The document proposes a new paradigm called the Social Cloud for collaborative scientific computation. It leverages existing social networks by allowing scientists to contribute resources like compute, storage, and services to groups, forming virtual research environments. This provides a flexible and extensible platform for global collaboration where access to shared resources is based on the implicit trust within social networks.
E democracy, visualization, open data, digital citizenship@cristobalcobo
Latin American study about digital democracy.
El Seminario/Taller que tiene como objetivo completar y cerrar el estudio comparativo de experiencias exitosas en América Latina y el Caribe sobre e – Democracia y promover el intercambio de buenas prácticas, el análisis y la documentación en torno a cómo consolidar la “democracia electrónica” en la región.
Describing the design of PowerMeeting (a Web browser based real time groupware) and comparing it with Google Wave and ThinkTank, using Tim Burners Lee's Web science process as a framework.
Researcher Profiling based on Semantic Analysis in Social NetworksLaurens De Vocht
We propose a framework to address an important challenge in the context of the ongoing adoption of the “Web 2.0” in science and research, often referred to as “Research 2.0”. Microblogging is one of the trends with increasing leverage. The challenge in this thesis is to connect users of microblogging services such as Twitter based on specific common entities that are representative and truly matter to them. We investigated the possibilities of using social data for locating an expert who shares a very specific research topic. To enrich and verify this social data we link such content to existing open data provided by the online community. We are using semantic technologies (RDF ,SPARQL), com- mon ontologies (SIOC, FOAF, DublinCore, SWRC) and Linked Data (DBpedia, GeoNames, CoLinDa) to extract and mine the data about scientific conferences out of context of microblogs. We are identifying users related to each other based on entities such as topics (tags), events, time, locations and persons (mentions). As a proof-of-concept we explain, implement and evaluate such a researcher profiling use case. It involves the development of a framework that focuses on the proposition of researches based on topics and conferences they have in common. This framework provides an API that allows quick access to the analyzed information. A demonstration application: “Researcher Affinity Browser” shows how the API supports developers to build rich internet applications for Research 2.0. This application also intro- duces the concept “affinity” that exposes the implicit proximity between entities and users based on the content users produced. The usability of a demonstration application and the usefulness of the framework itself are investigated with an explicit evaluation question- naire. This user feedback lead to important conclusions about successful achievements and opportunities to further improve this effort.
Poster submitted to the Digital Literacies Conference, held at the University of Southampton, June 2012 (http://www.diglit.soton.ac.uk/conference/programme/). The SMiLE project took place during the CAA conference (http://caaconference.org/caa2012/).
E democracy, visualization, open data, digital citizenship@cristobalcobo
Latin American study about digital democracy.
El Seminario/Taller que tiene como objetivo completar y cerrar el estudio comparativo de experiencias exitosas en América Latina y el Caribe sobre e – Democracia y promover el intercambio de buenas prácticas, el análisis y la documentación en torno a cómo consolidar la “democracia electrónica” en la región.
Describing the design of PowerMeeting (a Web browser based real time groupware) and comparing it with Google Wave and ThinkTank, using Tim Burners Lee's Web science process as a framework.
Researcher Profiling based on Semantic Analysis in Social NetworksLaurens De Vocht
We propose a framework to address an important challenge in the context of the ongoing adoption of the “Web 2.0” in science and research, often referred to as “Research 2.0”. Microblogging is one of the trends with increasing leverage. The challenge in this thesis is to connect users of microblogging services such as Twitter based on specific common entities that are representative and truly matter to them. We investigated the possibilities of using social data for locating an expert who shares a very specific research topic. To enrich and verify this social data we link such content to existing open data provided by the online community. We are using semantic technologies (RDF ,SPARQL), com- mon ontologies (SIOC, FOAF, DublinCore, SWRC) and Linked Data (DBpedia, GeoNames, CoLinDa) to extract and mine the data about scientific conferences out of context of microblogs. We are identifying users related to each other based on entities such as topics (tags), events, time, locations and persons (mentions). As a proof-of-concept we explain, implement and evaluate such a researcher profiling use case. It involves the development of a framework that focuses on the proposition of researches based on topics and conferences they have in common. This framework provides an API that allows quick access to the analyzed information. A demonstration application: “Researcher Affinity Browser” shows how the API supports developers to build rich internet applications for Research 2.0. This application also intro- duces the concept “affinity” that exposes the implicit proximity between entities and users based on the content users produced. The usability of a demonstration application and the usefulness of the framework itself are investigated with an explicit evaluation question- naire. This user feedback lead to important conclusions about successful achievements and opportunities to further improve this effort.
