Qicheng Li

The Dialog manager a system for managing procedural knowledge

The Dialog Manager is a conversational web-based tool that helps organizations manage procedural knowledge. In the modern enterprise, procedural knowledge is of particular importance for service delivery organizations. The Dialog Manager helps standardization of operating procedures in order to deliver a consistently high level of service. In turn, it provides a systematic approach to capturing, managing and disseminating procedural knowledge. The Dialog Manager captures procedural knowledge in the form of dialogs that serve as interactive guides by offering a visual knowledge representation and an integrated content management system. It also provides a sophisticated conversation management mechanism that records and manages the activation status of nodes in a conversation. With advanced question selection algorithms, it makes the performance of procedural knowledge effective. The Dialog Manager has been piloted with the Application Management Services practice of IBM Global Business Services. Currently, the Dialog Manager is being used primarily for teams managing and supporting software applications for large enterprise customers in service engagements. We currently have several hundred users and expect the user population to grow to several thousand by the end of the year. The system has been received enthusiastically by users and in a recent survey. We found that over 70% found the tool to be of value to them and that it significantly improves the productivity of the practitioners. While the initial area of deployment has been in the area of IT services, the Dialog Manager is equally well suited to handling all kinds of procedural knowledge in the enterprise.

Big Data architecture for IT incident management

IT incident management aims to restore normal service quality and availability of IT systems from interruptions. IT incidents often have complicated causes aggregated from an IT environment composed of thousands of interdependent components. Incident diagnosis then requires collecting and analyzing a large scale of data regarding these components, often, in real time to find suspect causes. It is extremely difficult to fulfill this requirement using traditional techniques. In this paper, we propose a new analysis architecture using Big Data techniques. This architecture leverages stream computing and MapReduce techniques to analyze data from various data sources, uses NoSQL databases to store incident-related documents and their relationships, and further utilizes other analytical techniques to examine the documents for root causes and failure prediction. We demonstrate this approach using a real-world example and present evaluation results from a recent pilot study.

A Service-Based Framework for Mobile Social Messaging in PaaS Systems

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, developing business applications on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems is increasingly popular among industry companies. Various services are developed to support different business requirements on PaaS systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, currently there is no service that provides mobile social messaging services to enable users of their apps to share messages in their social networks (e.g., We Chat, Whats App, Kaka Talk). Lack of such mobile social messaging services prevents industry companies from succeeding in drastic market competitions (e.g., Capture high customer satisfactory). In this paper, we propose a service-based framework to enable the mobile social messaging in PaaS systems (e.g., IBM Blue mix). Using this framework, developers can focus on the service encapsulation of existing applications, and define their business process flows via the conversation management in our platform (no coding work is needed). As such, our framework can effectively reduce the development workload for mobile social messaging in PaaS systems.

Enabling customizable service-based procedural knowledge applications — An service-orientation for Dialog Manager

The Dialog Manager is a conversational web-based tool that helps organizations manage procedural knowledge. A dialog is a visual knowledge representation of certain procedural knowledge enriched with interactive guides. To empower the usage of dialog, we further provide a service-orientation for Dialog Manager, aiming to enable customized service-based knowledge applications. Such service-orientation will enable a user to select services to answer questions from dialog automatically during runtime. It will also enable the subject matter expert (SME) to specify the external services to make good use of user dialog data to facilitate ticket issuing and resolution. Through a case study, we will demonstrate the great business impact of our proposal.

Providing Mobile Dialog Services Using WeChat

WeChat-based services are becoming very popular among billions of users. It is now an important business strategy to provide services for users to access business systems via WeChat. However, to the best of our knowledge, currently there is no easy way to foster the development of mobile dialog services using WeChat. Lack of such mobile social messaging services prevents industry companies from succeeding in drastic market competitions (e.g., capture high customer satisfactory). In this paper, we propose a framework for providing mobile dialog services using WeChat. Using this framework, industry companies can easily provide their IT services using WeChat. There are two levels of dialog authoring: static dialogs that enable non-developers to define for offering guidance path with static texts, and dynamic dialogs that require developers to write codes to support dynamic guidance path and dynamic texts on different path nodes. This framework can serve as the bridge between users and various information and business functionalities. Finally, we also use a use case to demonstrate how this mobile dialog service can be used in supporting sports activities.

A Service-Oriented Framework for Hybrid Immersive Web Applications

Immersive Web (IW for short) applications such as Second Life and SimCity are increasingly popular among individual users and companies. However, it is difficult to build a hybrid Immersive Web application, because of the different architectures used for building such IW applications. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented framework to support the mashup of heterogeneous IW applications for hybrid IW applications. We first model each object in IW (e.g., a virtual album or a virtual room) as an IW Object Service (IWOS) located by a unique URL with standardized service interfaces. As such, one IW application can use an IWOS instance in another IW application. Moreover, non-IW applications (e.g., an online album system) can also access an IWOS instance via its service interface. We further propose a service-oriented framework to manipulate these IWOS instances, to support the transition of these objects mainly between different IW applications, and to enable the transition between IW applications and non-IW applications. Our framework also includes the fundamental services to build hybrid IW applications. Finally, we provide examples to demonstrate the advantages of our framework, and conduct a qualitative analysis to show the effectiveness.

Second Order-Based Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Application Maintenance Services

Application Maintenance Services (AMS) is essential for applications executed on servers to function properly. Its objective is to reduce the application incidents happened and quickly recover services from application failures/issues. The application incidents defined as events when there are some application failures/issues happened are major concerns of AMS, therefore we propose a second order-based anomaly detection method to describe and predict application incidents based on analysis of monitored server traffic metrics. The proposed method first detects anomalies for each metric, second builds the linkage between detected anomalies for all metrics of the server and application incidents, and then predicts potential application incidents. Through the experiments, we find that the presented method provides satisfactory results for identify application incident, which gives more than 90 percentage recall rate while about 65 percentage precision rate.

A virtual-learning service platform and its API based programming learning and design refinement

The evolution of 3D internet technologies has opened a whole new range of opportunities for enhanced learning, and has offered new support in programming learning fields. In this paper, we present a framework for the virtual-learning service platform over 3D virtual worlds. Our framework provides a set of fundamental services that can effectively help to reduce the learning curve in learning programming on a new specific platform and improve the targeted platform development work. The proposed framework is a generalization of our experience gained in developing of a fully immersive 3D e-Iearning system which has been tested and used for customer training.