Marcos Baez

REST APIs: A Large-Scale Analysis of Compliance with Principles and Best Practices

Quickly and dominantly, REST APIs have spread over the Web and percolated into modern software development practice, especially in the Mobile Internet where they conveniently enable offloading data and computations onto cloud services. We analyze more than 78 GB of HTTP traffic collected by Italy’s biggest Mobile Internet provider over one full day and study how big the trend is in practice, how it changed the traffic that is generated by applications, and how REST APIs are implemented in practice. The analysis provides insight into the compliance of state-of-the-art APIs with theoretical Web engineering principles and guidelines, knowledge that affects how applications should be developed to be scalable and robust. The perspective is that of the Mobile Internet.

Domain-specific mashups: from all to all you need

Last years, aside the proliferation of Web 2.0, we assisted to the drastic growth of the mashup market. An increasing number of different mashup solutions and platforms emerged, some focusing on data integration (a la Yahoo! Pipes), others on user interface (UI) integration and some trying to integrate both UI and data. Most of proposed solutions have a common characteristic: they aim at providing non-programmers with a flexible and intuitive general-purpose development environment. While these generic environments could be useful for web users to develop simple applications, they are often too generic to address domain-specific needs and to allow users to develop real-life complex applications. In particular, proposed mashup mechanisms do not reflect those specific concepts that are proper of a given domain, which domain-experts are familiar with and could autonomously manage. We argue the need for domain-specific mashup architectures, also going beyond todays enterprise platforms, in which standard mashup mechanisms and components are driven by an underlying domain-specific layer. This layer will provide a service and component ecosystem built upon a shared and uniform conceptual model specific for the given domain. This way, domain experts will be provided with mashup components and mechanisms, following those well-known concepts and rules proper of the domain they belong to, that they are able to understand, use and, finally, profitably compose. In this paper, we will show the necessity of such an architecture through a real-life use case in the context of scientific publications and journals.

Innovation cockpit: a dashboard for facilitators in idea management

We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS), an emerging class of collaborative software for business organizations or local geographic communities. In these systems, users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that lacks adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. We show how the dashboard helps facilitators in making more efficient and effective decisions in situations where the selection and judgment become prohibitively lengthy and time consuming.

Universal Resource Lifecycle Management

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them.

The interplay of physical and social wellbeing in older adults: investigating the relationship between physical training and social interactions with virtual social environments

Background. Regular physical activity can substantially improve the physical wellbeing of older adults, preventing several chronic diseases and increasing cognitive performance and mood. However, research has shown that older adults are the most sedentary segment of society, spending much of their time seated or inactive. A variety of barriers make it difficult for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, including logistical difficulties in going to a gym (for some adults, leaving home can be challenging), reduced functional abilities, and lack of motivation. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of Gymcentral. A training application running on tablet was designed to allow older adults to follow a personalized home-based exercise program while being remotely assisted by a coach. The objective of the study was to assess if a virtual gym that enables virtual presence and social interaction is more motivating for training than the same virtual gym without social interaction. Methods. A total of 37 adults aged between 65 and 87 years old (28 females and 9 males, mean age = 71, sd = 5.8) followed a personalized home-based strength and balance training plan for eight weeks. The participants performed the exercises autonomously at home using the Gymcentral application. Participants were assigned to two training groups: the Social group used an application with persuasive and social functionalities, while the Control group used a basic version of the service with no persuasive and social features. We further explored the effects of social facilitation, and in particular of virtual social presence, in user participation to training sessions. Outcome measures were adherence, persistence and co-presence rate. Results. Participants in the Social group attended significantly more exercise sessions than the Control group, providing evidence of a better engagement in the training program. Besides the focus on social persuasion measures, the study also confirms that a virtual gym service is effective for supporting individually tailored home-based physical training for older adults. The study also confirms that social facilitation tools motivate users to train together in a virtual fitness environment. Discussion. The study confirms that Gymcentral increases the participation of older adults in physical training compare to a similar version of the application without How to cite this article Khaghani Far et al. (2015), The interplay of physical and social wellbeing in older adults: investigating the relationship between physical training and social interactions with virtual social environments. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 1:e30; DOI 10.7717/peerjcs.30 social and persuasive features. In addition, a significant increase in the co-presence of the Social group indicates that social presence motivates the participants to join training sessions at the same time with the other participants. These results are encouraging, as they motivate further research into using home-based training programs as an opportunity to stay physically and socially active, especially for those who for various reasons are bound to stay at home. Subjects Human–Computer Interaction, Emerging Technologies, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing, Network Science and Online Social Networks

Designing a facilitator's cockpit for an idea management system

We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS). IMS are an emerging class of collaborative software tools aimed at business organizations or local geographic communities. Through these systems users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that is lacking adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. In this paper we point to the unmet needs of these users, describe the design of a system prototype, and the evaluation of a first version of this prototype to test our design.

