research

There are 30 posts tagged research (this is page 1 of 3).

Main Figures

Here I would like to share some relevant information to highlight actions that have had special relevance in my career:

Research projects and agreements

Research activities

Academia

MapReduce Design patterns

Last and this week I have been preparing an introduction about the Map/Reduce algorithm I have found a lot of new excellent references (see my previous post) and I have read some books that I did not know. As a result I have made a compilation (it is just a summary that I will continue updating) that can serve as roadmap about what MapReduce is and what you can do with this programming model. As soon as I review my presentation and the examples I will upload them,

CFP Special issue on New trends on E-Procurement applying Semantic Technologies

Regarding the special issue in which I am a guest editor, please find the details in the next link.

Overview

E-Procurement refers to the use of electronic communications and transaction processing by government institutions and other public sector organizations when buying supplies and services or tendering public works. However, there is much more at stake than the mere changeover from paper based systems to ones using electronic communications for public procurement procedures. It should have the potential to yield important improvements in the efficiency of individual purchases, the overall administration of public procurement and the functioning of the markets for government contracts. The technology in this area may make it possible to automate the processes involved in the E-Procurement context besides features for supplier management and complex auctions should be included in by means of applying new technologies and methods in order to fulfill the requirements of this new realm of electronic businesses.

The new generation of E-Procurement is now on-demand or a software-as-a-service. There are seven main types of E-Procurement: 1) Web-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)  creating and approving purchasing requisitions, placing purchase orders and receiving goods and services by using a software system based on Internet technology; 2)e-MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul), the same as web-based ERP except that the goods and services ordered are non-product related MRO supplies; 3) e-sourcing, identifying new suppliers for a specific category of purchasing requirements using Internet technology; 4)e-tendering, sending requests for information and prices to suppliers and receiving the responses of suppliers using Internet technology; 5) e-reverse auctioning, using Internet technology to buy goods and services from a number of known or unknown suppliers; 6)e-informing, gathering and distributing purchasing information both from and to internal and external parties using Internet technology; 7) e-market sites, expands on Web-based ERP to open up value chains. Buying communities can access preferred suppliers’ products and services, add to shopping carts, create requisition, seek approval, receipt purchase orders and process electronic invoices with integration to suppliers’ supply chains and buyers’ financial systems.

The features and requirements of an E-Procurement system match the advantages and features of software component and knowledge-based architectures. In this sense, Information technology support for the next generation of E-Procurement systems is critical since this information technology needs to be: (1) Reusable, and (2) Rapidly changeable. Furthermore, it can be seen that the underlying software architecture of a supply chain solution also needs to be: (1) Agile, (2) Flexible, (3) Deployable over a multi-enterprise scope, (4) Multi-function support when used as a suite, (5) Handle complexity, (6) Enable collaboration, (7) Enable coordination and (8) Greener to provide new green supply chain environments. Under this context, Semantic Technologies have emerged as an option to develop digital assistants and agents with the ability to search products and services on the Web that correspond best to the specific needs of a certain user. Semantic Web enables machines to interpret data published in a machine-interpretable form on the Web. The emerging Semantic Technologies have the potential to deeply influence the further development of the Internet Economy and support the different stages of e-Procurement processes such as eNotification, eAccess, eSubmission, eEvaluation/eAwarding, eOrdering, eInvoicing and ePayment.

In the Semantic context, Linked Data is one of the main technological cornerstones of Semantic Technologies for the improvement of E-Procurement. Linked Data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. Currently research works are arising from a semantic perspective in order to solve and improve the interoperability, privacy, trust,  quality, provenance, integration, transparency, lifecycle, etc. issues of this context. That is due the emerging Semantic technologies are open new development and business models in E-Procurement reusing the available information to deploy new innovative services of matchmaking, recommendation or tracking activities and trying to automate the processes involved in the E-Procurement sector. In that sense, existing solutions are taking advantage of these semantic approaches to deliver innovative and cost-effective information services. They are designed to add value to public sector information generated within the framework of public contracts published in EU Member States as well as the information generated by EU Institutions own activity.

