Internal Infrastructure Research Articles

An AppGallery for dataflow computing

This paper describes the vision behind and the mission of the Maxeler Application Gallery (AppGallery.Maxeler.com) project. First, it concentrates on the essence and performance advantages of the Maxeler dataflow approach. Second, it reviews the support technologies that enable the dataflow approach to achieve its maximum. Third, selected examples of the Maxeler Application Gallery are presented; these examples are treated as the final achievement made possible when all the support technologies are put to work together (internal infrastructure of the AppGallery.Maxeler.com is given in a follow-up paper). As last, the possible impact of the Application Gallery is presented and the major conclusions are drawn.

The Threat of Cyberattack in East Asia

As businesses rely, in most countries, increasingly on the knowledge-based and value-added components of their offerings to secure suitable demand, the pressure on their internal infrastructure to maintain security has intensified. The range of potential adversaries continues to increase as commercial opportunities from cyber-attacks on their connectivity networks increases in both scope and scale. This paper considers the types of cyber-attacks that are being faced by organizations across East Asia and places these in the context of the political-economy of contemporary intellectual property rights. It is argued that multiplying risks threaten to overwhelm those organizations not prepared to take the issue seriously and to respond to those threats with appropriate rigor. Some implications for future practice are also derived from the analysis. Keywords: Cyber attack, threat, political economy

Autonomous indoor 3D navigation

A description of a new approach to the solution of the problem of autonomous indoor navigation is presented that is based on active use of models of virtual reality, 3D simulation, visualization of objects of the internal infrastructure of buildings, and the development of a client--server system of autonomous navigation inside these objects.

Requirements Identification for Migration of Higher Educational Resources to Cloud

Cloud represents an important change in the way information technology is used. Cloud makes it possible to access work anywhere anytime and to share it with anyone [1]. In order to gain the benefits of the cloud to be used in educational system in KSA, this paper investigates the Requirements Identification for Migration of Higher Educational Resources to Cloud with a view of consolidating a framework that defines a systematic implementation of educational cloud in the Higher Educational Systems for KSA. The proposed framework has four main stages. The first is higher educational organizations assessment, in this stage the organizations must determine their economic objectives, as they relate to, finances, customers and internal infrastructure. The second stage is creating the profile for higher education organization in KSA. Oorganization’s profiles must be created through a cross-analysis to resolve critical limitations that may delay migration to the cloud, the outcomes of the previous stage and the outcomes of the second stage will offer a complete profile of the organization. The third stage is choose the cloud provider and cloud migration implementation, the main aim of this stage is to choose the best cloud provider based on cost and the services offered. Finally, the last stage is post-implementation. It consists of two steps, which are create plan for moving from one provider to other and plan for stop cloud services. The benefit of the proposed framework is that the web based tool can be used by education entity at the initial stage, to assist these entities to evolve and move to the cloud computing technology with minimal risks.

Development of Urban Agglomerations of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Conditions of the Formation of the New Silk Road

The paper deals with current issues of the regional spatial organization based on the identification and analysis of key factors and prerequisites for the formation of urban agglomerations as the most important growth centers, integrated with global and regional markets in the conditions of a qualitatively new stage in the history of the Great Silk Road. We assess promising directions and negative effects of development of agglomerated formations and zones of their influence in the Republic of Kazakhstan as a region having an advantageous geostrategic position in the Eurasian space. In Kazakhstan, the current process of urbanization has a multiple- vector nature, and the course of formation of urban agglomerations provides convincing evidence of an increase in their share in settlement and in the total population. It is agglomerated forms of urban development that are a kind of indicator of the onset of maturity in settlement, specifying key points of the socio-economic space, namely: cores of regions, nodes of foreign economic relations and contacts, main areas of new territories development, the most important links in the internal infrastructure, etc. It is urban agglomerations that should act as a kind of special platform of integration processes, on the basis of which the Republic of Kazakhstan should revive its historical role in the development of the global project New Silk Road and become a major trade and logistics, finance and business, innovation and technology, and tourism hub of the Central Asia region, a bridge between Europe and Asia.

