this paper, we develop and evaluate an approach to assessing the content quality in a location‐based service (LBS). The proposed approach, instead of assessing the quality in absolute terms such as completeness or accuracy, measures the effect that the imperfection of the content is having on the reliability of that specific LBS. We apply the basic ideas from Software Reliability Engineering (SRE), but develop a modification of SRE, 2‐Branch, in order to separate content quality from other factors, such as positioning imprecision, and to reduce the measurement error. In our experimental study, we first compare 2‐Branch to the standard SRE, after which we experimentally analyze some prope…

Invariant aspects in M-commerce environments

Mobile phones and other small and powerful portable devices have revolutionized personal communication and affected the lifestyles of the people in the industrialized world. Following credible estimates, in a few years there will over two - billions of such portable devices in use. An emerging trend is the electronic commerce performed using mobile terminals over wireless networks, often called mobile commerce or M-commerce. Mobile commerce environments are characterized by high complexity, including myriads of technical and organizational aspects. This property makes it difficult to distinguish the more fundamental issues, structures, and concepts in mobile commerce from the hype. To captu…

Mobile Electronic Commerce: Emerging Issues

There are many definitions for Mobile Electronic Commerce (M-Commerce). We define M-Commerce as any type of transaction of an economic value having at least at one end a mobile terminal and thus using the mobile telecommunications network. The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) plays an important role in m-commerce by optimizing Internet standards for the constraints of the wireless environment and thus bridging the gap between Internet and mobile world. Mobile Network Operators can play a major role in m-commerce by being strategically positioned between customers and content/service providers. In this paper we investigate the roles the operator can play in m-commerce and discuss respecti…

Volkswagen Emission Crisis : Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web

Organizations establish their own profiles at social media sites to publish pertinent information to customers and other stakeholders. During a long and severe crisis, multiple issues may emerge in media interaction. Positive responses and prompt interaction from the official account of e.g. a car manufacturer creates clarity and reduces anxiety among stakeholders. This research targets the Volkswagen 2015 emission scandal that became public on Sept. 18, 2015. We report its main phases over time based on public web information. To better understand the online interaction and reactions of the company, we scrutinized what information was published on VW’s official web sites, Facebook, and Twi…

Mobile Wireless Interfaces: In Search for the Limits

With the proliferation of 2G and 3G Telecom and other wireless networks hundred of millions of users will be able to access wireless services with their terminals in only a few years. In this paper we discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing and emerging mobile technologies and methodologies for porting information and functionality from traditional PCs to mobile devices and vice versa. We argue that in order to be able to properly port things between devices an equivalence concept for user interfaces is required.

Electronic Commerce Transactions in a Mobile Computing Environment

Internet E-commerce has been flourishing for the last few years, especially with the advent of World Wide Web. Mobile Electronic Commerce (MEC) has started recently to appear in the scene. It exploits the advantages of Internet, mobile computing and mobile communications in order to provide a large number of advanced services to mobile users. The potentials of MEC are enormous while related technical, business and legal issues become more complicated. The goal of this chapter is to present and discuss problems and identify requirements associated with the trading and billing of tangible and intangible goods in a mobile environment where mobile handheld devices are used for conducting the tr…

The Spanning Tree based Approach for Solving the Shortest Path Problem in Social Graphs

Nowadays there are many social media sites with a very large number of users. Users of social media sites and relationships between them can be modelled as a graph. Such graphs can be analysed using methods from social network analysis (SNA). Many measures used in SNA rely on computation of shortest paths between nodes of a graph. There are many shortest path algorithms, but the majority of them suits only for small graphs, or work only with road network graphs that are fundamentally different from social graphs. This paper describes an efficient shortest path searching algorithm suitable for large social graphs. The described algorithm extends the Atlas algorithm. The proposed algorithm so…

Analysing the presence of school-shooting related communities at social media sites