Poster submitted to the Digital Literacies Conference, held at the University of Southampton, June 2012 (http://www.diglit.soton.ac.uk/conference/programme/). The SMiLE project took place during the CAA conference (http://caaconference.org/caa2012/).
The problem of matchmaking in electronic social networks is formulated as an optimization problem.
In particular, a function measuring the matching degree of fields of interest of a search profile with
those of an advertising profile is proposed.
Requirement 5: Federated Community Cloud - SillAlan Sill
Presentation on behalf of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federated Community Cloud (FCC) sub-group of the Reference Architecture and Taxonomy (RATax) working group at the NIST Cloud Computing and Big Data Forum and Workshop, Feb. 15-17, 2013 in Gaithersburg, MD.
I used these slides as part of a "Digital Dialogues" presentation at University of Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities: "Community, Cohesion, and Commitment: Developing and Deploying Open Source Tools in the UVa Online Library Environment"...more info at http://bit.ly/ffTmFH
The annual NMC Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education over three time horizons — one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. This presentation gives a visual overview of the contents of The NMC Horizon Report > 2008 Higher Ed Edition. The presentation was shared at conferences all over the world in conjunction with the release of the accompanying report.
The problem of matchmaking in electronic social networks is formulated as an optimization problem.
In particular, a function measuring the matching degree of fields of interest of a search profile with
those of an advertising profile is proposed.
Requirement 5: Federated Community Cloud - SillAlan Sill
Presentation on behalf of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federated Community Cloud (FCC) sub-group of the Reference Architecture and Taxonomy (RATax) working group at the NIST Cloud Computing and Big Data Forum and Workshop, Feb. 15-17, 2013 in Gaithersburg, MD.
I used these slides as part of a "Digital Dialogues" presentation at University of Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities: "Community, Cohesion, and Commitment: Developing and Deploying Open Source Tools in the UVa Online Library Environment"...more info at http://bit.ly/ffTmFH
The annual NMC Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education over three time horizons — one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. This presentation gives a visual overview of the contents of The NMC Horizon Report > 2008 Higher Ed Edition. The presentation was shared at conferences all over the world in conjunction with the release of the accompanying report.
The Social Semantic Server - A Flexible Framework to Support Informal Learnin...Sebastian Dennerlein
Introduction: Scaling Informal Workplace Learning
System Design: Designing a flexible framework for informal workplace learning
Theoretical Underpinning
Design Principles
System Implementation: SOA for a Hybrid Knowledge Representation
Software Architecture
Services
Applications: B&P, KnowBrain & Bookmarker/ Attacher
Conclusion on the Support of Informal Learning
Future Work: Next Steps & What else can be achieve by the SSS?
Social Media @ Jubilee Graduate Centre. Series of sessions on the use of social media in academic practice. Delivered to PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs). Session Three: Collaboration and Networking. 17 February 2008. Co-authored with LeRoy Hill.
A presentation from Cloud Open Europe 2014.
GreenQloud's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Tryggvi Lárusson spoke about how cloud computing and open source can be matched by the methodology of Appropriate Technology (AT) and drive innovation and social change at the same time.
More information: https://www.greenqloud.com/open-source-clouds-be-the-change/
Accelerate Trust Building to UInleash Innovation. Early results from the Innovation Ecosystems Network showing networks of executive women in technology-based businesses, investments into and out of China, and emerging globalization of Norwegian technology-based businesses in the information technology sector. Lecture by Martha Russell, of Media X at Stanford University.
“Knowledge Across Borders: Accelerate Building Trust to Unleash Innovation” - A presentation given by Dr. Martha Russell in Business Institute, Olso, Norway on October 7, 2010.