Collaborative Defence for Distributed Attacks (Case Study of Palestinian Information Systems)

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive approachfor protecting national Palestinian information systems. We do not restrict our attention to protecting each individual organization, but rather focus on the entire ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, thedeveloped system will be opened for participation for all Palestinian governmental and non -governmental organizations who are interested in improving their security and protection against current threats and security attacks targeting Palestinian information systems. The results will help in raising the aware ness about information security for participating organization. The new technological trends, the need to provide a compet itive services, and the overlap in the businesses in several fields have brought about a shift from the internal organization's infrastructure to engagement in a truly global ecosystem characterized by many cross domain interactions and heterogeneous systems and data. Therefore, the dependency of several governmental and non-governmental organizations on cyber-infrastructure of critical infrastructures encounters an increasing demands and undergoes a profound technological and usage changes. However, the sophistication of cyber attacks has increased over time and tools and techniques of attacks are easy and widely spread. This comes to fact that the technical knowledge required to exploit existing vulnerabilities is decreasing. For example, organizations t hat suffer from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, know that they have been attacked, but they cannot easily distinguish the group of IP addresses that commit this attack alone , which create a big challenge for organizations to defend themselves. The perpetrators of these attacks, whether motivated by the prospect of financial gain or because they see such an attacks as means of garnering publicity or otherwise pursuing a political cause, benefit from sharing technology and other information among themselves. Therefore, protecting these infrastructures in the face of faults and malicious attacks is crucial to ensure stability, availability, and continuity of the key electronic services and individual businesses worldwide.

Sexual selection targets cetacean pelvic bones.

Male genitalia evolve rapidly, probably as a result of sexual selection. Whether this pattern extends to the internal infrastructure that influences genital movements remains unknown. Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) offer a unique opportunity to test this hypothesis: since evolving from land-dwelling ancestors, they lost external hind limbs and evolved a highly reduced pelvis that seems to serve no other function except to anchor muscles that maneuver the penis. Here, we create a novel morphometric pipeline to analyze the size and shape evolution of pelvic bones from 130 individuals (29 species) in the context of inferred mating system. We present two main findings: (1) males from species with relatively intense sexual selection (inferred by relative testes size) tend to evolve larger penises and pelvic bones compared to their body length, and (2) pelvic bone shape has diverged more in species pairs that have diverged in inferred mating system. Neither pattern was observed in the anterior-most pair of vertebral ribs, which served as a negative control. This study provides evidence that sexual selection can affect internal anatomy that controls male genitalia. These important functions may explain why cetacean pelvic bones have not been lost through evolutionary time.

Regulations impacting corporate actions and best practices for implementation

Financial services firms continue to grapple with increasing levels of risk and growing regulatory challenges, forcing these firms to fundamentally rethink their data management, information sourcing and validation strategies. Firms are required to adopt more rigorous risk assessment and reporting capabilities, meaning they must also adopt more strategic data management and data quality programs. For example, The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) proposed the BCBS 239 ‘Principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting’, which encourages firms to address these processes from a more consistent and aggregated view of risk. Another is the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), which addresses the lack of a global standard for financial transaction identification at the entity/counterparty level. The benefits of complying with BCBS and broader leverage of the LEI are clear. And while some firms may be able to develop the internal infrastructure to address these regulations, other firms may choose to outsource the integration of new data management and workflow systems to a third party provider for the best result.

Fabrication and In Vivo Microanastomosis of Vascularized Tissue-Engineered Constructs

Tissue engineering endeavors to create replacement tissues and restore function that may be lost through infection, trauma, and cancer. However, wide clinical application of engineered scaffolds has yet to come to fruition due to inadequate vascularization. Here, we fabricate hydrogel constructs using Pluronic(®) F127 as a sacrificial microfiber, creating microchannels within biocompatible, biodegradable type I collagen matrices. Microchannels were seeded with human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) or HUVEC and human aortic smooth muscle cells (HASMC) in co-culture, generating constructs with an internal endothelialized microchannel. Histological analysis demonstrated HASMC/HUVEC-seeded constructs with a confluent lining after 7 days with preservation and further maturation of the lining after 14 days. Immunohistochemical staining demonstrated von Willebrand factor and CD31(+) endothelial cells along the luminal surface (neointima) and alpha-smooth muscle actin expressing smooth muscle cells in the subendothelial plane (neomedia). Additionally, the deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) components, heparan sulfate and basal lamina collagen IV were detected after 14 days of culture. HUVEC-only- and HASMC/HUVEC-seeded microchannel-containing constructs were microsurgically anastomosed to rat femoral artery and vein and perfused, in vivo. Both HUVEC only and HUVEC/HAMSC-seeded constructs withstood physiologic perfusion pressures while their channels maintained their internal infrastructure. In conclusion, we have synthesized and performed microvascular anastomosis of tissue-engineered hydrogel constructs. This represents a significant advancement toward the generation of vascularized tissues and brings us closer to the fabrication of more complex tissues and solid organs for clinical application.

Advantage of Collaboration Workflows in the Automotive Supply Chain: Case Study on the Automotive Cluster of Slovenia

Strengthening of collaboration among individual business partners has proved essential for the structuring of Slovenian economy and enhancing competitive advantage on the global market. At the same time, ontology, as an important concept of business collaboration among individual business partners, has been proposed for the collaboration of information systems in the supply chain. The present paper presents a case study of internet-based collaboration workflows in the automotive supply chain. Furthermore, the paper reveals a prototype solution, describing a concept of integration between the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and open source business process management software. The partners in the Automotive Cluster of Slovenia (ACS), striving to make use of internet services in their operations, are consequently allowed to integrate into the supply chain. The result ensures that the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) does not depend on internal IT infrastructure although their IT collaboration is supported by open source collaborative workflows.

