Renato F. G. Cerqueira

NCM 3.1: A Conceptual Model for Hyperknowledge Document Engineering

Most of multimedia documents available today are agnostic to data semantics and their specification language offer little to ease authoring and mechanisms to their players so they can retrieve and present meaningful content to improve user experience. In this paper, we present the main entities of the version 3.1 of the Nested Context Model (NCM), which concentrate efforts at integrating support for enriched knowledge description to the model. This extension enables the specification of relationships between knowledge descriptions in the traditional hypermedia way, composing what we call hyperknowledge in this paper. NCM previous version (NCM 3.0) is a conceptual model for hypermedia document engineering. NCL (Nested Context Language), which is part of international standards and ITU recommendations, is an XML application language that was engineered according to NCM 3.0 definitions. The extensions discussed in this paper contribute not only for advances in the NCL specifications, but mainly as a conceptual model for hyperknowledge document engineering.

Using Microservices and Software Product Line Engineering to Support Reuse of Evolving Multi-tenant SaaS

In order to achieve economies of scale, a Software as a Service (SaaS) should be configurable, multi-tenant efficient, and scalable. But building SaaS with these characteristics comes at a price of having more complex services. Some works in the literature integrate software product line engineering and service-oriented architecture to tackle the complexity of building multi-tenant SaaS. Most of these works focused on centralized approaches that rely on middleware or platforms, but they do not investigate the use of decentralized architectural style. Microservices architecture is an architectural style that relies on small, decentralized, and autonomous services that work together. Thus, this paper investigates the integrated use of microservices architecture and software produt line techniques to develop multi-tenant SaaS. We conducted an empirical study that analyzes the behavior of software reuse during the evolution of a multi-tenant SaaS. This empirical study showed an average software reuse of 62% of lines of code among tenants. We also provide lessons we learned during the the re-engineering and maintenance of such multi-tenant SaaS.

Extending Hypermedia Conceptual Models to Support Hyperknowledge Specifications

Most of multimedia documents available today are agnostic to data semantics and their specification language offer little to ease authoring of meaningful content. In this paper, we present the main entities of the version 3.1 of the Nested Context Model (NCM), which concentrate efforts at integrating support for enriched knowledge description to the model. This extension enables the specification of relationships between knowledge descriptions and multimedia content in the hypermedia way, composing what we call hyperknowledge in this paper. NCM previous version (3.0) is a hypermedia conceptual model. NCL (Nested Context Language), which is part of international standards and ITU recommendations, was engineered according to NCM 3.0 definitions. The extensions discussed in this paper contribute not only for advances in the NCL, but mainly as a conceptual model for hyperknowledge document engineering.

ResearchOps: The case for DevOps in scientific applications

DevOps (a portmanteau of “development” and “operations”) is a software development method that extends the agile philosophy to rapidly produce software products and services and to improve operations performance and quality assurance. It was born to accelerate the delivery of Web-based systems and quickly bring new value to users. Many Web-based systems evolve according to usage trends without a clear long-term goal. Before the widespread use of Web services, most software with a clear goal were delivered as packages that users installed on their own system. New versions were delivered with a much lower frequency, with periods in between versions ranging from months to years. Development cycles were divided into large design, coding and testing phases culminating in the release of a new stable version. In software development in the context of applied science, even when the goal is clear, the process to attain it is not. Hence, working releases that capture the current software state must be released frequently in order to reduce the risks for all stakeholders and to make it possible to assess the current state of a project and steer it in the right direction. This paper explores the usefulness of DevOps concepts to improve the development of software that supports scientific projects. We establish the similarities and differences between scientific projects and Web applications development, and discuss where the related methodologies need to be extended. Unique challenges are discussed herewith developed solutions, and still open questions. Lessons learned are highlighted as best practices to be followed in research projects. This discussion is rooted in our experience in real-life projects at the IBM Research Brazil Lab, which just as well apply to other research institutions.

Towards a Conceptual Model for Cognitive-Intensive Practices

Different conceptual data models in the literature are either geared towards the description of low-level features of media content or to more abstract and complex conceptual representations. A lesser number attempt to cover both purposes, i.e. to support both low-level aspects and high-level concepts in a single reasoning process. However, these models lack the needed expressiveness to represent cognitive-intensive activities, which are tightly based on production and consumption of knowledge present in multimedia content and commonly relate concepts at arbitrary abstraction levels. This work aims to contribute to a better understanding of how it could be possible to model the knowledge flow in such activities, which may include the collaboration of different cognitive systems (human and software) and interaction with devices, software interfaces, and real objects.