Surprisingly cruel mass murders and attacks have been witnessed in the educational institutions of the Western world since the 1970s. These are often referred to as 'school shootings'. There have been over 300 known incidents around the world and the number is growing. Social network sites (SNSs) have enabled the perpetrators to express their views and intentions. Our result is that since about 2005, all major school shooters have had a presence in SNS and some have left traces that would have made possible to evaluate their intentions to carry out a rampage. A further hypothesis is that future school shooters will behave in a similar manner and would thus be traceable in the digital sphere…

Challenges of Serendipity in Recommender Systems

Most recommender systems suggest items similar to a user profile, which results in boring recommendations limited by user preferences indicated in the system. To overcome this problem, recommender systems should suggest serendipitous items, which is a challenging task, as it is unclear what makes items serendipitous to a user and how to measure serendipity. The concept is difficult to investigate, as serendipity includes an emotional dimension and serendipitous encounters are very rare. In this paper, we discuss mentioned challenges, review definitions of serendipity and serendipity-oriented evaluation metrics. The goal of the paper is to guide and inspire future efforts on serendipity in r…

Insights from Operator Interviews

The previous section analysed use of software to improve productivity from a general perspective and provided a quick statistical analysis of software usage to the performance of a CSP. Before conducting elaborated statistical analysis on CSP software usage, we need to gain some insight into operator business and understanding on how operators see the role of software in their business as well as how they acquire software.

Decomposing issue patterns in crisis communication: the case of the lost airliner

This research explores the relation between a crisis and public discussion on related issues. In organisational crisis communication, a singleissue strategy is often proposed. Such a strategy, however, may not be adequate in more complex crises where the crisis lifecycle is likely to encompass shorter lifecycles of issues that generate media attention. Decomposing the online crisis debate into a pattern of issues supports understanding of public perceptions, and hence of crisis response and communication. This is investigated through an analysis of Facebook posts prompted by the loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in 2014. The analysis shows that during the life of the crisis a variety o…

Detection of Fake Profiles in Social Media - Literature Review

Revealing Fake Profiles in Social Networks by Longitudinal Data Analysis

Mobile Ontologies

The number of mobile subscribers in the world is soon reaching the three billion mark. According to the newest estimates, majority of the subscribers are already in the developing countries, whereas the number of subscribers in the industrialized countries is about to stagnate around one billion. Because especially in the developing countries the only access to Internet are mobile devices, developing high quality services based on them grows in importance. Ontologies are an important ingredient towards more complicated mobile services and wider usage of mobile terminals. In this article, we first discuss ontology and epistemology concepts in general. After that, we review ontologies in the …

How does serendipity affect diversity in recommender systems? A serendipity-oriented greedy algorithm

Most recommender systems suggest items that are popular among all users and similar to items a user usually consumes. As a result, the user receives recommendations that she/he is already familiar with or would find anyway, leading to low satisfaction. To overcome this problem, a recommender system should suggest novel, relevant and unexpected i.e., serendipitous items. In this paper, we propose a serendipity-oriented, reranking algorithm called a serendipity-oriented greedy (SOG) algorithm, which improves serendipity of recommendations through feature diversification and helps overcome the overspecialization problem. To evaluate our algorithm, we employed the only publicly available datase…

Transactions in Mobile Electronic Commerce

With the development of global networking, invention of WWW, and proliferation of Internet-enabled computer hardware and software into homes and pockets, a huge customer base has been created for electronic commerce. It is rapidly expanding in USA and Europe and Japan are following the trend. So far, the development of E-commerce has happened in a rather unregulated way especially in USA, whereas in Europe the European Commission has been developing a regulatory basis mainly in form of directives. Currently (12/1999) they have not yet all been accepted and a major restructuring of the regulatory framework has also been planned. Another technological development is the rapid growth of mobile…

