Diego Serrano

SociQL: A Query Language for the SocialWeb

Social-networking sites are becoming increasingly popular with users of all ages. With much of our social activity happening online, these sites are now becoming the subject of scholarly study and research. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they collect similar content and support similar relations and activities, the current generation of these sites are hard to query programmatically, offering limited views of their data, effectively becoming disconnected islands of information. We describe SociQL, a high-level query language, and a corresponding service, to which social-networking sites can subscribe, that supports the integrated representation, querying and exploration of disparate social networks. Unlike generic web query languages, SociQL is designed specifically to support the integration of networks through a common information model for the purpose of examining sociological questions, motivated by social theories. The paper discusses the design and rationale for the SociQL language elements and syntax, as well as our experience using the SociQL service to query a variety of social-network sites.

An environment for building, exploring and querying academic social networks

Social network analysis aims at uncovering and understanding the structures and patterns resulting from social interactions among individuals and organizations engaged in a common activity. Since the early days of the field, networks are modeled as graphs modeling social actors and the relations between them. The field has become very active with the maturity of computational machinery to handle large-scale graphs, and, more recently, the automated gathering of social data. We introduce ReaSoN: a comprehensive set of tools for visualizing and exploring social networks resulting from academic research. In doing so, ReaSoN contributes to the understanding as well as fostering of the social networks underlying academic research. We describe the infrastructure, visualizations and analysis provided in our system, as well as the process of extracting the social networks which are latent in bibliographic and citation databases.

From Relations to Multi-dimensional Maps: Towards an SQL-to-HBase Transformation Methodology

In this paper, we describe a method for transforming and migrating data schemas developed for RDBMS to HBase. The method consists of a set of HBase-organization guidelines and a four-step data-schema transformation process that HBase application developers may follow during the migration of their application data from RDBMSs to HBase. The method also considers data-access paths extracted from query logs, in order to improve the quality of the transformation and the eventual access efficiency of the HBase repository. We illustrate and validate the method with a case study.

2D and 3D visualizations in WikiDev2.0

Several types of 3D software visualizations have been developed to communicate information about the products of a software project and, sometimes, the development process itself. These visualizations have been limited in the degree of interactivity they enabled (primarily panning and zooming) and in their accessibility (since in most cases they assumed a particular client platform). In this paper we discuss our 3D visualization of the data collected and extracted in our collaborative software-development platform WikiDev2.0, developed in the Open Wonderland virtual world. The visualization adopts a city metaphor, similar to earlier work, but advances the state of the art by providing a web-accessible distributed 3D environment where multiple users can explore the same project. In this paper we discuss this visualization, which we call WikiDev3D, and we report on our preliminary findings about its effectiveness against the more traditional visualization of the original WikiDev2.0 tool.

Kaleidoscope: A Cloud-Based Platform for Real-Time Video-based Interaction

Mobile video streaming becomes increasingly useful in a variety of contexts (social interaction, education, and entertainment) and increasingly feasible with the rapid advancement of wireless networks and mobile technologies. In this paper, we present, Kaleidoscope, a cloud platform for multimedia streaming on mobile devices, enhanced with textual and touch-display interactions for a rich user experience. We evaluate the Kaleidoscope system on two different clouds at different locations, testing the streaming quality, and CPU and memory usage, using different numbers of clients.

Real-time traffic-based routing, based on open data and open-source software

The emergence of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) have given rise to a wealth of new opportunities for integrating heterogeneous systems and collecting massive data sets, whose analysis may lead to new information, insight, and knowledge. Building a scalable architecture for urban IoT environments is a complex task, primarily because of the massive amounts of data generated by sensor devices, and the variety of data sources. And yet it is a compelling application area, given the number of potential municipal services that can be improved using these technologies. In this paper, we describe our study of how cloud-computing and big-data management technologies can assist decision making for transportation systems in smart cities. More specifically, this paper presents and discusses a proof-of-concept prototype, based on open-source technologies and publicly available data for the city of Edmonton.

Exploring and visualizing academic social networks

We demonstrate the ReaSoN portal, consisting of interactive web-based tools for visualizing, exploring, querying, and integrating academic social networks. We describe how these networks are automatically extracted from bibliographic and citation databases, discuss notions of visibility in such networks which enable a rich set of social network analysis, and demonstrate our novel tools for the visualization and exploration of social networks.

“Smart Traffic”: an IoT traffic monitoring system based on open source technologies on the cloud

The constantly increasing importance of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) has led to solutions able to integrate heterogenous and diverse systems as well manage big data. This is especially true in Smart City environments with respect to traffic monitoring. Furthermore, cloud computing, and the various technologies around it are quickly becoming a must in the education domain. Unlike traditional education, it promotes the use of computing infrastructures anywhere and at any time, without restrictions. In this paper, we present our experience in using cloud computing technologies for a computing science course on Software Quality, with fourth-year undergraduate students at the University of Alberta, Canada. In particular, the paper illustrates how students have been actively involved in carrying out a real project and coordinated their project work among the class groups thanks to cloud technologies. Project work consisted in building a scalable system for an urban IoT environment of traffic monitoring and routing based on open source technologies and publicly available data from the city of Edmonton, Alberta in Canada.

Context-Aware Automated Workflow Composition for Interactive Data Exploration

Nowadays, the Web of Data contains a myriad of structured information sources on a large number of domains. Nevertheless, most of the information is available through Web APIs that act as isolated silos of data that cannot interoperate automatically with other resources and services on the Web. My dissertation aims at synthesizing semantic web technologies over Web APIs, in order to combine the easy data integration techniques offered by semantic web, with the flexibility and availability of web services. This paper discusses the two main aspects of the envisioned thesis: (a) a description language to semantically describe functional and non-functional components of web services, and the relationships among those components, and (b) a middleware that plans composition chains, based on user’s specifications, optimizing their trade-offs.