Papers by Dimitrios Kourtesis
IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence - Companion Volume
The goal of the research presented here is to support the development of a software platform allo... more The goal of the research presented here is to support the development of a software platform allowing businesses to improve the way they communicate with consumers throughout the lifecycle of the customer relationship. The motivation is to make communication with consumers more personalized and relevant to each customer’s interests, more direct and interactive, while also ensuring data privacy compliance by design. Personalization is made possible by developing predictive models based on a combination of data from past purchase transactions and past exchanges of messages between the business and the customer. This paper provides an overview of the capabilities of the system and the platform architecture that makes use of predictive analytics, data mining, and machine learning technologies.
Water scarcity and water stress issues pose a serious threat to the global population. Climate ch... more Water scarcity and water stress issues pose a serious threat to the global population. Climate change, drought, population growth and consolidation in urban centres have all been increasing the pressure on water service providers to deploy more sustainable approaches in urban water management. Real-time monitoring and control of water consumption are key ingredients for a smart water management system which will raise consumers' environmental awareness and reduce costs. This paper introduces a smart infrastructure system which enables remote telemetry and control of water consumption via a web application. The bidirectional and reliable communication between terminal devices (smart meters and valves) and the end-user (consumers and water utility operators) is realized through a fixed hybrid network which uses multiple telecommunication protocols. The metering data is collected and further processed through modern data analytics tools to give a deeper insight on water consumption...
Cloud application development platforms facilitate new models of software co-development and forg... more Cloud application development platforms facilitate new models of software co-development and forge environments best characterised as cloud service ecosystems. The value of those ecosystems increases exponentially with the addition of more users and third-party services. Growth however breeds complexity and puts reliability at risk, requiring all stakeholders to exercise control over changes in the ecosystem that may affect them. This is a challenge of governance. From the viewpoint of the ecosystem coordinator, governance is about preventing negative ripple effects from new software added to the platform. From the viewpoint of third-party developers and end-users, governance is about ensuring that the cloud services they consume or deliver comply with requirements on a continuous basis. To facilitate different forms of governance in a cloud service ecosystem we need governance support systems that achieve separation of concerns between the roles of policy provider, governed resourc...
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2020
Most of today's digital marketing campaigns which are sent through email and mobile messaging are... more Most of today's digital marketing campaigns which are sent through email and mobile messaging are bulk campaigns which deliver the same message at the same time to all customers, regardless of their needs and preferences. The outcomes are bad customer experience, low engagement and low conversion rates. Modern marketing automation tools aim to facilitate personalized communications, such as scheduling of individual marketing messages based on each individual subscriber's profile. This research focuses on the problem of automatically deciding on the optimal date and time for sending consent-based personalized marketing messages. We specifically focus on the case of repeat consumers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) which require regular replacement or replenishment. The objective is to timely anticipate the needs of consumers in order to increase their level of engagement as well as the rate at which they repurchase products. The proposed solution is based on a regression model trained with transactional data and instant messaging metadata. We describe the way such a model can be created and deployed to a scalable high-performance environment and provide pilot evaluation results that suggest a significant improvement in marketing effectiveness.
International Journal of Modeling and Optimization, 2020
The goal of the research presented here is to describe an innovative approach to predicting the i... more The goal of the research presented here is to describe an innovative approach to predicting the impact of a business messaging campaign, by estimating the percentage of message recipients who will engage with a message. The motivation is to facilitate business marketers to address the problem of estimating the return on investment coming from a potential messaging campaign. The presented solution relies on the processing of large scale business data, taking into account state-of-the-art predictive algorithms, GDPR compliance requirements, and the challenge of increased data security and availability. In this paper we discuss the design of the core functional components of a system that could make this possible, which encompasses predictive analytics, data mining and machine learning technologies in a cloud computing environment.
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 2008
The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ... more The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective that considers people and technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a knowledge management system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies, in order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on CrossCloud Systems, 2014
Market analysts have foreseen the emergence of cloud brokers in the mediation of cloud services. ... more Market analysts have foreseen the emergence of cloud brokers in the mediation of cloud services. But rather than focus on current kinds of intermediary role, it is more constructive to consider the kinds of brokerage capability that could be offered in the future, which go far beyond the integration, aggregation and customization services available today. This paper identifies advanced capabilities for cloud service governance, quality assurance and optimization that will be critical in catalyzing the emergence of cloud service ecosystems, environments in which all parties will find their symbiotic niches. It shows the path whereby a platform provider could evolve to become the hub of a cloud service ecosystem, through gradually taking on more of these advanced brokerage capabilities. The paper provides an overview of work conducted by the EU FP7 Broker@Cloud project towards realizing these advanced brokerage capabilities.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA ven... more UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machineunderstandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010
Service-based applications (SBAs) will increasingly be composed of third-party services available... more Service-based applications (SBAs) will increasingly be composed of third-party services available over the Internet. Reacting to failures of those third-party services by dynamically adapting the SBAs will become a key enabler for ensuring reliability. Determining when to adapt an SBA is especially challenging in the presence of conversational (aka. stateful) services. A conversational service might fail in the middle of an invocation sequence, in which case adapting the SBA might be costly; e.g., due to the necessary state transfer to an alternative service. In this paper we propose just-in-time testing of conversational services as a novel approach to detect potential problems and to proactively trigger adaptations, thereby preventing costly compensation activities. The approach is based on a framework for online testing and a formal test-generation method which guarantees functional correctness for conversational services. The applicability of the approach is discussed with respect to its underlying assumptions and its performance. The benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a realistic example.