Unifying Platform for the Physical, Mental and Social Well-Being of the Elderly

Aging deteriorates cognitive and physical abilities. Besides this, social activities decline in older ages. However, it is possible to slow down the deterioration of these abilities and to prolong the time elders live independently at their homes by proper training plan exercises. Existing tools offer very limited support as their design does not take into account elders as target users and the motivational factors that following training plans poses on them. In this paper we present a unified platform that hosts training games and physical exercises and leverage them with social, motivational and monitoring instruments.

Come Along: Understanding and Motivating Participation to Social Leisure Activities

In this paper we study the factors that affect peoples decision in participating in leisure activities in the social and cultural environment. To this end, we collected the ratings of local people from three different cities around the world on standard leisure activities, and looked at the personal, social and contextual features shaping their preferences. We then used this dataset to evaluate how these features can be exploited to recommend places people would actually like. Our initial results suggest that friends are a good source for recommending places, with higher precision and recall than considering only popular places, but these can be improved reducing the scope to similar friends in the context of the particular activity. We have also found that people preferences are sensitive to the companion (e.g., partner, friends, tourists) for which they look for different features. The results also suggest that similarities in the preferences of people can be extended to other activities, which points to the potential of profiling users based on lifestyle. We finally present the design and prototype of a system, namely Come Along, which aims at helping people discover, find and participate to social and leisure activities.

Resource Space Management Systems

Liquidpub 1 is an EU project within the “future and emerging technologies” category whose goal is to capture the lessons learned and opportunities provided by the Web and open source, agile software development to develop concepts, models, metrics, and science support services for an efficient (for people), effective (for science), and sustainable (for publishers and the community) way of creating, disseminating, evaluating, and consuming scientific knowledge [1]. Novel services for science are a hot topic these days. From social bookmarking sites to online ranking of scientists, these services try to assist scientists in sharing content and assessing people and their scientific contributions. These services are however still very much anchored to a traditional notion of publication and are only scratching the surface of what can be done to help scientists collaborate for the greater good. Examples of Scientific Services. An example of services that Liquidpub intends to deliver is that of Liquid Journals (LJ), that redefines the traditional notion of journal which was born at a time where the paper was the only possible form of non-verbal knowledge dissemination, printing was the scarce resource, and therefore peer review and pre-publication filtering was necessary. Liquid journals are based on these notions i) separation of publication from inclusion in a journal: contributions are posted online (without any review) or published in traditional journals following a traditional process, and then they can be included in an arbitrarily high number of LJs. Each LJ decides policies and rules to determine if a contribution is included. Essentially, LJs are ways to aggregate all sort of available content based on what is interesting and relevant for its readers. This can be done via review, collaborative filtering, looking at journals of people we consider highly, etc; ii) Everybody (even individuals) can create and run LJs; iii) Papers are not the only source of knowledge. Blogs, experiments, datasets, slides, comments/feedback and the like are valid and useful forms of dissemination, some of them having the additional benefits of allowing early dissemination and therefore better collaboration. Including feedback as a form of contribution has the effect that it is considered as part of what is evaluated from a scientist and therefore it encourages giving feedback, which is fundamental to the scientific creation process. All is driven towards what the purpose of a journal should be: providing people with interesting content to read, minimizing the dissemination overhead, and maximizing the collaboration. Current journals are a

Fitness Applications for Home-Based Training

Recent technological advances have created enormous opportunities for developing applications that support training from home--particularly for older adults, who often are socially more isolated, are physically less active, and have fewer chances to train in a gym. In this article, the authors review current fitness applications and their features alongside the design challenges and opportunities of fitness applications for trainees at home.