Listwise Collaborative Filtering

Recently, ranking-oriented collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms have achieved great success in recommender systems. They obtained state-of-the-art performances by estimating a preference ranking of items for each user rather than estimating the absolute ratings on unrated items (as conventional rating-oriented CF algorithms do). In this paper, we propose a new ranking-oriented CF algorithm, called ListCF. Following the memory-based CF framework, ListCF directly predicts a total order of items for each user based on similar users' probability distributions over permutations of the items, and thus differs from previous ranking-oriented memory-based CF algorithms that focus on predicting th…

User Influence and Follower Metrics in a Large Twitter Dataset

A modelling framework for social media monitoring

This paper describes a hierarchical, three-level modelling framework for monitoring social media. Immediate social reality is modelled through the first level of the models. They represent various virtual communities at social media sites and adhere to the social world models of the sites, i.e., the "site ontologies". The second-level model is a temporal multirelational graph that captures the static and dynamic properties of the first-level models from the perspective of the monitoring site. The third-level model consists of a temporal relational database scheme that models the temporal multirelational graph within the database. The models are specified and instantiated at the monitoring s…

E-Commerce Transactions

Research Direction for Developing an Infrastructure for Mobile & Wireless Systems: Consensus Report of the NSF Workshop Held on October 15, 2001 in Scottsdale, Arizona

The recent NSF Workshop on Infrastructure for Mobile and Wireless Systems, held on Oct. 15, 2001 in Phoenix had a goal of defining and establishing a common infrastructure for the discipline of mobile wireless networking. This consensus-based paper is the outcome of that workshop. The paper provides a foundation for implementation, standardization, and further research and discussion on the issues of what should constitute such an infrastructure. Workshop participants came from many different wireless communities, including those of communications, operating systems, core networking, mobility, databases, and middleware. The workshop presented various research directions in the field and inc…

Samsung and Volkswagen Crisis Communication in Facebook and Twitter : A Comparative Study

Since September 2015 at least two major crises have emerged where major industrial companies producing consumer products have been involved. In September 2015 diesel cars manufactured by Volkswagen turned out to be equipped with cheating software that caused NO2 and other emission values to be reduced to acceptable levels while tested from the real, unacceptable values in normal use. In August 2016 reports began to appear that the battery of a new smart phone produced by Samsung, Galaxy Note7, could begin to burn, or even explode, while the device was on. In Nov. 2016 also 34 washing machine models were reported to have caused damages due to disintegration. In all cases, the companies have …

Understanding Fast Diffusion of Information in the Social Media Environment. A Comparison of Two Cases.

The purpose of this paper is to gain understanding of what factors cause rapid issue spread in social media, to help predict issue growth. The frequency graphics of two issues, Arctic Sunrise and U.S. capitol shooting, were compared to investigate rapidity of spread on Twitter. Next, a qualitative model was applied to explain the differences found. Furthermore, a first attempt was made to investigate issue transfer between social media and news media. The findings showed that news items and tweets were interrelated, with hardly any time-lag in between, although the tweets continued longer and included more emotion. The approach seems promising but needs further testing. When in practice mon…

Tracing Potential School Shooters in the Digital Sphere

There are over 300 known school shooting cases in the world and over ten known cases where the perpetrator(s) have been prohibited to perform the attack at the last moment or earlier. Interesting from our point of view is that in many cases the perpetrators have expressed their views in social media or on their web page well in advance, and often also left suicide messages in blogs and other forums before their attack, along the planned date and place. This has become more common towards the end of this decennium. In some cases this has made it possible to prevent the attack. In this paper we will look at the possibilities to find commonalities of the perpetrators, beyond the fact that they…

An integrated identity verification system for mobile terminals

PurposeTo report the work on the design of an integrated identity verification system architecture aimed at approaching high verification accuracy, continuous security, and user‐friendliness.Design/methodology/approachThe reported research corresponds to the building process in the design science research paradigm. The requirements to an identity verification system are defined and used in the selection of architecture components. Furthermore, various issues affecting the suitability of component distribution between a terminal and a remote server are considered.FindingsIn order to meet the stated requirements, in the proposed architecture static and dynamic identity verification is combine…

