Sumit Mittal

A service creation environment based on end to end composition of Web services

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus resulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insufficient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. We present the first integrated work in composing web services end to end from specification to deployment by synergistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment along with a use-case scenario, and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-to-market for new services.

Synthy: A system for end to end composition of web services

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. However, application development is often done in an ad hoc manner resulting in poor reuse of software assets and longer time-to-delivery. Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web service composition system can help automate the process, from specifying business process functionalities, to developing executable workflows that capture non-functional (e.g. Quality of Service (QoS)) requirements, to deploying them on a runtime infrastructure. Intuitively, web services can be viewed as software components and the process of web service composition similar to software synthesis. In addition, service composition needs to address the build-time and runtime issues of the integrated application, thereby making it a more challenging and practical problem than software synthesis. However, current solutions based on business web services (using WSDL, BPEL, SOAP, etc.) or semantic web services (using ontologies, goal-directed reasoning, etc.) are both piecemeal and insufficient. We formulate the web service composition problem and describe the first integrated system for composing web services end to end, i.e., from specification to deployment. The proposed solution is based on a novel two-staged composition approach that addresses the information modeling aspects of web services, provides support for contextual information while composing services, employs efficient decoupling of functional and non-functional requirements, and leads to improved scalability and failure handling. We also present Synthy, a prototype of the service composition system, and demonstrate its effectiveness with the help of an application scenario from the telecom domain.

Understanding approaches for web service composition and execution

Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. Of particular interest is the Web Service Composition and Execution (WSCE) process - the creation of a workflow that realizes the functionality of a new service and its subsequent deployment and execution on a runtime environment. A significant number of solutions have been proposed in the literature for composition and execution of web services. However, in order to choose a suitable technique for an application scenario, one needs to systematically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each of these solutions. To this end, we present an analysis that includes formalization of the WSCE process, a classification of existing solutions into four distinct categories (approaches), and an in-depth evaluation of these approaches. Our evaluation is based on multiple metrics that we deem critical for a WSCE system, e.g. composition effort, composition control, and ability to handle failures. We also present an application of this analysis to three different scenarios.

User interests in social media sites: an exploration with micro-blogs

Recent technological advances in mobile-based access to social networking platforms and facilities to update information in real{time (e.g. in Facebook) have allowed an individuals online presence to be as ephemeral and dynamic in nature, as her very thoughts and interests. In this context, micro-blogging has been widely adopted by users as an effective means to capture and disseminate their thoughts and actions to a larger audience on a daily basis. Interestingly, daily chatters of a user obtained from her micro-blogs offer a unique information source to analyze and interpret her context in real-time - i.e. interests, intentions,and activities. In this paper, we gather data from the public timeline of Twitter spanning across ten worldwide cities over a period of four weeks. We use this dataset to (a) explore how users express interests in real-time through micro-blogs, and (b) understand how text mining techniques can be applied to interpret real-time context of a user based on her tweets. Initial findings reported herein suggest that social media sites like Twitter constitute a promising source for extracting user context that can be exploited by novel social networking applications.

Adaptation inWeb Service Composition and Execution

Web services simplify enterprise application integration by facilitating reuse of existing components for creating new services. In a dynamic environment, it is imperative to design a Web service composition and execution (WSCE) system that adapts to failure of component services or changes in their QoS offerings. In this paper, we motivate a staged approach for adaptive WSCE (A-WSCE) that cleanly separates the functional and non-functional requirements of a new service, and enables different environmental changes to be absorbed at different stages of composition and execution. We use Synthy, a prototype service creation environment, to implement our solution and demonstrate its effectiveness

R-U-In? - Exploiting Rich Presence and Converged Communications for Next-Generation Activity-Oriented Social Networking