A sponsored supplement produced for Jisc on how researchers can cope with the data deluge of modern research techniques. Published by Times Higher Education on 25 November 2009
Geochronos File Sharing Application Using CloudIJERA Editor
Accessing, running and sharing applications and data at present face many challenges. Cloud Computing and Social Networking technologies have the potential to simplify or eliminate many of these challenges. Social Networking technologies provide a means for easily sharing applications and data. Now a day’s people want to be connected 24x7 to the world around them. Networking and Communication have come together to make the world a small place to live in. People want to be in constant touch with their subordinates where ever they are and avail emergency services whenever needed. In this paper we present an on-line/on-demand interactive application service (Software as a Service). The service is built on a cloud computing basement that provisions virtualized application servers based on user demand. An open source social networking platform is leveraged to establish a portal front-end that enables applications and results to be easily shared between users. In the proposed system users can access the documents uploaded into the cloud by others and provide any data they have in hand to other users through the same cloud. This also allows the users to have an interactive session through the chat screens present in the cloud. The paper also highlights some major security issues existing in current cloud computing environment.
The cloud has come a long way since it was first introduced as a computing utility, being paid for only when and in the amount it was used.
While the cloud's future is wide open, but with the variety of workload types growing with no end in sight, the hybrid cloud is going to be the dominant option over the next couple of years.
This white paper discusses why open source is going to be a key component of cloud computing as a gateway to innovation.
Preference-Based Resource Allocation: Using Heuristics to Solve Two-Sided Mat...Simon Caton
The allocation of resources between providers to consumers is a well-known problem and has received significant attention, typically using notions of monetary exchanges. In this paper, we study resource matching in settings without monetary transactions by using a two-sided matching approach, e.g., in social and collaborative environments where users define preferences for with whom they may be matched. Whereas two-sided matching for strict and complete preference rankings (i.e., without indifferences) has been extensively studied, it is known that the matching problem is NP-hard for more realistic preference structures. We study, via simulation, the applicability of a heuristic procedure in settings with indiffernces in preferences, and compare its performance to existing algorithms. We study performance metrics like fairness and welfare in addition to the classic stability objective. Our results show
interesting trade-offs between performance metrics and promising performance of the heuristic.
A Social Content Delivery Network for Scientific Cooperation: Vision, Design...Simon Caton
Data volumes have increased so significantly that we need to carefully consider how we interact with, share, and analyze data to avoid bottlenecks. In contexts such as eScience and scientific computing, a large emphasis is placed on collaboration, resulting in many well-known challenges in ensuring that data is in the right place at the right time and accessible by the right users. Yet these simple requirements create substantial challenges for the distribution, analysis, storage, and replication of potentially "large" datasets. Additional complexity is added through constraints such as budget, data locality, usage, and available local storage. In this paper, we propose a "socially driven" approach to address some of the challenges within (academic) research contexts by defining a Social Data Cloud and underpinning Content Delivery Network: a Social CDN (S-CDN). Our approach leverages digitally encoded social constructs via social network platforms that we use to represent (virtual) research communities. Ultimately, the S-CDN builds upon the intrinsic incentives of members of a given scientific community to address their data challenges collaboratively and in proven trusted settings. We define the design and architecture of a S-CDN and investigate its feasibility via a coauthorship case study as first steps to illustrate its usefulness.
A Simulator for Social Exchanges and Collaborations - Architecture and Case S...Simon Caton
Social collaboration scenarios, such as
sharing resources between friends, are becoming increasingly prevalent in recent years. An example of this new paradigm is Social Cloud Computing, which aims at leveraging existing digital relationships within social networks for the exchange of resources among users and user communities. Due to their complexity, such platforms and systems have to be carefully designed and engineered to suit their purpose. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose simulation tool to help in the design and analysis of Social Collaboration Platforms, and discuss potential use cases and the architecture of the simulator. To show the usefulness of the simulator, we present a simple use case in which we study the effects of an incentive scheme on the system and its user community.
The Gamification of Well-Being MeasuresSimon Caton
There is an overriding interest in measuring the well-being of communities and institutions: healthy (flourishing) individuals and groups perform “better” than those that are not. Capturing the facets of well-being is, however, not straightforward: it contains personal information with sometimes uncomfortable self-realizations associated to it. Yet, the benefit of such data is the ability to observe and react to imbalances of a community, i.e. it can facilitate community management. Due to its personal nature, the observation of well-being needs to leverage carefully considered constructs. To have a comprehensive look at the concept of individual well-being, we propose a gamified frame of reference within a social network platform to lower traditional entrance barriers for data collection and encourage continued usage. In our setting, participants can record aspects of their well-being as a part of their “normal” social network activities, as well as view trends of themselves and their community. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach, we present the results of an initial study conducted via Facebook.
