Rui Pedro Lopes

On the use of mobility in distributed network management

Information technology has been under unprecedented transformations and it is dramatically changing the way of work inside organizations. Information management systems must be adequate to cope with the profound effects of this evolution, whose expectations include the introduction into the networks of enormous quantities of different elements. The mobile agent paradigm seems to be, for many researchers, the right solution to deal with the pressures of these new demands. The paper discusses the issues concerning the mobility of code on network management environments and presents ongoing work that provides mobility capability to distributed managers based on recent work of IETFs Disman working group.

SNMP management of MASIF platforms

In this paper we describe the architecture, the development and the assessment results of an SNMP agent that allows MASIF (mobile agent system interoperability facilities) compliant platforms to be managed through SNMP. The major outcome of this work is a simple integration of mobile agent technology with any well-established commercial network management system.

Delegation of expressions for distributed SNMP information processing

Due to the scalability problems of SNMP, management distribution has been an important topic during the last few years. The DISMAN workgroup propose a set of MIB modules to address this matter. One of the DISMAN modules has the capability of using expressions to perform decentralized processing of management information - the Expression MIB. Although it is essential to network management, the Expression MIB is not as well known as other DISMAN modules, such as the Script MIB, and not as available in terms of implementations. This paper focuses on the Expression MIB features, its implementation details and it also discusses, from a critical point of view, its functionality. It also proposes minor changes which can boost its application range and importance.

Maintenance behaviour-based prediction system using data mining

In the last years we have assisted to several and deep changes in industrial manufacturing. Induced by the need of increasing efficiency, bigger flexibility, better quality and lower costs, it became more complex. The complexity of this new scenario has caused big pressure under enterprises production systems and consequently in its maintenance systems. Manufacturing systems recognize high level costs due equipment breakdown, motivated by the time spent to repair, which corresponds to no production time and scrapyard, and also money spent in repair actions. Usually, enterprises do not share data produced from their maintenance interventions. This investigation intends to create an organizational architecture that integrates data produced in factories on their activities of reactive, predictive and preventive maintenance. The main idea is to develop a decentralized predictive maintenance system based on data mining concepts. Predicting the possibility of breakdowns with bigger accuracy will increase systems reliability.

A uniform resource identifier scheme for SNMP

One of the World Wide Web characteristics, besides its omnipresence in computer systems, is the adoption of a universal user interface that is used to access several different services that were previously accessed individually by independent applications. Internet resources started to be identified by URI (uniform resource identifier) schemes, a text string with specific syntax and grammar. Although existing for several services such as http, ftp, gopher and news, these identifiers are not used to identify SNMP resources. This paper proposes a URI scheme for identifying SNMP resources and presents some practical scenarios where the existence of such a compact and complete identifying mechanism increases flexibility and functionality of network management applications.

Policy-based network management in an integrated mobile network

Through the seamless integration of different kinds of technologies, services and terminals, and with the expected offered bandwidth, the next generation networks will put a new set of challenges related to operation and management. We present a policy-based network management system (PBNMS) that is being developed inside the Daidalos IST project. We evaluate several WBEM (Web based enterprise management) CIMOM (common information model object managers) in order to obtain a solid framework for the deployment of our PBNMS implementation. The OpenWBEM CIMOM was chosen based mainly on the maturity of this project. Upon OpenWBEM, several components are being developed, such as QoS providers, a CMS (central monitoring system) remote provider, LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) repository, and providers for COPS (common open policy service) and SNMP managed entities.

A multi-protocol architecture for SNMP entities

Growing requirement in the network management area, driven by the successive increase in network size, internetworking complexity and time-constrained services deployment, impose the omnipresence of technicians and tools. The universality of interfaces is essential to support these requirements, from the side of both the manager and the agent. The paper presents a middleware architecture for the development of agents that can be transparently mapped into different management protocol stacks.

Connecting Funding to Entrepreneurs: A Profile of the Main Crowdfunding Platforms

The general purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyse the financing phenomenon of crowdfunding and to investigate the relations between crowdfunders, project creators and crowdfunding websites. More specifically, it also intends to describe the profile differences between major crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The results showed that both Kickstarter and Indiegogo are among the most popular crowdfunding platforms. Both of them have thousands of users and these users are generally satisfied. Most of them rely on individual approaches for crowdfunding. Despite this, Kickstarter and Indiegogo could benefit from further improving their services. Furthermore, according to the results, it was possible to observe that there is a direct and positive relationship between the money needed for the projects and the money collected from the investors for the projects, per platform.

Entrepreneurship in Higher Education as a Horizontal Competence

The definition of entrepreneurship usually leads us through business and profit-maximizing techniques and attitudes, usually characterizing individuals and company makers. Recently, the use of the term social entrepreneurship has also been gaining popularity, to describe the entrepreneurial activities with the goal of creating social value (Abu-Saifan, Technol Innov Manag Rev: 22–27, 2012; Shane and Venkataraman, Acad Manag Rev 25: 217–226, 2000). Entrepreneurial activity, in its broad definition, is associated to several factors, both external, such as the economy, employability, market opportunities, and internal, such as the personality characteristics of individuals (Zhao, Seibert, and Lumpkin 2010). In fact, specific traits, such as leadership, optimism, perseverance, passion, resilience, creativity, empathy and others, are more easily found in entrepreneurial individuals. Although not usually considered as explicit competences in the curriculum of higher education degrees, these personality traits can be strengthened, and skills can be learned either directly or by specifying horizontal competences in higher education programmes. The training intentionality of higher education institutions is described in the curricular unit forms, which constitute the study plan of current educational programmes. These are rigorously focused on vertical competences, associated to the scientific area of the programme, but they also include horizontal skills, that contribute to empower the student with a broader set of knowledge and abilities. The teaching and learning methodologies, the content of the curricular units and the learning outcomes all describe the training process, which can be analysed to get an overall idea of the intentionality of entrepreneurship training in current educational degrees.

Pedagogical innovation in higher education: teachers’ perceptions

The regulation changes we have been witnessing in Portugal in the last 5 or 6 years have been introducing new degrees, new diplomas and new audiences in higher education. The Technological Specialization Courses where created in this context, providing a more vocational and technical post-secondary training.