Tomáš Pitner

Towards multi-tenant and interoperable monitoring of virtual machines in cloud

The advent of Cloud Computing introduced new challenges in various computer science fields and disciplines, monitoring being one of them. Due to the multi-tenant nature of Cloud environment, its size and use of massive virtualization, the current monitoring solutions are approaching their limits. Unlike some other approaches, focusing on data integration, aggregation, and abstraction, our work focuses on a virtual machine representing the primary source of monitoring information. In this paper, we propose requirements for the producer of monitoring information addressing existing issues related to monitoring data representation, storage, processing and distribution. As a proof-of-concept, conforming to these requirements, prototype of event-based monitoring daemon is presented in detail. The resulting solution allows multiple users to consume monitoring information in an extensible data format without impairing interoperability.

Semantically Enriched Tools for the Knowledge Society: Case of Project Management and Presentation

Working with semantically rich data is one of the stepping stones to the knowledge society. In recent years, gathering, processing, and using semantic data have made a big progress, particularly in the academic environment. However, the advantages of the semantic description remain commonly undiscovered by a “common user”, including people from academia and IT industry that could otherwise profit from capabilities of contemporary semantic systems in the areas of project management and/or technology-enhanced learning. Mostly, the root cause lays in complexity and non-transparency of the mainstream semantic applications. The semantic tool for project management and presentation consists mainly of a module for the semantic annotation of wiki pages integrated into the project management system Trac. It combines the dynamic, easy-of-use nature and applicability of a wiki for project management with the advantages of semantically rich and accurate approach. The system is released as open-source (OS) and is used for management of students’ and research projects at the research lab of the authors.

Anomaly detection in Smart Grid data: An experience report

In recent years, we have been witnessing profound transformation of energy distribution systems fueled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), towards the so called Smart Grid. However, while the Smart Grid design strategies have been studied by academia, only anecdotal guidance is provided to the industry with respect to increasing the level of grid intelligence. In this paper, we report on a successful project in assisting the industry in this way, via conducting a large anomaly-detection study on the data of one of the power distribution companies in the Czech Republic. In the study, we move away from the concept of single events identified as anomaly to the concept of collective anomaly, that is itemsets of events that may be anomalous based on their patterns of appearance. This can assist the operators of the distribution system in the transformation of their grid to a smarter grid. By analyzing Smart Meters data streams, we used frequent itemset mining and categorical clustering with clustering silhouette thresholding to detect anomalous behaviour. As the main result, we provided to stakeholders both a visual representation of the candidate anomalies and the identification of the top-10 anomalies for a subset of Smart Meters.

Smart grids deployments within EU projects: The role of smart meters

There is a large number of European Union (EU) projects that deal with Smart Grids research and deployment. Overall, they provide a substantial amount of knowledge that can be mined to gain useful insights for future projects and on-going roll-outs of Smart Grid related utilities. In the current paper, we focus on Smart Meters and we evaluate different communication-related architectural styles within an Advanced Metering infrastructure (AMI). In particular, we derive from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Smart Grids projects review three different layouts for Smart Meters two-way communication: i) mobile Peer-to-Peer (P2P), ii) data concentrator-supported, and iii) gateway-supported. After the discussion about the architectural styles, we look at how common such choices are within EU projects deployments. Overall, we found predominance of both gateway / data concentrator architectures over P2P mobile communication layouts. The main outcome of the paper is a mapping of the three architectural styles to the deployments within the selected EU projects. Based on the map, we debate about the implications of such deployments within the current and future Smart Grids context.

Intelligent Facility Management for Sustainability and Risk Management

Building construction has gone through substantial change with the emerging spread of ICT during last decades. In the field of construction industry, the term intelligent buildings describes facilities equipped with devices and systems that can be remotely controlled and programmed and that are able to communicate and collaborate in order to ensure convenient building environment and effective operation. However, installing devices with such capabilities is only one part of the task of effective facility management and risk management. Facility managers have to be provided with tools that allow them to inspect and analyze gathered building operational data and make decisions to improve building performance. Decision support tools for facility managers usually lack deep integration with building systems. This article aims on technical aspects of providing data from intelligent buildings to the responsible personnel in order to help them to operate the building effectively with emphasis on its energy consumption and risk management.

Towards Effective Social Network System Implementation

In this paper we present our latest research in the area of social network system implementation. Both business and technological aspects of social network system development is considered. There are many tools, languages and methods for developing large-size software systems and architectures represented by social network systems. However, no research has been done yet to uncover reason behind the selection and usage of such systems in terms of choosing the right architecture and data storage.We describe effective approach of developing specific parts of social network systems with special attention to data layer (using Hadoop, HBase and Apache Cassandra) which forms basis of any social network system and is highly demanding for performance and scalability.

Technology enhanced learning in programming courses --- international perspective

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is increasingly influencing university education, mainly in overcoming disadvantages of direct instruction teaching approaches, and encouraging creativity, problem solving and critical thinking in student-centered, interactive learning environments. In this paper, experiences from object-oriented programming (OOP) courses that are taught in three institutions from three different European countries are presented and compared. The courses are based on Java and are delivered in the second year of studies, after students have attended an introductory programming course. The emphasis is given on TEL approaches and accompanying tools and services, focusing mainly on Learning Management Systems (LMS). Our students completed an appropriate questionnaire to evaluate the importance and utilization of TEL services that are used or planned to be used at the programming courses. The results of statistical analysis of collected data show that students from all three institutional groups consider organizational services provided by TEL tools as much or very much important in their education, while communicational services are rarely used. Using non-parametric statistical tests we studied the similarities and differences in perceived importance of TEL services among students from different institutional groups.

Distributed Event-Driven Model for Intelligent Monitoring of Cloud Datacenters

When monitoring cloud infrastructure, the monitoring data related to a particular resource or entity are typically produced by multiple distributed producers spread across many individual computing nodes. In order to determine the state and behavior of a particular resource all the relevant data must be collected, processed, and evaluated without overloading the computing resources and flooding the network. Such a task is becoming harder with the ever growing volume, velocity, and variability of monitoring data produced by modern cloud datacenters. In this paper we propose a general distributed event-driven monitoring model enabling multiple simultaneous consumers a real-time collection, processing, and analysis of monitoring data related to the behavior and state of many distributed entities.

A framework for monitoring and evaluation of learning processes

The paper will describe the features and show advantages of process orientation in all phases of university course design and implementation applied in an introductory course on environmental science at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics in Brno, Czech Republic. It will demonstrate the principles of process-oriented learning design and its support in the open-source based Medusy project. Primarily, it will show the integrated approach to learning process design, tooling, runtime environment, and learning process pattern repository.

Information system monitoring and notifications using complex event processing

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a novel approach how to process streaming events and extract information that would otherwise be lost. While tools for CEP are available right now, they are usually used only for a limited number of projects. That is disappointing, because every Enterprise Information System (EIS) is producing a high number of events, e.g. by logging debug information, and industry is not taking an advantage of CEP to make these information useful. We pick two concepts that seems to be from a different category -- notifications -- a ubiquitous way how to notify user of an EIS and EIS monitoring. With notifications we define a new abstraction upon notifications with respect to a separation of concerns to create a more maintainable implementation. In our research we show that this is a typical example of a possible future application of CEP and that the industry requires specific service oriented tools that can be used for both, notifications and monitoring. When these service oriented tools would be introduced into the industry it would promote EIS maintainability and extensibility.