Scientific researchers faced with extremely large computations or the requirement of storing vast quantities of data have come to rely on distributed computational models like cloud computing. However, distributed computation is typically complex and expensive. The Social Cloud for Public eResearch aims to provide researchers with a platform to exploit social networks to reach out to users who would otherwise be unlikely to donate computational time for scientific and other research oriented projects. In this paper we explore the motivations of users to contribute computational time and examine the various ways these motivations can be catered to through established social networks. We specifically look at integrating Facebook and BOINC, and discuss the architecture of the functional system and the novel social engineering algorithms that power it.
Incentivising Resource Sharing in Social CloudsSimon Caton
Social Clouds provide the capability to share resources among participants within a social network - leveraging on the trust relationships already existing between such participants. In such a system, users are able to trade resources between each other, rather than make use of capability offered at a (centralized) data centre. Incentives for sharing remain an important hurdle to make more effective use of such an environment, which has a significant potential for improving resource utilization and making available additional capacity that remains dormant. We utilize the socio-economic model proposed by Silvio Gesell to demonstrate how a "virtual currency" could be used to incentivise sharing of resources within a "community". We subsequently demonstrate the benefit provided to participants within such a community using a variety of economic (such as overall credits gained) and technical (number of successfully completed transactions) metrics, through simulation.
Engineering Incentives in Social Clouds Simon Caton
Combining the strengths of the Cloud Computing and Social Network paradigms, the vision of Social Clouds aims to provide a resource sharing mechanism where participants dynamically share and trade resources on the premise of the relationships encoded in a social network. By building upon existing relationships in social networks and the inherent trust that accompanies these relationships, a Social Cloud is able to address one of the most cited obstacles in the adoption of current cloud solutions, the missing trust between Cloud service providers and users. However, as with other computing approaches relying on user participation, incentivisation of potential and existing participants is crucial for the success and sustainability of a Social Cloud. Therefore, an incentive engineering approach is needed and will be discussed in this paper considering all phases of user participation in a Social Cloud in order to provide proper incentives for active user participation and desired user behavior.
Social Cloud: Cloud Computing in Social NetworksSimon Caton
With the increasingly ubiquitous nature of Social networks and Cloud computing, users are starting to explore new ways to interact with, and exploit these developing paradigms. Social networks are used to reflect real world relationships that allow users to share information and form connections between one another, essentially creating dynamic Virtual Organizations. We propose leveraging the pre-established trust formed through friend relationships within a Social network to form a dynamic “Social Cloud”, enabling friends to share resources within the context of a Social network. We believe that combining trust relationships with suitable incentive mechanisms (through financial payments or bartering) could provide much more sustainable resource sharing mechanisms. This paper outlines our vision of, and experiences with, creating a Social Storage Cloud, looking specifically at possible market mechanisms that could be used to create a dynamic Cloud infrastructure in a Social network environment.
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing DaysKari Kakkonen
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
Climate impact / sustainability of software testing discussed on the talk. ICT and testing must carry their part of global responsibility to help with the climat warming. We can minimize the carbon footprint but we can also have a carbon handprint, a positive impact on the climate. Quality characteristics can be added with sustainability, and then measured continuously. Test environments can be used less, and in smaller scale and on demand. Test techniques can be used in optimizing or minimizing number of tests. Test automation can be used to speed up testing.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Alt. GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using ...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 5DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 5. In this session, we will cover CI/CD with devops.
Topics covered:
CI/CD with in UiPath
End-to-end overview of CI/CD pipeline with Azure devops
Speaker:
Lyndsey Byblow, Test Suite Sales Engineer @ UiPath, Inc.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Maruthi Prithivirajan, Head of ASEAN & IN Solution Architecture, Neo4j
Get an inside look at the latest Neo4j innovations that enable relationship-driven intelligence at scale. Learn more about the newest cloud integrations and product enhancements that make Neo4j an essential choice for developers building apps with interconnected data and generative AI.