The aim of this special issue is to collect innovative and high-quality research and industrial contributions regarding E-Procurement processes that can fulfill the needs of this new realm. This special issue aims at exploring the recent advances in the application of Semantic Technologies in the E-Procurement sector soliciting original scientific contributions in the form of theoretical, experimental and real research and case studies.

Submission Guidelines

Papers submitted must have not been published previously or under consideration for publication, though they may represent significant extensions of prior work. All submissions will be peer-reviewed following a double-blind review process. The objective is to apply very high standards of acceptance while ensuring fair, timely and efficient review cycles. The acceptance process will focus on those papers that address innovative contributions for adopting and implementing new techniques on E-Procurement applying semantic Web-based technologies.

Important dates and Timeline

  • 1st of May 2013,  full papers due (depending on the EES)
  • 15th of May 2013,  Chief editors desk review results
  • 1st of July, 2013, ending the first round of reviews
  • 15th of September 2013, revised papers due
  • 1st of November 2013, ending the second round of reviews
  • 1st of December 2013, final papers due

Week #8 in Thessaloniki

Just a few comments for this week (to be completed)….

Reading (pi = persona interest)

Writing, reviewing and researching

Meetings

  • I have had a meeting with my SEERC colleagues to present my prototype and plan next actions in QoS, etc.
  • I have attended a call with the Oviedo Council (planned)

Coding and Tools

  • I have re-implemented my real time word counter of Twitter status using RabbitMQ, Node.js, Storm and Redis (see Demo wiki page).
  • I am going to test the MOA framework (based on Weka) for mining data streams. In this sense I have also found an implementation of MOA in Storm.

Other things

I have Internet connection at home!

Week #6 in Thessaloniki

Just a few comments for this week….

Reading

Writing and reviewing

  • I have written a paper entitled “Semantic-based QoS management in Cloud Systems: Current Status and Future Challenges “. It is a survey of 25 pages in which I review most of the approaches for QoS in Cloud Computing as well as the main techniques for stream reasoning in the Semantic Web area. It must be the kick-off of the architecture for semantic-based QoS management in Cloud Systems. and I also have the acronym “SEQoS” (remember it because you will hear about it!)
  • I have also managed tasks regarding the special issue in COMIND.

Coding and Tools

I have not made any relevant progress in developing tasks.

Week #4 in Thessaloniki

This week I have made some interesting tasks. Following the same structure of last weeks I leave some links to the activities I am carrying out:

Reading

Writing and reviewing

  • I have continued with the structure and firts contents of two papers and one special issue proposal.
  • I have submitted a contribution to the European Data Forum 2013.
  • I have prepared a presentation (I have to make some changes…)

Coding and Tools

I have not made any relevant progress in developing tasks but I have being refreshing my know-how on Python.

 

Freews

Our try to get funding and create a new start-up will have this week a new opportunity in the contest organized by CEEI Asturias. There are several participants with excellent ideas that are very good rivals. This is our flyer in which the approach is explained (it is only available in Spanish). We hope to have good news on Wednesday! Anyway we will continue working on this project to change the journalism realm!

My Business Model

Last months I was discussing with my syster and her husband about business models for enterprises, we are very interesting in knowing how some companies get success stories and outcomes just re-inventing their actitivities. The result was the reading of some books about the generation of business models I know some of them that I would like to leave here the “reference” book:

Apart from the “business” view of this book other efforts have emerged applying this approach to other contexts, for instance to check your career and value as individual. The BusinessModelYou community has created a specific book entitled as “Business Model You: A One-Page Method For Reinventing Your Career” by Timothy Clark, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. This book is not just for re-inventing your career but to asses your value! There are also a lot of tools to create your own canvas (the key-piece to create your business model.
I firmly believe  this technique is the key to identify your talent, value and potential that is why I strongly encourage you to download a template and create “Your Own Business Model”. I leave here my own business model.
If you have any doubt please do not hesitate to ask me!
We are human-being, the value is our talent not hours!

