Timo Aaltonen

MashReduce: Server-side mashups for mobile devices

In the past few years, the Web has become a popular deployment environment for new kinds of software applications. In the new era of web-based software, applications live on the Web as services, and consist of data, code and other resources that can be located anywhere in the world. Furthermore, web sites, commonly referred to as mashups, that combine (mash up) content from more than one source have become common. So far, mashups have been usually built such that the client downloads and combines data. While this enables using already existing resources in new contexts, this is also a fundamental restriction. In this paper, we introduce an architecture that enables a client system to upload code to servers that then run the code to create application specific content. In addition, we demonstrate the capabilities of the system with a simple application that performs face detection for various photographs residing in the servers.

Configurator-as-a-service: tool support for deriving software architectures at runtime

Variability in software architectures, and especially dynamic variability in software architectures, calls for tool support. The complexity involved in the variability means that tools should be able to efficiently derive architectures at runtime. Our contribution is to offer concepts and an expository instantiation of Configurator-as-a-Service (CaaS). CaaS provides integrability, separation of derivation concerns, and automation. The approach is validated with a case of social devices, where proximity-based, distributed service compositions of mobile devices are derived at runtime.

Tool Assisted Analysis of Open Source Projects: A Multi-Faceted Challenge

Open Source Software OSS is currently a widely adopted approach to developing and distributing software. OSS code adoption requires an understanding of the structure of the code base. For a deeper understanding of the maintenance, bug fixing and development activities, the structure of the developer community also needs to be understood, especially the relations between the code and community structures. This, in turn, is essential for the development and maintenance of software containing OSS code. This paper proposes a method and support tool for exploring the relations of the code base and community structures of OSS projects. The method and proposed tool, Binoculars, rely on generic and reusable query operations, formal definitions of which are given in the paper. The authors demonstrate the applicability of Binoculars with two examples. The authors analyze a well-known and active open source project, FFMpeg, and the open source version of the IaaS cloud computing project Eucalyptus.

Chasers of the Lost Data: Turning content management systems into gaming platforms

This paper briefly presents our Information Retrieval and Indexing System (IRIS), and how it adapts to support game engine components. We describe a conceptual game, Chasers of the Lost Data, to demonstrate how pervasive games elements interact with content and user context detection, enabling a broad range of game applications. The presented game combines physical, sensorial and contextual information with personal content and inject this information into the game world in forms of game chases. This game allows personal content of players to be enhanced by new sets of metadata from different point of views (other players). This result in an improved content management, search and recommendation system while being more resonant fun experiences for the users.