Pushing the limits of ePRTC: 100ns holdover for 100 daysAdtran
At WSTS 2024, Alon Stern explored the topic of parametric holdover and explained how recent research findings can be implemented in real-world PNT networks to achieve 100 nanoseconds of accuracy for up to 100 days.
How to Get CNIC Information System with Paksim Ga.pptxdanishmna97
Pakdata Cf is a groundbreaking system designed to streamline and facilitate access to CNIC information. This innovative platform leverages advanced technology to provide users with efficient and secure access to their CNIC details.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
GridMate - End to end testing is a critical piece to ensure quality and avoid...ThomasParaiso2
End to end testing is a critical piece to ensure quality and avoid regressions. In this session, we share our journey building an E2E testing pipeline for GridMate components (LWC and Aura) using Cypress, JSForce, FakerJS…
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and Sales
Collaborative eResearch in a Social Cloud
1. The Social Cloud for
Collaborative Scientific Computation
Ashfag Thaufeeg, Kris Bubendorfer and Kyle Chard
eScience 2011
2. Background
Increasingly research requires access to computation and storage of
scientific data.
This is often beyond the resources that individual scientists or
individual organisations can provide.
Access to national fixed infrastructure is often limited to selected
larger projects and well established researchers.
Research conducted on commercial clouds is potentially expensive.
Large usability barriers for non expert users, i.e. command line etc.
Coordination within existing projects and establishing new
collaborations is difficult, tools and systems vary across members
and organisations.
22
eScience 2011
3. Researchers & Social Networks
Multi-institute collaboration is desirable, but
communication and coordination is hard in practice, and
face to face meetings tend to occur only sporadically, i.e., at
conferences and workshops.
Social networks can potentially provide a natural basis
for collaboration, they:
decrease the effort needed to initiate a new collaborative
effort, by using tools and infrastructure already familiar to
and understood by most people,
Can facilitate discovery of other scientists working on
similar projects, through relationships, feeds and
invitations.
33
eScience 2011
4. Social Networks
Are based around pre-existing relationships,
i.e. your friends and colleagues, friends of friends…
Have a pre-existent fabric of trust inherently
interwoven into the network
How many of your friends do you not trust?
Friends can be grouped based on interest and level of
trust.
Many applications now use social networks as a
platform for:
Authentication e.g. Facebook Connect
Application Portals e.g. ASPEN and PolarGrid
projects
Established application APIs
4
5. Researchers & Social Networks
But, the social network itself is not a complete
collaboration solution.
collaboratorsalso often have resources they wish to
share dynamically for the duration of a project, and
resources may include documents, media, data,
services, compute, storage, and so on.
Currently this is a difficult process that
Requires access to unfamiliar tools and systems
outside the social network,
manual (reciprocal) user account creation etc.
sharing involves access, rights, accounting and
auditing – that increases the overhead of project
management.
55
eScience 2011
6. The Social Cloud
The Social Cloud is a new way of thinking about providing cloud
like resources for eResearch.
A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing
relationships established between members of a social network.
Social networks (such as Facebook, Linkedin etc):
provide considerable infrastructure, including authorisation
and APIs for external apps.
contain many tools for managing relationships, forming groups
and defining security policies.
Include basic incentive mechanisms to moderate behaviour.
This is ‘free’ user infrastructure we can take advantage of.
66
eScience 2011
7. The Social Cloud
What is different about the social cloud?
The social network comes first:
It is not a cloud or collaboration environment extended with a social
network, it is a social network extended with cloud functionality.
The people and their networks form the basic infrastructure,
the resources they access and shared are formed around their
unique social graph.
In some ways this turns the provision of research infrastructure
on its head. Rather than fitting the researcher to the
infrastructure, we fit the infrastructure to the researcher.
Users fulfill all roles, from provision of resources, management
of collaborations through to use of services and computation -
all of which are performed with familiar Social Networking
tools.
The researchers choose how to delegate resources between the
77
eScience 2011
groups within which they collaborate.
8. Groups in a Social Cloud
We exploit the analogy between social networking
groups and dynamic virtual organizations.
Groups like virtual organizations have an intent,
membership and policies that define sharing (in
social networks this relates to photos, media, etc).