Online Stakeholder Interaction of Some Airlines in the Light of Situational Crisis Communication Theory

Part 2: Digital Marketing and Customer Relationship Management; International audience; The purpose of this paper is to explore the participation of main actors in Facebook. The engagement shows different degrees of participation that directly affect the brand image and reputation. This research applies Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to interaction in the social media. It provides possibilities for decision makers to monitor diverse messages online, understand stakeholder concerns and reply to them adequately, which is especially important in crisis situations. Seven airline organizations were selected for a comparative analysis concerning their online discussions. The verif…

A survey of serendipity in recommender systems

We summarize most efforts on serendipity in recommender systems.We compare definitions of serendipity in recommender systems.We classify the state-of-the-art serendipity-oriented recommendation algorithms.We review methods to assess serendipity in recommender systems.We provide the future directions of serendipity in recommender systems. Recommender systems use past behaviors of users to suggest items. Most tend to offer items similar to the items that a target user has indicated as interesting. As a result, users become bored with obvious suggestions that they might have already discovered. To improve user satisfaction, recommender systems should offer serendipitous suggestions: items not …

Exploring social media network landscape of post-Soviet space

The “post-Soviet space” consists of countries with a substantial fraction of the world’s population; however, unlike many other regions, its social media network landscape is still somewhat under-explored. This paper aims at filling this gap. To this purpose, we use anonymized data on user friendships at VK.com (also known as VKontakte and, informally, as “Russian Facebook”), which is the largest and most popular social media portal in the post-Soviet space with hundreds of millions of user accounts. Using the VK network snapshots from October 2015 to December 2016, we conduct a “multiscale” empirical study of this network by considering conn…

Mobile Communities in Developing Countries

The number of mobile devices has exceeded four billions and is still growing. Especially in developing countries mobile devices are often the only access to Internet and digital services. In the most developed countries laptops, Wi-Fi and faster and faster wireless telecom networks have for long time made mobile access to various digital services possible while on the move. Still, large and instant mobile communities can only rely on more portable devices, such as mobile phones. In this paper we will analyze various mobile communities and the support they are offered by the social media sites. We will discuss the phenomena encountered in developing countries, like how the mobile technology …

A Survey on Technologies Which Make Bitcoin Greener or More Justified

According to recent estimates, one bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as 1.5 million Visa transactions. Why is bitcoin using so much energy? Most of the energy is used during the bitcoin mining process, which serves at least two significant purposes: a) distributing new cryptocurrency coins to the cryptoeconomy and b) securing the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. In reality, the comparison of bitcoin transactions to Visa transactions is not that simple. The amount of transactions in the Bitcoin network is not directly connected to the amount of bitcoin mining power nor the energy consumption of those mining devices; for example, it is possible to multiply the number of bitcoin transactio…

Reusability and modularity in transactional workflows

Abstract Workflow management techniques have become an intensive area of research in information systems. In large scale workflow systems modularity and reusability of existing task structures with context dependent (parameterized) task execution are essential components of a successful application. In this paper we study the issues related to management of modular transactional workflows, i.e., workflows that reuse component tasks and thus avoid redundancy in design. The notion of parameterized transactional properties of workflow tasks is introduced and analyzed, and the underlying architectural issues are discussed.

Mobile commerce: core business technology and intelligent support

Mobile commerce is an emerging field in its early stages, but there are a number of ideas of what is going to constitute the key success factors for the actors in the global m-commerce arena. This arena is already growing diversified with a number of application areas, which are growing in different directions and at different paces. We understand already that B2B, B2E, B2C and P2P will produce rather different types of applications, because the propositions for value-added products and services are quite different. This is probably one of the reasons why the hunt for the “mobile commerce killer applications” has been in vain so far.