A Distributed Real-Time Java-Centric Architecture for Industrial Systems

There is a trend in industrial systems towards the use of common-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to develop applications that interact with open systems. This trend includes among others the use of high-level languages, such as Java, and Internet protocols (HTTP and Web Services). Although many industrial systems use these technologies at their business layers, they are far from offering a homogeneous programming platform in their most internal infrastructures. This paper extends the current practice by introducing a real-time Java-centric architecture for industrial systems. The architecture integrates existing and upcoming technology to define a Java-based approach. The empirical evidence, included in the paper, illustrates the performance of the core of the industrial layer of this architecture.

Erwerbsverläufe in Deutschland: Zur Bedeutung betrieblicher Charakteristika und regionaler Disparitäten

Life course research accentuates that employment trajectories are governed by individual determinants and endogenous causalities; thus, the start to the employment career enduringly affects workers’ future mobility patterns. However, their actions are always embedded within a particular framework: Their employment trajectories are influenced by firm-specific opportunity structures, regional heterogeneities, and the business cycle. This article focuses on the structural factors framing worker’s mobility processes. Structural and cyclical determinants were assessed by combining a German linked employer-employee dataset with data on regional economic characteristics from the statistical “spatial planning regions”. The hierarchically clustered data were explored with multilevel analysis models. These identified the key factors influencing employment stability; the determinants of upward, lateral, and downward interfirm mobility; and transitions leading to unemployment. Our results show that employees can minimize the endogenous causality by taking advantage of particular framework conditions: A firm’s investments in further training and internal infrastructure impact positively on employment trajectories, and work councils increase employment stability, especially during periods of economic growth. In contrast, employment trajectories are destabilized by disadvantageous firm demographics and intensive use of fixed-term employment. During an economic downswing, employment opportunities are better in densely populated areas, whereas unemployment risks dominate in rural areas. In the period of economic growth, all employees within a region benefit from a higher local level of human capital regardless of qualification level, whereas during an economic downturn, skill segregation prevails and only the highly qualified benefit.

Cloud Computing and Gov 2.0

This article seeks to dissect the evolution of digital governance within the Canadian public sector at an expansionary time for cloud computing and wider reforms often referred to as Gov 2.0. Beyond infrastructure, the notion of the cloud may also be viewed as a proxy for a wider societal transformation that, in turn, impacts government both administratively and politically. This wider transformational nonetheless faces tensions between traditional proprietary concepts and mindsets and newer emerging models of open source and shared openness. The future of the Canadian public sector requires a careful navigation and blending of these two worldviews. While some observers may prefer to decouple cloud computing from new governance capacities associated with Gov 2.0 (viewing the cloud instead strictly through a prism of internal architecture and infrastructure), the evidence presented in this article suggests that both directions are intimately related in shaping the public sector going forward.

The future of restaurant revenue management

Although hotels and restaurants have expressed strong interest in implementing restaurant revenue management (RRM), data, change management and system integration issues have often stymied their efforts. The intent of this article is to present a framework for understanding the various aspects of RRM in a full-service restaurant and to identify fertile areas for future research. We present RRM as a building consisting of five pillars. The foundation consists of the company’s internal infrastructure of data, decision support tools, systems and internal culture, while the five pillars consist of the traditional four Ps of marketing (product, promotion, price and placement) along with a fifth P, people.

Increasing Dental Student Diversity Through the UNLV Dental Prospects Program

Adequately providing for the health care of the growing minority population in the United States requires increased racial and ethnic diversity of the health care workforce. Long-term diversity in the dental profession depends on a more diverse student population in dental schools. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Dental Medicine's (UNLV SDM) Dental Prospects Club is a predental education program that has increased the number of underrepresented minority and disadvantaged students in the school by concentrating on outreach, recruitment, and retention initiatives. The approaches used by the club members and faculty advisors to increase the number of underrepresented minority students recruited to and enrolled in the UNLV SDM are discussed in this report. Also described are the strategies, methods, internal infrastructure, and organizational support used to increase the number of underrepresented minority students at the school.