We extend the concept of sharing to include
resources such as, compute, storage and other
services.
This forms a Virtual Research Environment (VRE)
within the SoCC.
We explicitly bind a VRE/VO to a Facebook group
within the SoCC.
88
eScience 2011
9. Social Cloud and Groups
Co-workers
Family B
Friends
A
C
99
eScience 2011
10. Advantages
We believe that a cloud architecture integrated with a
social network can benefit the scientific community in the
following ways:
Lowers usability barriers, a minimal move away from a
non CS expert’s comfort zone.
It allows researchers to share resources for the duration
of collaboration.
Such collaborations are light-weight and dynamic,
resources can be delegated, removed and accessed using
the SN group structure.
Authorization and access control take place
transparently for the owner and users.
no visible certificate management,
single sign on and
seamless integration with SN functionality.
10
10
eScience 2011
11. Advantages
A Social Cloud could also be considered a:
resource fabric overlay over a Social Network, or,
generalized and extended form of crowd sourcing.
It is not intended to replace specialist HPC
infrastructure for big science.
The social cloud is intended to be smaller, more
general, adhoc and dynamic.
Created and destroyed on need, ideal for early
work, initial studies, smaller projects etc.
11
11
eScience 2011
12. The Social Cloud Project
Collaboration between researchers at:
Victoria, Cardiff, Chicago and KiT
There are a number of implementations exploring
different aspects of the Social Cloud domain:
The Social Storage cloud (the first implementation),
The Social Cloud for public eScience, and
The Social Cloud for Collaborative Scientific Computation.
In addition projects have been looking at:
Business models for the social cloud,
Incentives, economies, gamification to underpin sharing.
The Social Cloud project began in 2009.
12
12
eScience 2011
13. Social Storage Cloud
SaaS: Simple Storage Service
Implemented as a Facebook application.
first experiments with a socially oriented market.
Agreement
13
14. Posted Price
Enables interactions based upon active trading and or
collaborative decisions
Intuitively facilitates reciprocal resource exchange
Current “norm” in industry solutions
Social Cloud
MDS
User UR Capaci Price
ID L ty
User1 100MB 5
Storag
User2 500MB 10
e
Storag
Storag
User3 5GB 7 e
e
14
15. Dynamic Auctions
Auction:
Enables dynamic participant pairing
Sealed bid second price reverse auction
Could be extended to any other auction mechanism
15
16. SoCC Architecture
A IaaS platform constructed and accessed via a facebook
application.
Schedules VMs across a VRE (group/VO)
Built on top of Nimbus
Handles the VM lifecycle.
Facebook interface to:
Group/VRE management.
Create, join, leave a VRE
Delegate resources to a VRE
Monitor your VMs
Monitor your delegated resources.
Facebook interface, used for groups, tweets, feeds, and
other project personnel coordination.
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18. SoCC Architecture
Application Server (logical):
The application server hosts a web application built
using the Facebook public API that renders directly
inside the Facebook UI, thereby giving the
impression of seamless integration to users.
The application server is responsible for collecting
registered user data from Facebook through the
graph API and providing an interface to the SoCC.
Within the logical Application Server there is also an
Image Store, Scheduler and Context Broker.
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19. SoCC Architecture
Image store: contains the base set of OS images
for the VMs. These images are pre-packaged to
provide quick instantiation for users who do not
want to prepare their own images
Scheduler: schedules submitted VMs to one of
the available clusters** depending on resources
owed and available.
Context Broker: contextualizes the VMs,
including the setting up ssh keys and user
accounts so that members belonging to the same
VO (social network group) can connect to the VM.
OCCI
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21. VM startup times
1000
created->running
900
received->created
800
Total Time (seconds)
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
ylinux-op on-1 ubuntu-op on-1 ylinux-op on-2 ubuntu-op on-2
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22. Sharing
Different contexts require different models, we
are exploring a range of allocation tecniques in
the social cloud context:
Storage– credits
Compute – shares or slices
Volunteer – gamification, incentives (talk tomorrow)
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24. Summary
A new cloud paradigm, the social cloud.
The Social Cloud for Collaborative Computation
Uses existing Social Network infrastructure.
Scientists contribute to groups, both with resources
and postings (social media) forming VREs.
Open flexible, extensible. Global.