<title>Managing compressed multimedia data in a memory hierarchy: fundamental issues and basic solutions</title>

The purpose of the work is to discuss the fundamental issues and solutions in managing compressed and uncompressed multimedia data, especially voluminous continuous mediatypes (video, audio) and text in a memory hierarchy with four levels (main memory, magnetic disk, (optical or magnetic) on-line/near-line low-speed memory, and slow off-line memory, i.e. archive). We view the multimedia data in such a database to be generated, (compressed), and stored into the memory hierarchy (at the lowest non-archiving level), and subsequently retrieved, (decompressed), and presented. If unused, the data either travels down in the memory hierarchy or it is compressed and stored at the same level. We firs…

Improving Serendipity and Accuracy in Cross-Domain Recommender Systems

Cross-domain recommender systems use information from source domains to improve recommendations in a target domain, where the term domain refers to a set of items that share attributes and/or user ratings. Most works on this topic focus on accuracy but disregard other properties of recommender systems. In this paper, we attempt to improve serendipity and accuracy in the target domain with datasets from source domains. Due to the lack of publicly available datasets, we collect datasets from two domains related to music, involving user ratings and item attributes. We then conduct experiments using collaborative filtering and content-based filtering approaches for the purpose of validation. Ac…

Distributed evolutionary approach to data clustering and modeling

In this article we describe a framework (DEGA-Gen) for the application of distributed genetic algorithms for detection of communities in networks. The framework proposes efficient ways of encoding the network in the chromosomes, greatly optimizing the memory use and computations, resulting in a scalable framework. Different objective functions may be used for producing division of network into communities. The framework is implemented using open source implementation of MapReduce paradigm, Hadoop. We validate the framework by developing community detection algorithm, which uses modularity as measure of the division. Result of the algorithm is the network, partitioned into non-overlapping co…

An Initial Security Analysis of the Personal Transaction Protocol

Our society is becoming increasingly dependent on the rapid access and processing of information. The number of handheld mobile devices with access to the Internet and network-based software and services is exploding. Research indicates [1] that by the end of 2002 there will be over 1 billion mobile phone owners globally with Internet access, and that this number is going to grow exponentially in the nearest future. By 2006 the number of interconnected mobile device users is expected exceed the worldwide Internet subscriber population. It is estimated that in a few years there will be three times as many of these devices worldwide as personal computers.

Ontology-based Semantic Web Service platform in Mobile Environments

The number of mobile terminals is continuously increasing in the world, although in many developed countries the market has saturated. Thus, the market can only grow if new service types are offered to the mobile terminals. One emerging technology that might make this possible is semantic web services. At the core of this technology are ontologies that are necessary for automatic discovery and composition of the services. In this paper we discuss how mobility affects the architectural considerations of semantic web service platform and particularly ontology management. We rely on reference architecture for Semantic Web Services in our work.

Identity Use and Misuse of Public Persona on Twitter

Social media sites have appeared during the last 10 years and their use has exploded all over the world. Twitter is a microblogging service that has currently 320 million user profiles and over 100 million daily active users. Many celebrities and leading politicians have a verified profile on Twitter, including Justin Bieber, president Obama, and the Pope. In this paper we investigate the '‘hundreds of Putins and Obamas phenomenon’ on Twitter. We collected two data sets in 2015 containing 582 and 6477 profiles that are related to the G20 leaders’ profiles on Twitter. The number of namesakes varied from 5 to 1000 per leader. We analysed in detail various aspects of the Putin and Erdogan rela…

Autonomy, Heterogeneity and Trust in Mobile P2P environments

Mobile P2P environments are emerging as a result of rapid expansion of portable terminals that are able to establish direct wireless communication links among themselves. These kinds of terminals are under the control of persons and allowing interactions between their terminals is subject to trust between the individuals and their desire to preserve various aspects of autonomy against each other. In this paper we relate the concepts of node autonomy, heterogeneity and trust with each other, defining also numeric measures for them. We also investigate what kind of interactions (such as transactions, file exchanges) are possible at certain heterogeneity, autonomy and trust level between the t…