Proceedings of the 2013 international workshop on Hot topics in cloud services, 2013
Establishing the Foundation of Collaborative Networks, 2007
The FUSION approach proposes both a conceptual framework and a system architecture that supports ... more The FUSION approach proposes both a conceptual framework and a system architecture that supports the composition of business processes using semantically annotated web services as bui/ding bloch. Results will be validated by supporting collaborative commercial proo/:orconcept pilots. The FUSION approach willfacilitate trans-national pilot cases having operations spanning the enlarged Europe. in particular: integration of transactions of a franchising .firm, provision of career and human resource management services, collaboration of companies in a chain of schools of /iJreign languages. The paper provides an overview on the FUSION approach and illustrates how it can be applied on one of the pilot cases.
Establishing the Foundation of Collaborative Networks, 2007
Service-oriented computing is being adopted at an unprecedented rate, making the effectiveness of... more Service-oriented computing is being adopted at an unprecedented rate, making the effectiveness of automated service discovery an increasingly important challenge. UDDI has emerged as a de facto industry standard and fundamental building block within SOA infrastructures. Nevertheless, conventional UDDI registries lack means to provide unambiguous, semantically rich representations of Web service capabilities, and the logic inference power required for facilitating automated service discovery. To overcome this important limitation, a number of approaches have been proposed towards augmenting Web service discovery with semantics. This paper discusses the benefits of semantically extending Web service descriptions and UDDI registries, and presents an overview of the approach put forward in project FUSION, towards semantically-enhanced publication and discovery of services based on SAWSDL.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Cloud service brokerage represents a novel operational model in the scope of cloud computing. A c... more Cloud service brokerage represents a novel operational model in the scope of cloud computing. A cloud broker acts as an intermediary between a service provider and a service consumer with the goal of adding as much value as possible to the service being provisioned and consumed. Continuous quality assurance is a type of brokerage capability having high value to both providers and consumers of cloud services. At the same time, it can be among the most challenging kinds of capability for cloud service brokers to realise. In this paper we focus on two specific themes within this scope. We present a motivating scenario and outline key research challenges associated with introducing policydriven governance and service level failure mitigation capabilities in brokers.
Service-Oriented Frameworks
Establishing the Foundation of Collaborative Networks, 2007
If we try to increase the level of automation in Business-to-Business (B2B) Enterprise Applicatio... more If we try to increase the level of automation in Business-to-Business (B2B) Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios, we confront challenges related to the resolution of data heterogeneities, service discovery and process composition. In this paper, we propose the Enterprise Interoperability Ontology (ENIO) that provides a shared, common understanding of data, services and processes within B2B integration scenarios. ENIO consists of an Upper Enterprise Interoperability Ontology (Upper ENIO), which is based on the DOLCE-SUMO alignment, with extensions called facets that cover several dimensions of the EAI domain. Each facet contains a relative meta-model that utilizes widely adopted standards. Finally, we demonstrate the utilization of ENIO in a real-world B2B scenario across a franchisor-franchisees collaborative value network.
IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing
Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relations... more Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection.
2009 Seventh IEEE European Conference on Web Services, 2009
Web services exposing run-time behaviour that deviates from their behavioural specifications repr... more Web services exposing run-time behaviour that deviates from their behavioural specifications represent a major threat to the sustainability of a service-oriented ecosystem. It is therefore critical to verify the behavioural conformance of services during run-time. This paper discusses a novel approach for run-time verification of Web services. It proposes the utilisation of Stream X-machines for constructing formal behavioural specifications of Web services which can be exploited for verifying that a service's run-time behaviour does not deviate from what is defined in the specification. Our approach allows for checking both the control flow of a Web service and the values of the data in the generated responses. The paper also proposes a classification of Web services and discusses how different types of services can be verified at run-time. Finally, it presents a run-time monitoring and verification architecture and discusses how it can be integrated into different types of service-oriented infrastructures.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a concept whereby a computing platform and a software development... more Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a concept whereby a computing platform and a software development stack are being offered as a combined service to prospective application developers. This model has been shown to carry a great number of benefits for developers and PaaS providers alike, and represents an important trend within cloud computing today. However, the design of mature platforms to support this model to its full extent remains a complex and challenging undertaking for enterprise application PaaS providers. The aim of this paper is to present the approach that is being undertaken within research project CAST to realise a platform that pushes the envelope of PaaS facilities and addresses the challenges associated with optimising application reusability, extensibility, configurability, integrability, and manageability. The ultimate aim is to create a software platform that fosters the creation of an ecosystem, thus pursuing the PaaS vision to its fullest extent possible.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide... more Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontologybased and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services.
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Papers by Dimitrios Kourtesis