Kiev Gama

Towards Ecosystems based on Open Data as a Service

Despite several efforts in contests throughout the world that encourage local communities to develop applications based on government Open Data, the solutions resulting from such initiatives do not have longevity, lacking maintenance and rapidly falling into disuse. This is due mainly to the lack of investment or even a model for monetizing the use of such applications. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a model that fosters the value chain for Open Data aiming an economically self-sustained ecosystem. Such ecosystem should promote new businesses through the creation of systems and applications focused on citizens. This article discusses the creation of software ecosystems for services and applications underpinned by a platform based on Open Data as a Service.

Crowdsourced Software Development in Civic Apps - Motivations of Civic Hackathons Participants.

Hackathons are intensive events that typically last from 1 to 3 days, where programmers and sometimes people with interdisciplinary backgrounds (e.g., designers, journalists, activists) collaborate to develop software applications to overcome a challenge proposed by the event organizers. Civic hackathons are a particular type of hackathon that gained momentum in the last years, mainly propelled by city halls and government agencies throughout the world as a way to explore public data repositories. These initiatives became an attempt to crowdsource the development of software applications targeting civic issues. Some articles in academic literature have conflicting arguments about factors that motivate developers to create such apps. Claims are mostly based on anecdotal evidence since research is still scarce in the empirical analysis of civic hackathons. Thus, we decided to do a study to gather data under the perspective of hackathon participants, focusing on what motivation factors make them join such competitions. We conducted a survey research where we intended to provide empirical evidence for a diverse audience (e.g., hackathon organizers, open data specialists) interested in civic hackathons as a form of software crowdsourcing. In this work, we present preliminary results.

Device nimbus: an intelligent middleware for smarter services for health and fitness

The world is experiencing an unprecedented explosion in the number of smart devices and mobile apps that are available to users. In the health and fitness domains, many of the devices and technologies in the market place are restricted to proprietary platforms, typically working in isolation with fixed hardware settings. Consequently, an important challenge is to investigate techniques for combining and analyzing data encapsulated by these ubiquitous technologies. In this paper, we introduce an intelligent middleware—Device Nimbus—to meet this challenge. The middleware supports the integration of distributed and heterogeneous mobile sensor data, enabling both context and predictive analysis. We describe a minimum viable product of Device Nimbus and report the results of preliminary tests spanning multiple data sources focused on fitness apps, illustrating the efficacy of the middleware.

hSpy: An intelligent framework for context and predictive analysis for smarter health devices

The world is experiencing an unprecedented explosion in the number of smart devices and mobile apps available. In particular in health area devices and technologies related to market place are often restricted to proprietary platforms, typically working in isolation with fixed hardware settings. Gaining access to high-quality data - including aggregated data from existing sensors, gadgets and smart devices is one important challenge. This article explores the idea of hSpy, an intelligent framework to support context and predictive analysis based on the integration of distributed and heterogeneous mobile sensor data for smarter health devices. hSpy aims to help users monitoring their current health status via the acquisition of meaningful and accurate information.

Resilience in Dynamic Component-Based Applications

Increasingly, software is required to accommodate new features after the design and deployment stages. Applications are designed to improve their adaptability and flexibility. Software needs to evolve at runtime with minimal interruptions and, when possible, never stop running. Different motivations push software design to allow such evolution at runtime. For example, production systems with critical availability requirements need to be updated with little perceived execution interruption. This paper enumerates challenges in the construction of dynamic component-based applications that are capable of undergoing changes during execution, with minimal impact.

Towards a Dynamic and Extensible Middleware for Enhancing Exhibits

Exhibit sites, such as museums and commercial conventions, do not usually allow or motivate visitor interaction with the exhibited items. In this work we present an architecture for providing an augmented experience for exhibits. In our concept, visitors can use wireless handheld devices to scan the identifiers (e.g. RFID tags, 2D barcodes) of exhibit items and receive information about them or trigger events in the surrounding environment. We present a generic middleware which is dynamic, extensible and configurable, and is capable of generating different responses to visitor interactions. Responses can consider the visitors profile, the exhibits or visitors history, administrative preferences, and other information. They include sending events to the visitors device or to devices surrounding the exhibit. The architecture hides development complexity and takes advantage of various technologies, integrating them into our middleware and our handset application. We also provide administration capabilities, such as reporting and exhibit configuration. Our concept has been implemented and validated in a museum scenario and uses multiple technolugies for communication, unique exhibit identification, and software dynamicity and extensibility.

Preliminary findings on software engineering practices in civic hackathons

Civic hackathons gained momentum in the last years, mainly propelled by city halls and government agencies as a way to explore public data repositories. These initiatives became an attempt to crowdsource the development of software applications targeting government transparency and urban life, under the smart cities umbrella. Some authors have been criticizing the results of these competitions, complaining about the usefulness and quality of the software that is produced. However, academic literature has much anecdotal evidence on that, being scarce on empirical analysis of civic hackathons. Therefore, we intended to gather preliminary data not only to help verifying those claims but also to understand how teams in these competitions are tackling the different activities in their software development process, from requirements to application release and maintenance. In this work, we present preliminary results of these findings.

A policy-based coordination architecture for distributed complex event processing in the internet of things: doctoral symposium

The dissemination of powered communication devices has instigated a new technological paradigm called Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are present in our life, capturing information about peoples routines and using them as data stream to support many decision-making processes. Nevertheless, many IoT applications take into consideration only the information related to their local context and the data analysis is done by a cloud server, increasing the feedback information latency to the data consumers and reducing the information quality. This work adopts the use of a distributed complex event processing (CEP) to analyse data considering all the IoT devices to execute data processing and distribution through a policy-based coordination architecture, building a μDCEP, called GiTo. The policies define rules for coordination processing which are monitored through the distributed CEP engine. This approach focus on information quality improvement and time reduction between data generation and information acquired by the consumers.

A Web-based platform for scavenger hunt games using the Internet of Things

The concept of an “Internet of Things” (IoT) initially referred to a network where objects would be individually and instantly identified with Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). Such concept was later evolved to a wider notion of heterogeneous objects using ubiquitous technologies to interact among them and with the physical environment. Among these technologies, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPRS, NFC, QR code, can be cited some of those that were labeled as IoT technologies. Based on the possibility of linking ordinary objects from the physical world to the Internet, this paper proposes and details a platform called TagHunt, for creating and playing scavenger hunt games. It allows smartphones to interact with ordinary objects using IoT-based technologies such as NFC and QR Code, stimulating the user/player to interact with the surrounding environment looking for “clues” in the game. We performed an experiment involving four different scavenger hunt game scenarios created with the platform were we could evaluate user/player engagement when playing such games.

Hackathons in the formal learning process

Hackathons are short-lived events, typically lasting from 1 to 3 days, where participants gather into groups to tackle a challenge and present a proof of concept in the form of software or hardware prototype, motivated by a common theme. Studies show that learning is one of the primary motivations for people joining hackathons, where situated and collaborative learning take place. The acquisition of knowledge comes as a result of the practice itself and with participants learning from one another. By taking that into account, we considered bringing hackathons into the classroom. This paper presents a case study of an Internet of Things (IoT) undergraduate course where a hackathon is used as a learning instrument, leveraging on challenge-based learning to motivate students to find and develop a suitable semester project. We utilize a mixed-method approach where quantitative and qualitative data are used to analyze the perspective of students about the effectiveness of that approach.