Cross-Domain Recommendations with Overlapping Items

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in cross-domain recommender systems. However, most existing works focus on the situation when only users or users and items overlap in different domains. In this paper, we investigate whether the source domain can boost the recommendation performance in the target domain when only items overlap. Due to the lack of publicly available datasets, we collect a dataset from two domains related to music, involving both the users’ rating scores and the description of the items. We then conduct experiments using collaborative filtering and content-based filtering approaches for validation purpose. According to our experimental results, the sourc…

ENFORCEMENT OF INTER-TASK DEPENDENCIES IN WORKFLOWS, CHARACTERIZATION AND PARADIGM

Workflow techniques have gained a lot of attention as a means to support advanced business applications such as cooperative information systems and process re-engineering but also as a means to integrate legacy systems. Inter-task dependencies, described separately from the other parts of the workflow, have been recognized as a valuable method in describing certain restrictions on the executions of workflows. In this paper, we study the issue of pre-analysing and enforcing inter-task dependencies. The protocol and the theory behind it are presented, along with examples and discussions on ways to improve the performance. The idea is to present the meaning of a dependency through an automato…

IPS/UMS/WNGS/MUS 2008 Workshop - Message from the Workshop Organizers

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the 2008 IPS/UMS/WNGS/MUS workshop held in conjunction with the International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering (MUE2008), Hanwha Resort Haeundae, Busan, Korea. The workshop covers topics on ubiquitous multimedia services and security in ubiquitous multimedia systems. All the submitted papers have undergone rigorous review process by the technical program committee members and external reviewers. We have selected 17 best papers for presentation and publication in the conference proceedings.

Transaction management for m-commerce at a mobile terminal

Although there has been a lot of discussion of "transactions" in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), very little attention has been paid for distributed transactional properties of the computations facilitating m-commerce. In this paper, we first present a requirement analysis and then present a wireless terminal-based transaction manager (TM) architecture. This architecture is based on the assumption that there is an application that supports certain business transaction(s) and that it uses the TM to store transactional state information and retrieve it after a communication link, application, or terminal crash. We present the design of such a TM, including the application interface, modules a…

Developing Mobile Ontologies; Who, Why, Where, and How?

The number of mobile subscribers in the world is soon reaching the three billion mark. According to the newest estimates, majority of the subscribers are already in the developing countries, whereas the number of subscribers in the industrialized countries is about to stagnate around one billion. Because especially in the developing countries the only access to Internet are mobile devices, developing high quality services based on them grows in importance. Ontologies are an important ingredient towards more complicated mobile services. In this paper we refine the taxonomy for mobile ontologies and discuss their creation, business models, maintenance and intellectual property rights (IPR).

Online activity traces around a "Boston bomber"

This paper describes traces of user activity around a alleged online social network profile of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, after the tragedy occurred. The analyzed data, collected with the help of an automatic social media monitoring software, includes the perpetrator's page saved at the time the bombing suspects' names were made public, and the subsequently appearing comments left on that page by other users. The analyses suggest that a timely protection of online media records of a criminal could help prevent a large-scale public spread of communication exchange pertaining to the suspects/criminals' ideas, messages, and connections.

