The monolithic nature of current middleware platforms is unable to deal with the demands of emerging technologies such as multimedia and mobile computing. In addition, these platforms are sometimes too complex for applications with few resources. There have been some attempts to introduce more flexibility, however, middleware nowadays does not address configuration and reconfiguration issues in...

Interdomain routing is the task of establishing connectivity among the independently administered networks (called autonomous systems) that constitute the Internet. The protocol used for this task is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [1], which allows autonomous systems to independently define their own route preferences and route advertisement policies. By careful design of these BGP policies,...

Technologies for composition of loosely-coupled web services in a modular and flexible way are in high demand today. On the one hand, the services must be flexible enough to be reused in a variety of contexts. On the other hand, they must be specific enough so that their composition may be provably consistent. The existing technologies (WS-CDL, WSCI and session types) require a behavioural cont...

Despite the widespread deployment of CCTV through most major cities and towns in great Britain, and the importance of surveillance to contemporary debates within the social sciences, there remains relatively little detailed research concerned with the practical use of these technologies in the workplace. In this paper, we examine how personnel in the operation rooms in London Underground use CC...

Budgetary constraints are almost a constant challenge confronted by academia. In the case of small colleges and universities, these constraints become even more pronounced when these institutions enhance their programs to meet the needs of their constituents. While in some cases program enhancement might simply be accomplished by hiring new faculty members; in others, it might require additiona...

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) use a main memory area as a buffer to reduce the number of disk accesses performed by a transaction. DB2 Universal Database divides the buffer area into a number of independent buffer pools and each database object (table or index) is assigned to a specific buffer pool. The tasks of configuring the buffer pools, which defines the mapping of database objects t...

Middleware platforms are today solutions to the problem of designing and implementing distributed applications. They provide facilities for heterogeneous software components to communicate remotely, according to various interaction model, for example client server communication or asynchronous message passing. However, middleware platforms, like message busses or object request brokers, hardly ...

Automated algorithm configurators have been shown to be very effective for finding good configurations of high performance algorithms for a broad range of computationally hard problems. As we show in this work, the standard protocol for using these configurators is not always effective. We propose a simple and computationally inexpensive modification to this protocol and apply it to state-of-th...

This paper presents a general approach for automatic composing and orchestrating applications distributed over the cloud. The process is driven by user requirements that are made explicit though a goal specification language. The self-configuration module dynamically organizes a mashup application by composing existing cloud application as atomic brick to compose. Finally the orchestrator modul...

This paper shows how systems can be built from their component parts with specified sharing. Its principle contribution is a modular language for configuring systems. A configuration is a description in the new language of how a system is constructed hierarchically from specifications of its component parts. Category theory has been used to represent the composition of specifications that share...