Cloud Computing and Semantics

Last weeks I have reviewed some of the existing works trying to mix semantics and cloud computing to improve some of the key-processes in a cloud environment. QoS and resource provisioning are two of the main processes that are supposed to take advantage of an intelligent decision support systems to dynamically  adapt client requirements to cloud resources. According to the different types of cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) the use of formal models and knowledge bases can help to take decisions in different ways: prediction of resources, adjustment of “pay-as-go”, etc. Among other works I would like to leave here a list of relevant papers, etc. that I consider essential to understand the underlying problems, technology, current efforts and approaches to tackle them.

I will continue updating this post and the references but I think it is a good starting point to check all related works in this area. Moreover I had collected some papers related to Map/Reduce, SPARQL and more in the ROCAS project wiki.

Best,

From Java to Scala…

This week I have started a course about Scala teached by Martin Odersky (the creator of this programming language). The course is basically focused on Functional programming with Scala and it reminds me my first steps in this paradigm when I was student of Labra‘s course “Functional and Logic Programming” in which I learnt some portions of Prolog and Haskell.

After some years using Java and encouraged by Labra I enrolled in this new language (I had performed my first steps in Scala some time ago but without specific objectives). The learning methodology is very easy: you have to follow and watch some video lectures and after that you have some assingments to be completed in the a fixed schedule, if you complete all assignments you can obtain a certificate!

The purpose of this post is to show (my own experience) how the same function can be coded in Java or Scala (this is the typical example of moving from an imperative paradigm to a functional one). Imagine that you have to calculate the sum of an integer list (1, 3, 5)

  • In Java, you will use something like…
int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i<l.size();i++){
 sum = sum + l.get(i);
}
return sum;
  • In Scala, using a Java style…
  def sum(xs: List[Int]): Int = {
	var sum = 0
	for (x <- xs)
		sum = sum + x
	return sum
 }
  • In Scala, using recursion and Java style…
def sum(xs: List[Int]): Int {
    if (xs.isEmpty) return 0
    else return xs.head + sum(xs.tail)
}
  • In Scala, using a more functional approach…
def sum(xs: List[Int]): Int = xs match{
    case _ if xs.isEmpty => 0
    case _ => xs.head + sum (xs.tail)
}
  • In Scala, pure functional approach
def sum(xs: List[Int]): Int = xs.foldLeft(0)(_+_)
This is only to demonstrate how a good use of tools and programming techniques can ease the coding!

Interview about the Webindex

Last Tuesday I was interviewed by RPA about the participation of the WESO Research Group in this project. It was my first apparition in the radio and I believe the result was pretty good. You can listen the audio here. Moreover our head Labra was interviewed in other media such as newspaper and other radios and these contents can be accesed via the official communication portal at the University of Oviedo.

On the other hand and following with the Webindex it is my intention to provide data and methods to calculate values using R. I think this is a real way to open and encourage the reutilization of data, at least in statistics.

Finally, I am also involved in my distributed reasoner and preparing some proposals to mix computational linguistics, computational social choice theory, etc. I will update the blog with my outcomes. I also started this week to teach “Software Design” with my colleagues Benjamín López, César Acebal and Raúl Izquierdo, I am very excited with this topic because I love design patterns, software architectures, etc. I hope to do my best!

Keep in touch!

Emerald Reading List

During June and July, I have participated in the creation of a “Reading List” for the Emerald Publishing Group in collaboration with Prof. Patricia Ordoñez de Pablos. The objective of this task is to create a list of relevant publications for a target journal or topic, in this case the main topic was “Knowledge management and organizational learning in the workplace” and it was an interesting research activity because I could extend my background in these areas reading some papers.

I have to say I consider the creation of a reading list as something very relevant in order to help authors to focus on a journal’s topic or to ease the access to the most adequated references. Besides the methodology followed by Emerald is very professional and they are aware of any change in your selected papers and can help you in any step of the process. Finally, could this practice considered as “crowd-reading-list-assistance”? Yes, it could! “Crowds and Power” is changing the way you perform your work!

With regards to the list, it is available at this link, if you any comment or doubt, please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime,

Enjoy reading!