The Issue Arena of a Corporate Social Responsibility Crisis : The Volkswagen Case in Twitter

This paper explores the online debate in a corporate social responsibility crisis, where multiple actors communicate through social media, each representing different interests and views pertaining to the crisis. The study utilizes Twitter data relating to the recent case of the falsified Volkswagen diesel emissions that became public in 2015. To better understand the online interaction, use is made of issue arena theory and insights on CSR crises. The focus is on capturing the issue as it evolved over time, the actors and sentiments expressed, and the responses of the organization. The findings show that after the case became public, the emissions issue received massive attention in Twitte…

Investigating serendipity in recommender systems based on real user feedback

Over the past several years, research in recommender systems has emphasized the importance of serendipity, but there is still no consensus on the definition of this concept and whether serendipitous items should be recommended is still not a well-addressed question. According to the most common definition, serendipity consists of three components: relevance, novelty and unexpectedness, where each component has multiple variations. In this paper, we looked at eight different definitions of serendipity and asked users how they perceived them in the context of movie recommendations. We surveyed 475 users of the movie recommender system, MovieLens regarding 2146 movies in total and compared tho…

Evolutionary approach to coverage testing of IEC 61499 function block applications

The paper addresses the problem of coverage testing of industrial automation software represented in the IEC 61499 standard, one of the recent standards for distributed control system design. Contrary to model-based testing (MBT), the paper focuses on implementation coverage, not model coverage. An approach based on evolutionary algorithms is presented which generates coverage test suites for both basic and composite IEC 61499 function blocks. It employs two third-party tools, FBDK and EvoSuite. The evaluation of the approach was performed on a set of control applications for two lab-scale demonstration plants. Results show that the approach is applicable and shows good performance at least…

Linear Feature Extraction for Ranking

We address the feature extraction problem for document ranking in information retrieval. We then propose LifeRank, a Linear feature extraction algorithm for Ranking. In LifeRank, we regard each document collection for ranking as a matrix, referred to as the original matrix. We try to optimize a transformation matrix, so that a new matrix (dataset) can be generated as the product of the original matrix and a transformation matrix. The transformation matrix projects high-dimensional document vectors into lower dimensions. Theoretically, there could be very large transformation matrices, each leading to a new generated matrix. In LifeRank, we produce a transformation matrix so that the generat…

Supporting Dispute Handling in E-Commerce Transactions, a Framework and Related Methodologies

An E-commerce transaction is a means to conduct particular commercial activities using the global digital E-commerce infrastructure. We concentrate here on business to customer (B-to-C) E-commerce transactions. These transactions are based on protocols offered by the global infrastructure, primarily the Internet. Using electronic means to do business can greatly improve the efficiency of the business transactions. It, however, poses some problems that were rarely considered to be important before. One class of problems is caused by the behavior of untrusted participants. For reasons such as dishonesty, disputes may arise. In the general case, when a dispute arises an untrustworthy participa…

On building an infrastructure for mobile and wireless systems

Over the last few years, there have been at least two dramatic changes in the way computers are used. The first has its origin in the fact that computers have become more and more connected to each other. The second was triggered by the increasing miniaturization and affordability of hardware components and power supplies, together with the development of wireless communication paths. These two trends combined have allowed the development of powerful, yet comparatively low-priced, portable computers. In spite of these changes, little attention has been given to reaching a common consensus and to the development of a strong infrastructure in this area.

Cross-Social Network Collaborative Recommendation

Online social networks have become an essential part of our daily life, and an increasing number of users are using multiple online social networks simultaneously. We hypothesize that the integration of data from multiple social networks could boost the performance of recommender systems. In our study, we perform cross-social network collaborative recommendation and show that fusing multi-source data enables us to achieve higher recommendation performance as compared to various single-source baselines.

A Mobile Healthcare System for Sub-saharan Africa

The disparity between healthcare systems in developed countries and underdeveloped countries is huge, particularly due to the fact that the healthcare infrastructure of former is based on a sophisticated technological infrastructure. Efforts are being made worldwide to bridge this disparity and make healthcare services affordable even to the most remote areas of undeveloped countries. Recent growth of mobile networks in underdeveloped countries argues for building mHealth systems and applications on their basis. However, peculiarities of the area introduce difficulties into potential use cases of mobile devices, thus making the copying of mHealth services from developed countries inapplicab…

