http://hdl.handle.net/1974/792 2013-06-20T10:31:30Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8008 Title: A FRAMEWORK FOR DATA DELIVERY IN INTEGRATED INTERNET OF THINGS ARCHITECTURES Authors: Alfagih, ASHRAF Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a networking paradigm where entities are viewed as objects that are identifiable, traceable and connected. This view requires the integration and interoperability of numerous wireless standards. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are two dominant technologies that jointly constitute a class of hybrid/integrated IoT architectures known as RFID-Sensor Networks (RSNs). Data delivery across such integrated architectures faces challenges in terms of cost-efficiency, scalability and connectivity, among many others. Moreover, IoT-driven solutions are required to address constraints on node mobility, delay-tolerance and resource management, and may have to adhere to an economic model in order to establish incentive-based schemes. Most available RSN solutions are tailored for a single-application and fail to address the aforementioned IoT constraints. To the best of our knowledge, a detailed framework that comprehensively addresses such constraints does not exist. We investigate this promising research direction by proposing a novel framework that incorporates an RSN integrated architecture to improve delivery over heterogeneous topologies. Our framework provides data delivery solutions that adhere to delivery and connectivity considerations of integrated RSN architectures in IoT. Moreover, our data delivery solutions incorporate pricing policies for incentive public sensing applications over the proposed architecture. We show, by theoretical analysis and simulations, that our framework outperforms rival RSN integration approaches, as well as other wireless Ad-hoc data delivery schemes in realizing IoT performance requirements. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-05-01 15:09:52.668 2013-05-01T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7982 Title: HANDLING DISCONNECTION IN SYNCHRONOUS GROUPWARE Authors: Roy, BANANI Abstract: Synchronous distributed groupware is a class of software applications allowing a geographically distributed group of people to collaborate in real time. There are different types of groupware, e.g., collaborative editing software, distributed meeting support tools, and multiplayer games. However, collaborators in groupware can become disconnected from the session. Disconnections can range in duration from a few seconds (e.g., due to a network outage) to hours or days (e.g., stowing a laptop while flying). Disconnection causes information loss and makes it difficult for users to understand both the state of the workspace and the current activities of other people upon reconnection. Thus, it is important to handle disconnection in groupware. However, handling disconnection is difficult for groupware developers. They need to determine varieties of strategies in order to address different disconnection scenarios. These strategies determine how stored information can be manipulated as the system waits for a disconnected user to rejoin, and how information should be replayed upon reconnection. If disconnection lasts for a long time, developers need to select and combine strategies in order to manage a trade-off between performance requirements (e.g., delivering stored information as quickly as possible upon reconnection) and understandability requirements (e.g., allowing users to watch missed information in an understandable manner). Developers might not know how to implement such strategies in a reusable manner. Because of this lack of knowledge in handling disconnection, developers might build disconnection-aware groupware applications that will not address the range of wide variety of user-level requirements that arise from different disconnection scenarios. Moreover, as there are a few disconnection-aware groupware applications, developers might not know the overhead (e.g., additional message transmission time, memory usage and programming complexity) of handling disconnection in synchronous groupware in practice. In order to mitigate developers’ problems to handle disconnection in synchronous groupware, this thesis provides codified solutions that capture and organize a wide range of strategies for handling disconnection, that manage the performance and understandability trade-off through selecting and combining suitable strategies and that show how to implement the strategies in a reusable manner. In order to determine the overhead of handling disconnection, a toolkit is developed following the designed solutions, and different applications are constructed using the toolkit. User studies and performance analyses are conducted that evaluate the toolkit and demonstrate its quality goals, such as offering simple application programming interface (API), high performance, and supporting different disconnection scenarios and timeframes. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-29 17:52:00.165 2013-04-29T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7923 Title: PREDICTION OF PROTEIN FUNCTION USING TEXT FEATURES EXTRACTED FROM THE BIOMEDICAL LITERATURE Authors: Wong, ANDREW Abstract: Proteins perform many important functions in the cell and are essential to the health of the cell and the organism. As such, there is much effort to understand the function of proteins. Due to the advances in sequencing technology, there are many sequences of proteins whose function is yet unknown. Therefore, computational systems are being developed and used to help predict protein function. Most computational systems represent proteins using features that are derived from protein sequence or protein structure to predict function. In contrast, there are very few systems that use the biomedical literature as a source of features. Earlier work demonstrated the utility of biomedical literature as a source of text features for predicting protein subcellular location. In this thesis we build on that earlier work, and examine the effectiveness of using text features to predict protein function. Using the molecular function and biological process terms from the Gene Ontology (GO) as our function classes, we trained two classifiers (k-Nearest Neighbour and Support Vector Machines) to predict protein function. The proteins were represented using text features that were extracted from biomedical abstracts based on statistical properties. For evaluation, the performance of our two classifiers was compared to that of two baseline classifiers: one that assigns function based solely on the prior distribution of protein function, and one that assigns function based on sequence similarity. The systems were trained and tested using 5-fold cross-validation over a dataset of more than 36,000 proteins. Overall, we show that text features extracted from biomedical literature can be used to predict protein function for any organism. Our results also show that our text-based classifier typically has comparable performance to the sequence-similarity baseline classifier. Based on our results and what previous work had shown, we believe that text features can be integrated with other types of features to provide more accurate predictions for protein function. Description: Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-24 21:07:13.983 2013-04-25T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7865 Title: A FRAMEWORK FOR MIGRATING WEB APPLICATIONS TO WEB SERVICES Authors: Almonaies, ASIL Abstract: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an increasingly important software architecture, designed to flexibly connect separate components in response to rapid changes in the business environment. SOA focuses on the exchange of information between independent software components and on the reusability of the components by separating communication interface from internal implementation. There are several features of SOA that make legacy system modernization to SOA appealing in today’s world. These are loose coupling, abstraction of underlying logic, agility, flexibility, reusability, autonomy, statelessness, discoverability and reduced cost. Migration of legacy systems to SOA is an important problem. While migration of legacy data processing systems has been widely studied, migration of legacy web applications has not. In this thesis we review existing strategies for migration of monolithic legacy web applications to web services, noting the unique challenges due to the highly dynamic nature of the systems, poorly structured code, and weakly typed languages in web applications, and the need for automation to assist in the process. We present a new semi-automated framework for the analysis and migration of monolithic web applications to web services using source analysis and transformation techniques, and outline a set of source transformation steps that can be used to migrate existing legacy web applications to web services form. We demonstrate our framework on the analysis and automated restructuring of two large existing web applications to extract and migrate integrated internal features to independent, reusable web services. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-28 14:23:24.797 2013-04-01T04:00:00Z