Efficient autonomic cloud computing using online discrete event simulation

Interest is growing in open source tools that let organizations build IaaS clouds using their own internal infrastructures, alone or in conjunction with external ones. A key component in such private/hybrid clouds is virtual infrastructure management, i.e., the dynamic orchestration of virtual machines, based on the understanding and prediction of performance at scale, with uncertain workloads and frequent node failures. Part of the research community is trying to solve this and other IaaS problems looking to Autonomic Computing techniques, that can provide, for example, better management of energy consumption, quality of service (QoS), and unpredictable system behaviors. In this context, we first recall the main features of the NAM framework devoted to the design of distributed autonomic systems. Then we illustrate the organization and policies of a NAM-based Workload Manager, focusing on one of its components, the Capacity Planner. We show that, when it is not possible to obtain optimal energy-aware plans analytically, sub-optimal plans can be autonomically obtained using online discrete event simulation. Specifically, the proposed approach allows to cope with a broader range of working conditions and types of workloads.

Education in Emergency: A Climate Change Adaptation Agendum Towards the Socio-Economic Propagation of Bangladesh

Both the scientific and negotiating community has recognized Bangladesh as one of the most vulnerable countries to Climate Change effect which in future is likely to face more frequent climatic adversities. This paper emphasizes on putting the theme of ‘Education in Emergency’ in all climate change adaptation efforts in the country which can enable it to safeguard country’s important education sector during any disaster or in the recovery phase. Education has received inconsiderable amount of importance in those efforts and ultimately encompassed all the spheres of social, emotional, cognitive and physical ground which decelerate multifarious predicaments and adversities. In preparing this paper the authors highly rely on secondary sources of data. In the era of globalization, a vast number of populations remain untouched or being detracted from the light of education. It is particularly fact for country like Bangladesh where natural calamity is an incessant event due to the intrusion of globalization. Bilateral, multilateral, regional and global affiliation and association can be undertaken to the depletion of hindrances. Besides, substantial and congruous strategies, plans, policies and programs within the internal infrastructure may assist to mitigate this endanger and also comply with the commitment of education for all even in the cataclysm. For accomplishing responsiveness and flourishing prowess, an integrating approach to the management of Education in Emergency (EiE) requires coordination and collaboration among government departments or ministries and agencies, designing and upgrading courses (including issues like Need for Sustainable Development and Actions for Environment Protection, Environmental Management Tools & Environmental Assessment, Environment Pollution Management, Progress in Environmental Science, International Environment Laws etc.), as well as superior and immaculate information technology to resolve this consternation and vulnerability. Propitious and admissible approaches can ensure eco-balance and sustainable socio-economic development in a vulnerable country like Bangladesh with a proper accentuation on education in emergency. This paper will be highly helpful for policy makers both in private and public sectors to ensure sound education opportunity in the highly disaster prone i.e., coastal areas. However, this piece of effort might also cut attention of the human rights workers.

Shaky roads and trembling exports: Assessing the trade effects of domestic infrastructure using a natural experiment

Our knowledge of the trade effects of domestic infrastructure is very limited. The reason is twofold. First, data needed to examine these effects are not readily available. Second, identifying such effects requires properly addressing potential endogeneity problems affecting the relationship between internal infrastructure and trade. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by combining firm-level export data with detailed geo-referenced information on Chile and by exploiting the earthquake that took place in this country in 2010 as an exogenous source of variation in available infrastructure and thereby in transport costs. We find that diminished transportation infrastructure had a significant negative impact on firms' exports.

Transforming the information technology infrastructure of IBM

The structure, strategy, and business operation of IBM have experienced a significant transformation over the last several years. This transformation has been accompanied by an equally important transformation of the internal services and technologies that support the company. Key among such activities has been the renovation of company information technology (IT) and the infrastructure it is built on. This paper describes the transformation of the internal IT infrastructure of IBM and some of the key initiatives that contributed to a smarter, optimized capability. We describe the activities, best practices, and lessons learned in server virtualization work, cloud computing incubation and evolution, workload location and data-center consolidation, and the transformation of the internal communications network of IBM. Realizing that transformation is an on-going process, we conclude the paper with an exploration of our plans to use analytics to enable the expansion and delivery of a real-time collaboration experience, another key IT service area.

The polarization of commercial and journalistic values in the newspaper industry: An exploratory study in Greece

The intense commercialization that underpins contemporary society has dynamically permeated into the global newspaper industry and converted journalism into a marketable commodity. Nevertheless, the demands of the marketplace, which have their origin in news commodification, may clash with traditional journalistic principles. With the aid of the face-to-face interview method and a sample of 30 press people employed by Greek newspaper companies, the present study aspires to explore the possible conflict between commercial and journalistic values, investigate its sources, and identify management problems that stem from this polarization. The results confirmed an unavoidable conflict, which ends up being an indispensable compromise between a newspaper’s informative role and the vital need to secure financial resources. Self-censorship imposed on journalists by profit-hunting media moguls creates tensions in the internal infrastructure of press firms and deprives newspaper content of veracity and objectivity.