New paper “Montsalvat: Intel SGX Shielding for GraalVM Native Images” to be presented at Middleware’21
New paper “Montsalvat: Intel SGX Shielding for GraalVM Native Images” to be presented at Middleware’21. Congrats to Gaël!
New paper “The Serverless Shell” to be presented at Middleware’21
New paper “The Serverless Shell” to be presented at Middleware’21. Congrats to Aurele and Pierre!
New paper “Highly-available and consistent group collaboration at the edge with Colony” to be presented at Middleware’21
New paper “Highly-available and consistent group collaboration at the edge with Colony” to be presented at Middleware’21. Congrats to Pierre!
New paper “Automating user-feedback driven requirements prioritization” in Elsevier Information and Software Technology
Authors: Fitsum Meshesha Kifetew, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi, Aberto Siena, Denisse Muñante and Itzel Morales-Ramirez
Information and Software Technology, Elsevier, 2021, 138, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03277970
Abstract
Context: Feedback from end users of software applications is a valuable resource in understanding what users request, what they value, and what they dislike. Information derived from user-feedback can support software evolution activities, such as requirements prioritization. User-feedback analysis is still mostly performed manually by practitioners, despite growing research in automated analysis. Objective: We address two issues in automated user-feedback analysis: (i) most of the existing automated analysis approaches that exploit linguistic analysis assume that the vocabulary adopted by users (when expressing feedback) and developers (when formulating requirements) are the same; and (ii) user-feedback analysis techniques are usually experimentally evaluated only on some user-feedback dataset, not involving assessment by potential software developers. Method: We propose an approach, ReFeed, that computes, for each requirement, the set of related user-feedback, and from such user-feedback extracts quantifiable properties which are relevant for prioritizing the requirement. The extracted properties are propagated to the related requirements, based on which ranks are computed for each requirement. ReFeed relies on domain knowledge, in the form of an ontology, helping mitigate the gap in the vocabulary of end users and developers. The effectiveness of ReFeed is evaluated on a realistic requirements prioritization scenario in two experiments involving graduate students from two different universities. Results: ReFeed is able to synthesize reasonable priorities for a given set of requirements based on properties derived from user-feedback. The implementation of ReFeed and related resources are publicly available. Conclusion: The results from our studies are encouraging in that using only three properties of user-feedback, ReFeed is able to prioritize requirements with reasonable accuracy. Such automatically determined prioritization could serve as a good starting point for requirements experts involved in the task of prioritizing requirements Future studies could explore additional user-feedback properties to improve the effectiveness of computed priorities.
New paper “PrioDeX: a Data Exchange middleware for efficient event prioritization in SDN-based IoT systems” in ACM TOIT
Authors: Georgios Bouloukakis, Kyle Benson, Luca Scalzotto, Paolo Bellavista, Casey Grant, Valérie Issarny, Sharad Mehrotra,Ioannis Moscholios, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, In press, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03171358
Abstract
Real-time event detection and targeted decision making for emerging mission-critical applications require systems that extract and process relevant data from IoT sources in smart spaces. Oftentimes, this data is heterogeneous in size, relevance, and urgency, which creates a challenge when considering that different groups of stakeholders (e.g., first responders, medical staff, government officials, etc) require such data to be delivered in a reliable and timely manner. Furthermore, in mission-critical settings, networks can become constrained due to lossy channels and failed components, which ultimately add to the complexity of the problem. In this paper, we propose PrioDeX, a cross-layer middleware system that enables timely and reliable delivery of mission-critical data from IoT sources to relevant consumers through the prioritization of messages. It integrates parameters at the application, network, and middleware layers into a data exchange service that accurately estimates end-to-end performance metrics through a queueing analytical model. PrioDeX proposes novel algorithms that utilize the results of this analysis to tune data exchange configurations (event priorities and dropping policies), which is necessary for satisfying situational awareness requirements and resource constraints. PrioDeX leverages Software-Defined Networking (SDN) methodologies to enforce these configurations in the IoT network infrastructure. We evaluate our approach using both simulated and prototype-based experiments in a smart building fire response scenario. Our application-aware prioritization algorithm improves the value of exchanged information by 36% when compared with no prioritization; the addition of our network-aware drop rate policies improves this performance by 42% over priorities only and by 94% over no prioritization.
New paper “IoT data qualification for a logistic chain traceability smart contract” in Sensors journal
Authors: Mohamed Ahmed, Chantal Taconet, Mohamed Ould, Sophie Chabridon, Amel Bouzeghoub
MDPI Sensors, 21 (6), 2021. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03219609
Abstract
In the logistic chain domain, the traceability of shipments in their entire delivery process from the shipper to the consignee involves many stakeholders. From the traceability data, contractual decisions may be taken such as incident detection, validation of the delivery or billing. The stakeholders require transparency in the whole process. The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the blockchain paradigms helps in the development of automated and trusted systems. In this context, ensuring the quality of the IoT data is an absolute requirement for the adoption of those technologies. In this article, we propose an approach to assess the data quality (DQ) of IoT data sources using a logistic traceability smart contract developed on top of a blockchain. We select the quality dimensions relevant to our context, namely accuracy, completeness, consistency and currentness, with a proposition of their corresponding measurement methods. We also propose a data quality model specific to the logistic chain domain and a distributed traceability architecture. The evaluation of the proposal shows the capacity of the proposed method to assess the IoT data quality and ensure the user agreement on the data qualification rules. The proposed solution opens new opportunities in the development of automated logistic traceability systems.
New paper “Efficient Replication via Timestamp Stability” to be presented at Eurosys’21
New paper “Efficient Replication via Timestamp Stability” to be presented at Eurosys’21. Congrats to Pierre!
New paper “FaaSCache: an opportunistic free caching system for FaaS platforms” to be presented at Eurosys’21
New paper “FaaSCache: an opportunistic free caching system for FaaS platforms” to be presented at Eurosys’21. Congrats to Mathieu!
New paper “EZIOTracer: Unifying Kernel and User Space I/O Tracing for Data-Intensive Applications” to be presented at the CHEOPS workshop of Eurosys’21
New paper “EZIOTracer: Unifying Kernel and User Space I/O Tracing for Data-Intensive Applications” to be presented at the CHEOPS workshop of Eurosys’21. Congrats to Alexis C and François!
New paper “A Transactional Approach to Enforce Resource Availabilities – Application to the Cloud” at RCIS’2021
Authors: Zakaria Maamar, Mohamed Sellami and Fatma Masmoudi
Abstract
This paper looks into the availability of resources, exemplified with the cloud, in an open and dynamic environment like the Internet. A growing number of users consume resources to complete their operations requiring a better way to manage these resources in order to avoid conflicts, for example. Resource availability is defined using a set of consumption properties (limited, limited-but-renewable, and non-shareable) and is enforced at run-time using a set of transactional properties (pivot, retriable, and compensatable). In this paper, a CloudSim-based system simulates how mixing consumption and transactional properties allows to capture users’ needs and requirements in terms of what cloud resources they need, for how long, and to what extent they tolerate the unavailability of these resources.
