Cláudio Teixeira

User Provided Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 started a paradigm shift concerning content generation. Users spend hours browsing and producing contents to share, most of the times, freely. During these activities, their laptops and home PCs are considerably underused. By combining the amount of idle processing capacity with increasingly fast internet accesses, every computer can be considered as a computational “nearby” resource. The question is: what to do with them? This paper explores how these resources can be used to give something back to the user in a secure and private way.

The Building Blocks of a PaaS

Traditional cloud computing providers enable developers to program and deploy applications in the cloud by using platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Despite the benefits of such an approach, this service model usually comes with a high level of the lock in effect into the service provider. The lock in effect occurs when a software developer needs to change its cloud provider. When this happens, it usually means a major application rewrite, specific for the new PaaS. This paper details the initial results of a project whose goal is to build a PaaS where vendor lock in does not occur. With this PaaS, developers wishing to deploy their applications into the cloud may continue to program using their usual development environments. There are no necessary changes required to make the application PaaS compatible. As a proof of concept, we developed an open source PaaS management application as a regular web application and then deployed it on the cloud.

Cloud Computing: A Platform of Services for Services

This article describes the state of the art of cloud computing, focusing on its features and on the variety of services and applications that can be placed inside a cloud system, such as databases, processing, cloud gaming, storage and backup, etc.. This article also assesses and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using cloud computing by companies and provides an overview of cloud computing trends and solutions currently available.

GlobaliD - Privacy Concerns on a Federated Identity Provider Associated with the Users' National Citizen's Card

Personal information sharing is one of the most common online activities. Most of the times we feel forced to give up about some privacy in order to share a piece of information with others. This paper reflects on the anonymity, integrity, privacy of users’ personal information and it’s scattering across the Web by taking an approach to digital identity management concept. Consequently it also reflects on the users’ information certification and accountability. In this paper we purpose a Federated Identity Management solution for the Web to decrease the privacy issues and avoid the lost of anonymity that may occur when users exchange their particular information within web contexts. We will use a collection of publicly available strong identification mechanisms, such as the users (Portuguese) National Electronic Citizen Identity Card, and a Federated Identity initiative to create the GlobaliD, a Federated Identity Provider to address the previously mentioned reflections. Our aim with the development of GlobaliD is to take a step further in the digital identity management and therefore in the privacy and anonymity safety of the users identity Online by making it more versatile, responsible, trustworthy, integrity and privacy safe, anonym and thus secure.

User Profiles in Corporate Scenarios

In an organizational/corporative environment, each user can perform different roles throughout the time. Dynamic user profiles can be used to accomplish this variation specification. A user profile is a set of information about a given user in a given context and on a specific period of time. The concept of dynamic profiling simply means that the relevant information about the user can vary in time. User profiling is usually related to web advertisement of goods and services for a user in a Web site, by means of gathering information of the users interests and then harvesting the web over these interests. The profile discussed in this paper is service related, directly depending from the users condition in an organization.

Contact@UA - A Profile Driven Portal

Contact@UA is an underway project in development at University of Aveiro, Portugal. The goal of the project is to provide an online web portal that can be used as a front-end for all University users - students, teachers, staff- and services library, administration, elearning, email. The aim of Contact@UA is not to build a bulk of new services, but instead to integrate the existing ones, in a dynamic web interface that self reconfigures according to the preferences and privileges of the user that logs into the portal. One of the key features of this portal is the usage of a web service (WS) architecture system to integrate the information collected in the existing services.

Sky Computing: exploring the aggregated Cloud resources

The Cloud wide spawn and maturing has brought the attention of High-Performance Computing consumers, willing to move to its potential. The use of those resources to make intensive computing proficiently is a requirement to achieve the final goal of supporting intensive computing applications. The big challenge here is managing the combined resources of available Clouds, public or private and interoperating between them without an excessive efficiency loss. On the other hand, the resource optimization can also be undertaken by maximizing the existing resources, even if not intended for Cloud purposes or not having state-of-the-art hardware. This paper proposes an architecture, shows how to implement it and experiments on how to integrate heterogeneous resources on a hybrid Cloud infrastructure.

Continuous integration using cloud computing

Nowadays systems can evolve quickly, and to this growth is associated, for example, the addiction of new features, or even the change of system perspective, required by the stakeholders. Consequently, these cause an increase in the number of developed tests. Run a large battery of tests sequentially can take hours. However, tests can run faster in a distributed environment with rapid availability of pre-configured systems, such as Cloud Computing. This paper pretends to demonstrate some scenarios on the implementation of the practice Continuous Integration (CI) in Information Systems, with software tests performed on Cloud Computing. The main goal is explore the most of capacities that CI practice gives, for automating the build and testing in a Information System.

Towards a measurement framework for tools' ceiling and threshold

Software development tools are not catching up with the requirements of increasingly complex interactive software products and services. Successful tools are claimed to either be low-threshold/low-ceiling or high-threshold/high-ceiling, however no research to date addressed how to define and measure these concepts. This is increasingly important as these tools undergo an evaluation and adoption process by end-users. Here we hypothesized that the evaluation and adoption of tools is associated with the threshold (learnability). To assess this we conducted a learnability and usability study using three commercial Platform-as-a-Service tools. In this study we used an augmented think-aloud protocol with question asking where ten subjects were asked to create a simple web application. Our data shows that most learnability issues fall into two categories: understanding or locating. No evidence was found that usability defects correlate with the tools learnability score. Though we found an inverse correlation between the amount of issues and the learnability score.

Assisted On-Job Training

This chapter presents the work being done in Cape Verde relating this subject. We have been developing an information system, named SIPP, to be used in the Courts of law in Cape Verde. SIPP stands for Sistema de Informacao do Processo Penal (Criminal Proceedings Information System). SIPP is a joint initiative, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice of Cape Verde and developed from scratch by the University of Aveiro and University of Cape Verde. The SIPP has been in testing phase since June 2010 and will be put in production phase on October 2011.