A Serendipity-Oriented Greedy Algorithm for Recommendations

Most recommender systems suggest items to a user that are popular among all users and similar to items the user usually consumes. As a result, a user receives recommendations that she/he is already familiar with or would find anyway, leading to low satisfaction. To overcome this problem, a recommender system should suggest novel, relevant and unexpected, i.e. serendipitous items. In this paper, we propose a serendipity-oriented algorithm, which improves serendipity through feature diversification and helps overcome the overspecialization problem. To evaluate our algorithm and compare it with others, we employ a serendipity metric that captures each component of serendipity, unlike the most …

Formal specification of open standards and the case of RSS v2.0

Open standardization seems to be very popular among software developers as it makes the standard's adoption by the software engineering community easier and smoother. Formal specification methods, on the other hand, while very promising, are being adopted by protocol engineers very slowly; the industry seems to have little motivation to move into this, almost unknown, territory.In this paper the authors present the i) idea of applying formal methods (formal specification techniques) to open standards' specifications, and ii) an example of a formal specification of open standards, RSS v2.0 in particular. The authors support and provide evidence for the advantages of the open standards formal…

A Generic Architecture for a Social Network Monitoring and Analysis System

This paper describes the architecture and a partial implementation of a system designed for the monitoring and analysis of communities at social media sites. The main contribution of the paper is a novel system architecture that facilitates long-term monitoring of diverse social networks existing and emerging at various social media sites. It consists of three main modules, the crawler, the repository and the analyzer. The first module can be adapted to crawl different sites based on ontology describing the structure of the site. The repository stores the crawled and analyzed persistent data using efficient data structures. It can be implemented using special purpose graph databases and/or …

A Repository for Multirelational Dynamic Networks

Nowadays, WWW contains a number of social media sites, which are growing rapidly. One of the main features of social media sites is to allow to its users creation and modification of contents of the site utilizing the offered WWW interfaces. Such contents are referred to as user generated contents and their type varies from site to site. Social media sites can be modeled as constantly evolving multirelational directed graphs. In this paper we discuss persistent data structures for such graphs, and present and analyze queries performed against the structures. We also estimate the space requirements of the proposed data structures, and compare them with the naive "store each complete snapshot…

Towards Next Generation System Architecture for Emergency Services

European Union has decided that all emergencies can be reported to authorities by European citizens by calling 112 or sending a text message to 112. Distributing warnings and alerts of authorities to citizens currently happens through national TV and radio channels, but telecom networks are also used now in some countries for this purpose. During the last ten years there have been attempts to develop new system architectures for various emergency service provision phases. Some of them are already deployed in special cases, like in ambulance services. Multimedia emergency alert messages can be delivered to citizens over fixed and mobile telecom networks and commercial systems are already in …

Modelling Dependencies Between Classifiers in Mobile Masquerader Detection

The unauthorised use of mobile terminals may result in an abuse of sensitive information kept locally on the terminals or accessible over the network. Therefore, there is a need for security means capable of detecting the cases when the legitimate user of the terminal is substituted. The problem of user substitution detection is considered in the paper as a problem of classifying the behaviour of the person interacting with the terminal as originating from the user or someone else. Different aspects of behaviour are analysed by designated one-class classifiers whose classifications are subsequently combined. A modification of majority voting that takes into account some of the dependencies …

Ranking-Oriented Collaborative Filtering: A Listwise Approach

Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most effective techniques in recommender systems, which can be either rating oriented or ranking oriented. Ranking-oriented CF algorithms demonstrated significant performance gains in terms of ranking accuracy, being able to estimate a precise preference ranking of items for each user rather than the absolute ratings (as rating-oriented CF algorithms do). Conventional memory-based ranking-oriented CF can be referred to as pairwise algorithms. They represent each user as a set of preferences on each pair of items for similarity calculations and predictions. In this study, we propose ListCF, a novel listwise CF paradigm that seeks improvement in bot…