Service Creators Research Articles

Embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in usability testing: Recommendations and a research agenda

Technologies support our everyday lives, and to ensure that people are not routinely excluded they must be usable by the wider population. However, technologies are not commonly tested with participants from a range of backgrounds. This paper reports on interviews and roundtable discussions with people whose identities can be underrepresented in usability testing and usability researchers to discuss how equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) can be embedded in usability testing.Key findings include (1) when people participate in research they need a sense of value, trust and agency, and (2) challenges for researchers for embedding EDI in usability testing include organisational pressures, stakeholder culture, getting guidance and recruiting who you need. Recommendations are made to researchers, and to the organisations that employ them. Additionally, we propose a research agenda for a community of users, creators of services and products, usability researchers, and all those advocating for EDI in usability research.

Managing the Cloud: Establishing Standards for Describing Core Tasks of Cloud Creators, Providers, and Consumers

loud computing is an Internet-based computing technology that can be used to share resources like software, infrastructures, storage and information are delivered to consumers on their request. It also called a computing platform to share resources that comprise platform, software, applications, and business processes. So as to configuration, manufacture, and give cloud based arrangements that best address clients' issues, it is fundamental to comprehend the abilities, objectives, essential assignments, and responsibilities of the individuals or associations required all through the cloud service lifecycle. The three center jobs of Cloud Service Creator, Cloud Service Provider, and Cloud Service Consumer make the base for reflecting the nearby connection among developers, providers, and consumers so as to accomplish the ideal service flow.

A Survey on OpenFlow Technologies

SUMMARY The paper presents a survey on OpenFlow related technologies that have been proposed as a means for researchers, network service creators, and others to easily design, test, and deploy their innovative ideas in experimental or production networks to accelerate research activities on network technologies. Rather than having programmability within each network node, separated OpenFlow controllers provide network control through pluggable software modules; thus, it is easy to develop new network control functions in executable form and test them in production networks. The emergence of OpenFlow has started various research activities. The paper surveys these activities and their results.

Semi-Automated Mobile TV Service Generation

Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services becoming one of the future trends. However, current MDTV interactive service generation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers and the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, this paper proposes an innovative MDTV service generation solution, which introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. By employing open-standard technologies including XHTML and Java ME for the service presentation the proposed work benefits are twofold. Firstly it helps in reducing the technical demands of MDTV service production for service creators. Secondly it improves the inter-compatibility of the created service application amongst different MDTV standards. Initial test results indicate that the proposed solution allows for a faster and more effective MDTV interactive service generation.

High capacity and secured methodologies for steganography

In current digital era, people are using e-devices such as ipods, iphones and cell phones for capturing the static and dynamic images. However, these images have a compromised size and quality due to fixed memory dimension. But, in the multi-media messaging service (MMS) of cell phones and iphones, they may participate as a cover medium, strengthening the steganography communication. The different methods of steganography are mostly applied on image files to embed the data. In all these cases, the principle of replacing the entire or some parts of the chosen pixel may not be able to utilise all the available memory area of an image for the purpose of the secret data. This paper presents a new high capacity steganographic technique to hide information. Three different techniques out of which two are to embed the plain text and one is for all type of data to embed in image. Based on these methods, we have constructed secured MMS creator and short message service creator viewer in Microsoft platform for providing data embedding in new e-devices.

Employing collective intelligence for user driven service creation

With advances in computing technologies and active user participation through smart devices such as the iPhone and Android, user needs are becoming varied and complex. It is quite natural, then, that a single Web service may not be sufficient to fully satisfy the diverse goals of users in their daily lives. A set of cohesively connected Web services/mashups may be able to deal with these goals. An increasing number of open APIs can facilitate various types of service compositions with users as the service creators. Recently, Internet, telecommunications, and third-party providers have opened their services to the public in the form of open APIs, a trend following the Web 2.0 paradigm. However, most service creation environments do not have sufficient knowledge (particularly, available services and their functionality) to support service creation by users. The problem of knowledge scarcity is that users may have difficulty in finding relevant open APIs for a given situation, finally resulting in rather straightforward types of service. In this article we present two kinds of collective intelligence for user-driven service creation: the user's own experiences in service composition, and activity knowledge from the web. These collective intelligence types will aid in creating enduser service compositions by enforcing knowledge support in terms of user experiences and activity-aware functional semantics, and will finally accelerate the development of various kinds of converged applications. Using the beneficial roles of collective intelligence as key enablers of future service creation environments, this article also shows a new potential for user-driven composite services within the next few years.

Architecture, Implementation, and Experiments of Programmable Network Using OpenFlow

We propose a flexible and scalable architecture for a network controller platform used for OpenFlow. The OpenFlow technology was proposed as a means for researchers, network service creators, and others to easily design, test, and virtually deploy their innovative ideas in a large network infrastructure, which will accelerate research activities on Future Internet architectures. The technology enables the independent evolution of the network control plane and the data plane. Rather than having programmability within each network node, the separated OpenFlow controller provides network control through pluggable software. Our proposed network controller architecture will enable researchers to use their own software to control their own virtual networks. Flexibility and scalability were achieved by designing the network controller as a modularized and distributed system on a cluster of servers. Testing showed that a group of servers can efficiently cooperate to serve as a scalable OpenFlow controller. Testing using the nationwide JGN2plus network demonstrated that high-definition video can be delivered through OpenFlow-based point-to-point and point-to-multipoint paths.

Application-transparent adaptation in wireless systems beyond 3G

The forthcoming wireless systems beyond 3G are heralded to trigger dramatic changes in the way that mobile services are being developed and deployed. A key additional requirement is the delivery of applications in disparate contexts, characterised by different terminal capabilities, network characteristics and user status/preferences. The increasing diversity of such environmental parameters in modern wireless systems makes the task of providing pre-compiled application versions for every situation unacceptably complex for service creators. The current paper provides a solution to this issue, by introducing a deployment-time adaptation function, which is able to automatically generate a single downloadable application package that is tailored to the context of the corresponding user request. The proposed mechanism is completely transparent to the application and can be extended to support various service models originating from different software development vendors and communities.

Integrated web and telephone service creation

We describe a system for creating, maintaining, and analyzing interactive services that require access from multiple devices. The system augments the infrastructure of the World Wide Web with Mawl, an application-oriented language for specifying form-based services in a device-independent manner, and TelePortal, a software/hardware platform that enables telephone access to Web content via standard interactive voice response (IVR) platforms. Service creators link service logic and presentation with templates written in an extension of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is extended with marks for dynamic content (Meta-HTML) and with marks specific to a user interface or access device. Documents to be interpreted by TelePortal are written in the Phone Markup Language (PML). Together, Mawl and TelePortal provide a new way to create integrated services, as well as IVR services. The ability to develop such services in a single environment appears to be unique.