Challenges on Multimedia for Decision-Making in the Era of Cognitive Computing

The increasing momentum towards cognitive computing unlocks a diverse set of opportunities and challenges for the multimedia research community. In fact, with a different approach from the one present in the traditional artificial intelligence systems, cognitive computing glimpses a human-machine collaboration, promoting a more natural and symbiotic interaction. The main goal of this paper is to discuss central challenges when the multimedia research area enrolls decision-making processes in the era of cognitive computing. Aiming at supporting the multimedia research community on future investigations in this research area, we present challenges in different topics gathered in specific domains.

WISE-SPL: bringing multi-tenancy to the weather InSights environment system

Weather conditions affect many cities and companies. The WISE (Weather In Sights Environment) system serves as a central place to gather and present weather related information for decision makers. It was initially developed to fit a single tenant. Due to a multi-tenant opportunity, WISE is evolving to be deployed on a Cloud environment to support on-demand computing resources and multiple clients. Software product line techniques were applied to model common and variable features of tenants. WISE-SPL enables the derivation of products for each client and also the deployment on Cloud infrastructure. The contribution of this work is a demonstration and discussion of benefits and limitations in applying SPL techniques, following a extractive approach, to build a multi-tenant Cloud application.

Cloud-based Remote Visualization of Big Data to Subsurface Exploration

Since the first visualization solutions were explored for O&G, major technical improvements enabled gigabyte-sized models to be rendered and manipulated at interactive speeds. Yet, other fundamental aspects such as data access and distribution are often overlooked in the process, even to date. Data movement may often be prohibitive, either due to legal constraints (data is restricted from departing the country) or practical considerations (data is too large to be moved, is a checkpoint tightly connect to imaging processes, and requires costly resources to be manipulated). Collaborative visualization tends to be performed co-locally, following an explicit, manually conducted, data transfer to a dedicated visualization machine. We propose an alternative based upon data-centric computing. The model offers visualization as-a-service over a multitenant cloud-based environment. Remote visualization enables lightweight access and interaction with generated data readily after the processing, dismissing the need to transfer the whole dataset into analysts machine. It offloads heavy graphics processing to a cloud server featuring the necessary infrastructure to handle such voluminous data, like GPUs, GPFS, and ultimately sends only a reduced output to lightweight clients (rendered images/geometry). Visualization resources can also be shared among concurrent users in a web-based interface and combined with other data sources, like correspondent well information or velocity models, facilitating effective remote collaboration towards knowledge discovery in subsurface exploration. Ubiquitous on-the-go data access (e.g., in the exploration field itself) is thereby made possible through mobile interfaces. Concurrently, several challenges emerge with the aforementioned visualization model. The effective resource distribution of different data sources among several clients needs to benefit from the cloud execution platform. The OpenPower Foundation is an example of the future HPC platform that can be customized to O&G characteristics and be offered as a cloud model.

A system for runtime type introspection in c

Many object-oriented languages support some kind of runtime introspection that allows programmers to navigate through meta-data describing the available classes, their attributes and methods. In general, the meta-data can be used to instantiate new objects, manipulate their attributes and call their methods. The meta-programming enabled by this kind of reflection has proven itself useful in a variety of applications such as object-relational mappings and inversion-of-control containers and test automation n nMotivated by the need of programmatic support for composition and configuration of software components at runtime, in this work we show how to implement a runtime reflection support for C++11, using the available runtime type information, template metaprogramming and source code analysis. We will show the capabilities of the reflection API and the memory footprint for different kinds of meta-data. The API relies on a few features introduced by C++11, the new ISO standard for C++. Our reflection system is not invasive as it requires no modifications whatsoever of the application code.

Abstraction Levels as Support for UX Design of User’s Interaction Logs

User interaction logging is a powerful tool for user behavior studies, usability testing, and system metrics analysis. It may also be applied in large data contexts, such as social networks analysis, helping data scientists to understand social patterns. Data scientists, User Experience (UX) designers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners, and software engineers have been performing the analysis of this kind of data to obtain knowledge regarding the source system’s usage. User interaction log data, however, can also be critical for final users themselves. They can use interaction log data, for example, (i) to revisit his own interaction path, redoing his steps that lead to a relevant insight or discovery; (ii) to learn from someone else’s interaction path new ways to perform a given task; (iii) or even to analyze critical steps of a process supported by the source system. The need for final users to consume interaction log data is presenting significant challenges for UX researchers. Influenced by Semiotic Engineering, a HCI theory that views human-computer interaction as a form of human communication between designers and users mediated by a computer system, we propose three user interaction log abstraction levels - strategic, tactical, and operational - to frame and guide user interaction logs’ UX design. In this paper, we discuss how those abstraction levels can be used as UX design guidelines and present some research questions to be explored - how source system captures interaction log is central for log analysis strategy and how a strategic level can be identified thought the analysis of interaction logs data from other abstraction levels.