With the growing popularity of social networking,traditional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom operators have both started exploring new opportunities to boost their revenue streams. The efforts have facilitated consumers to stay connected to their favorite social networks,be it from an ISP portal or a mobile device. The use of Web 2.0technologies and converged communication tools has further led to a rise in both user-generated content as well as contextual information (i.e. rich presence) about users – including their current location, availability, interests and moods. In this evolving landscape, social networking players need to innovate for value-centric usage models that increase customer stickiness,along with business models to monetize the social media. To this end, we present R-U-In? - an activity-oriented social networking system for users to collaborate and participate in activities of mutual interest. Activities can be initiated and scheduled on-demand and be as ephemeral as the user interests themselves. R-U-In? leverages contextual modeling and reasoning techniques to enable “social search” based on real-time user interests and finds potential matches for the proposed activity. Further, it exploits next-generation presence and communication technologies to manage the entire activity lifecycle in real-time. Initial survey results, based on a prototype implementation of R-U-In?, attest to the promise of realtime activity-oriented social networking - both in terms of an effective collaboration tool for value-oriented social networking users and an enhanced end-user experience.

An Integrated Development Environment for Web Service Composition

Web services provide an instantiation of the loosely coupled service-oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software, and other resources. However, to exploit the true potential of web services, it is critical to develop technologies and tools for composing new services from existing ones. While numerous composition approaches have been developed in the past, very little has been done towards tooling. What is clearly lacking is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ease the process of composition, thereby reducing development time and integration efforts. In this paper, we build on our previous work on service composition, and present an IDE for end-to-end composition of web services. We elaborate on the design of the IDE, describe its integration with existing technologies, and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.

Caching dynamic web content: designing and analysing an aspect-oriented solution

Caching dynamic web content is an effective approach to reduce Internet latency and server load. An ideal caching solution is one that can be added transparently by the developers and provides complete consistency of the cached documents, while minimizing false cache invalidations. In this paper, we design and implement AutoWebCache, a middleware system for adding caching of dynamic content transparently to J2EE server-side applications having a backend database. For this purpose, we first present the principles involved in caching dynamic web content, including our logic to ensure consistency of the cached entries. Thereafter, we demonstrate the use of aspect-oriented (AOP) techniques to implement our system, showing how AOP provides modularity and transparency to the entire process. Further, we evaluate the effectiveness of AutoWebCache in reducing response times of applications, thereby improving throughput. We also analyze the transparency of our system for a general application suite, considering issues such as dynamic web pages aggregating data from multiple sources, presence of insufficiently structured interfaces for exchanging information and the use of application semantics while caching. We use two standard J2EE web benchmark applications, RUBiS and TPC-W, to conduct our experiments and discuss the results obtained.

Sewnet -: a framework for creating services utilizing telecom functionality

With Telecom market reaching saturation in many geographies and revenues from voice calls decreasing, Telecom operators are trying to identify new sources of revenue. For this purpose, these operators can take advantage of their core functionalities like Location, Call Control, etc. by exposing them as services to be composed by developers with third party offerings available over the Web. To hide the complexity of underlying Telecom protocols from application developers, the operators are steadily adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and reference standards like Parlay-X and IMS. However, a number of challenges still remain in rapid utilization of Telecom functionalities for creating new applications - existence of multiple protocols, different classes of developers, and the need to coordinate and manage usage of these functionalities. In this paper, we present SewNet, a framework for creating applications exploiting Telecom functionality exposed over a (converged) IP network. More specifically, SewNet a) provides an abstraction model for encapsulating invocation, coordination and enrichment of the Telecom functionalities, b) renders a service creation environment on top of this model, and c) caters to various different categories of developers. With the help of two use-case scenarios, we demonstrate how SewNet can create services utilizing rich Telecom functionality.

Accommodating user diversity for in-store shopping behavior recognition

This paper explores the possibility of using mobile sensing data to detect certain in-store shopping intentions or behaviours of shoppers. We propose a person-independent activity recognition technique called CROSDAC, which captures the diversity in the manifestation of such intentions or behaviours in a heterogeneous set of users in a data-driven manner via a 2-stage clustering-cum-classification technique. Using smartphone based sensor data (accelerometer, compass and Wi-Fi) from a directed, but real-life study involving 86 shopping episodes from 30 users in a malls food court, we show that CROSDACs mobile sensing-based approach can offer reasonably high accuracy (77:6% for a 2-class identification problem) and outperforms the traditional community-driven approaches that unquestioningly segment users on the basis of underlying demographic or lifestyle attributes.