Access to resources based on implicit trust.
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Editor's Notes
Good to have the general public participate in science and research Boinc until recently had more compute available than the top supercomputer Tianchi-III. Only recently surpassed by the step change at he top of the SC table. The resources available through facebook are massive.
Tools that are designed for NON EXPERT users!!!
Social Networks model relationships – can also model collaborations. Authentication e.g. Facebook Connect, rather than Open ID Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) [6] exposes applications hosted by Cloud providers to user communities in Facebook. The focus of ASPEN is exposing applications and sharing data within an enterprise through an intuitive and integrated environment, however this could also be applied to a scientific domain does not proviion the infrastructure via FB. OpenSocial & OpenId, used by most social networking sites, and Facebook ’ s bespoke application framework
One role for a social cloud is in the early stages of research when the costs of dedicated research infrastructure would be prohibitive. It is light weight, The value of social networking has been observed in multi- ple scientific domains as a means of facilitating collaboration. Increasingly social networks are being used to coordinate re- search communities, two such examples are MyExperiment [3] for biologists and nanoHub [4] for the nanoscience community. MyExperiment provides a virtual research environment where collaborators can share and execute scientific work- flows. nanoHub allows users to share data and transparently execute applications on distributed resource providers such as TeraGrid. While similar to a Social Cloud, MyExperiment and nanoHub each have specific sharing focuses and build their own proprietary social network stack.
User-specific groups, defined by relationship types, are shown in the context of a Social network. In this example group A is composed of only co-worker members, whereas group B is formed by family members and group C includes only friends. Clearly the level of trust and mechanisms for social correction (identifying incentives and disincentives for users to participate) differ between groups. This figure also highlights that Social Clouds are not mutually exclusive, that is, users may be simultaneously members of multiple Social Clouds. Whereas a VO is often associated with a particular application or activity, and is often disbanded once this activity completes, a group is longer lasting and may be used in the context of multiple applications or activities.
Lower/remove barriers to usability. To a larger, non expert base of users. A minimal move away from comfort zone, make the facilities fit the users rtaher than the users fit the facilities. There are many hurdles struck by putting users pushed into/on raw infrastructure, certificates particularly problematic. Old unfamilar techniques such as command lines etc. intimidating for non expert users. But the point of the social cloud is uniform over resources due to being within Social Network.
The Social Storage cloud (SaaS the first implementation), The Social Cloud for public eScience, and The Social Cloud for Collaborative Scientific Computation (IaaS or PaaS).
FB renders the interface, provides the social connectivity data – computation is done outside FB on our own servers.
Take it or leave it fixed price Used MDS for resource discovery.
Attributes of a Second Price Sealed Bid auction Encourages truth telling Lowers communication overhead We weren ’ t really happy with the economic models underpinning resource trading between friends. But this was a first attempt at implementing a social cloud, and in this it was successful, we built an application in FB that enabled FB users to trade storage with their friends. We didn ’ t implement obvious facilities such as replication as that would have been a trivial extension had we gone beyond the protoctype.
Talk about why facebook. Maturity. Challenges, API lacks stability. Baby steps! Obviously the end goal would be SaaS – members can provide IaaS and SaaS freely within the VRE.
OCCI = Open Cloud Computing Interface, draft standard. Used for IOC and between user resources and application server.
** most of our recent work has been on the scheduler, now 2 layer meta scheduler that schedules from multiple virtual clusters. Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) adopted the OCCI draft specification in the SoCC for communication between user resources and the application server, as well as for communication between user resources.
Also an Android app.
With spot pricing, both for consumption and provision of Compute Shares. Credits here = shares. Experiment naturally resource limited – potentially an artifical situation. Each VO consumes credits. Members earn credits through providing resources that can then be used in turn for computation. Global price. After preparation, the AuverGrid trace had the following characteristics: • Number of users: 401 • Number of VOs: 8 (VO1: 158 users, VO2: 107 users, VO3: 16 users, VO4: 47 users, VO5: 46 users, VO6: 11 users, VO7: 10 users, VO8: 8 users) • Number of computes: 339314
Asym, researchers vs public. Not always clear what public gets out of it, hence incentives. Sym, peers, collaborations, participants on equal footing. Group/VRE ower can kick out misbehaving members.