Abstract: Computations are pervasive across many domains, where end users have to compose various heterogeneous computational entities to perform professional activities. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a widely used mechanism that can support such forms of compositions as it allows heterogeneous systems to be wrapped as services that can then be combined with each other. However, current SOA orchestration languages require writing scripts that are typically too low-level for end users to write, being targeted at professional programmers and business analysts. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach based on an architectural-style for service orchestration using an end user specification style called SCORE. SCORE uses high-level constructs that can be tailored for different domains and automatically translated into executable constructs by tool support. We demonstrate the usefulness of SCORE across two domains – dynamic network analysis and neuroscience, where users are intelligence analysts and scientists respectively. They can use an architectural style based vocabulary as a basis of their domain-specific

Abstract: An emergent domain that raises some unique engineering challenges is that of software architectures to convert large bodies of unstructured data to human-usable knowledge, such as in the domain of socio-cultural information analysis. We report on an architecture based on Service-Oriented Architectures that we are applying in this domain. We list the requirements that such an architecture must support, describe our architecture for addressing them, and outline what we believe are the important engineering and research issues that must still be overcome.

Abstract: This paper introduces an architectural style for enabling end-users to quickly design and deploy software systems in domains characterized by highly personalized and dynamic requirements.

The style offers an intuitive metaphor based on boxes, pipes, and wires, but retains enough preciseness that systems can be automatically assembled and dynamically reconfigured based on uDesign descriptions. uDesign was primarily motivated and validated within monitoring and control applications for smart spaces, but we envision possible extensions to other domains.

Our contribution differs from early attempts at end-user programming in the level of abstraction, software architecture rather than programming, and in the subject of description: run-time rather than code structures. To validate the approach, the paper presents (a) two case studies, one in health care and one in home security, (b) the formal semantics of uDesign’s primitives, and (c) a mapping of those primitives to an existing software infrastructure: the Aura infrastructure.

Abstract: Self-adapting systems based on multiple concurrent applications must decide how to allocate scarce resources to applications and how to set the quality parameters of each application to best satisfy the user. Past work has made those decisions with analytic models that used current resource availability information: they react to recent changes in resource availability as they occur, rather than anticipating future availability. These reactive techniques may model each local decision optimally, but the accumulation of decisions over time nearly always becomes less than optimal.

 In this paper, we propose an approach to self adaptation, called anticipatory configuration that leverages

predictions of future resource availability to improve utility for the user over the duration of the task. The approach solves the following technical challenges: (1) how to express resource availability prediction, (2) how to combine prediction from multiple sources, and (3) how to leverage predictions continuously while improving utility to the user. Our experiments show that when certain adaptation operations are costly, anticipatory configuration provides better utility to the user than reactive configuration, while being comparable in resource demand.

Abstract: An important emerging requirement for computing systems is the ability to adapt at run time, taking advantage of local computing devices, and coping with dynamically changing resources. Three specific technical challenges in satisfying this requirement are to (1) select an appropriate set of applications or services to carry out a user s task, (2) allocate (possibly scarce) resources among those applications, and (3) reconfigure the applications or resource assignments if the situation changes. In this paper we show how to provide a shared infrastructure that automates configuration decisions given a specification of the user s task. The heart of the approach is an analytical model and an efficient algorithm that can be used at run time to make near-optimal (re)configuration decisions. We validate this approach both analytically and by applying it to a representative scenario.

Abstract: As intelligent devices become affordable and wireless infrastructure becomes pervasive, the potential to combine, or aggregate, device functionality to provide a user with a better experience grows. Often, there will be multiple devices providing similar functionality that the user will have to choose from for the aggregation. This paper presents the design and prototype implementation of a system for automatic selection of devices for aggregation in a dynamic environment. It allows a user to express trade-offs between the quality of device attributes, user distraction, and aggregation stability. This approach enables a user to have a richer experience without having to constantly worry about the device and the environment details.

Abstract: Service-orchestrations define how services can be composed together and are widely used to execute applications based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). However, the various special purpose orchestration languages used today require code-level constructs that force the users to provide excessive technical detail. For many SOA domains end-users of these orchestrations have limited technical expertise, and hence these users find it difficult to specify orchestrations in current languages. Additionally, users specifying orchestrations would often like to reason about architectural attributes such as performance, security and composability - capabilities that current languages and tools do not support. In this paper we provide an improved technique for modeling orchestrations that allows users to focus primarily on the functional composition of services that is guided by tool supported domain-specific analyses. We introduce an abstract architectural specification language called SCORE (Simple Compositional ORchestration for End users) that defines the vocabulary of elements that can be used in a service composition. SCORE not only allows users to create correct service orchestrations, but it also removes the need for technical detail, most of which is auto-generated by tool support. We demonstrate the use of our approach to specify service-orchestrations in SORASCS (Service ORiented Architectures for Socio-Cultural Systems), which is a SOA system for the intelligence analysis domain. SORASCS users are analysts, who are involved with domain-specific analysis workflows that are represented using SCORE and executed.

Abstract: Addressing resource variation plays an increasingly important role in engineering today’s software sys- tems. Research in resource-adaptive applications takes an important step towards addressing this problem. However, existing solutions stop short of addressing the fact that different user tasks often have specific goals of quality of service, and that such goals often entail multiple aspects of quality of service. This paper presents a framework for engineering software systems capable of adapting to resource variations in ways that are specific to the quality goals of each user task. For that, users are empowered to specify their task-specific preferences with respect to multiple aspects of quality of service. Such prefer- ences are then exploited to both coordinate resource usage across the applications supporting the task, and to dynamically control the resource adaptation polices of those applications. A user study validates that non-expert users can use our framework to successfully control the behavior of such adaptive systems.

Abstract: Abstract—Dynamic Network Analysis is a domain of computation that refers to the analysis of complex social systems that change over time. Within this domain, analysts need to be able to carry out workflows, involving composition of various tools and procedures that they use to extract and analyze social systems. Typically these workflows require the incorporation of heterogeneous tools in distributed locations, are interactive in that they allow dynamic parameterization and exploration, and can be shared with and reused by other analysts in different contexts. Furthermore, because such analysts are not computer programmers, they require an approach for constructing workflows that allows them to focus on their analysis task, and that provides them with appropriate guidance in constructing and reusing workflows. In this paper, we describe a tool, called SWiFT, that provides a workflow construction environment for dynamic network analysis, built on a service oriented architecture, that provides these features.