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The purpose of this paper is to characterise a number of current and future computing environments and summarises their resource discovery requirements. It then seeks to analyse, with respect to the requirements of each environment, several established service discovery protocols and some newer protocols that are still in the research domain. In addition, the key features of a new resource discovery protocol that has been developed to operate with heterogeneous computing environments are described.

A comprehensive literature survey was undertaken, highlighting the shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols with respect to large pervasive computing environments. Given the identified gaps in existing protocols, an alternative protocol is suggested.

The main findings of this paper relate to the identified shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols. It was also found that a hybrid resource discovery protocol capable of spanning dynamic, mobile computing environments and more stable ones was able to overcome many of the challenges presented by large‐scale pervasive computing environments.

This paper presents comprehensive literature survey of the state‐of‐the‐art in resource discovery protocols, pointing out some of the problems that are not solved. The paper describes the design of an alternative protocol, and presents an evaluation of it. The pervasive computing research community can draw upon the survey and evaluation to guide the design of future resource discovery protocols for the increasingly dynamic world in which we live.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how and why virtual machines (VMs) and cloud computing and related development environments built on cloud-based resources may be used to support and enhance the technological elements of library and information science (LIS) education.

It is based on analysis of available technologies and relevant applications.

Cloud computing and virtualization offer a basis for creating a robust computing infrastructure for LIS education.

In the context of LIS education, cloud computing is relevant in two respects. First, many important library and archival services already rely heavily on cloud-based infrastructures, and in the near future, cloud computing is likely to define a much larger part of the computing environment on which libraries and archives rely. Second, cloud computing affords a highly flexible and efficient environment that is ideal for learning about VMs, operating systems and a wide variety of applications. What is more important, it constitutes an environment for teaching and learning that is vastly superior to the ones that currently support most LIS degree programs. From a pedagogical perspective, the key aspect of teaching and learning in the cloud environment is the VM. So, the article focuses a significant portion of its attentions on questions related to the deployment and use of VMs and Linux Containers, within and without cloud-based infrastructures, as means of learning about computer systems, applications and networking and achieving an understanding of essential aspects of both cloud computing and VM environments.

Based on a search of available literature in computer science and library and information science, the paper has no counterparts.

Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.

The paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.

The framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.

The main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

Founded on the concept of organizational ambidexterity and the competing value model, the purpose of this paper is to develop an information technology (IT) ambidexterity framework to underscore the importance of a balanced and harmonious IT environment in enterprise cloud adoption.

With survey responses from 165 IT executives in a managerial position who are in charge of cloud computing implementation, partial least square method is used to test the research model.

Cloud absorptive capacity plays an important role for firms to secure a competitive advantage. The synergy of the two capabilities (flexibility and control), which have conflicting characteristics, contributes to the enhancement of cloud absorptive capacity and leads to a firm’s knowledge accumulation and performance.

This study is the very first attempt that empirically establishes the relationship between a firm’s competitiveness and cloud computing absorptive capacity. This study provides a comprehensive framework that integrates ambidexterity theory with the competing value framework (CVF) with extending the concept of absorptive capacity that is bounded within an organizational perspective into a cloud computing context.

Firms should treat cloud computing as a strategic consideration to secure a competitive advantage in the contemporary business environment. For a firm’s performance, a dual governance structure, that encompasses flexibility and control, is required to achieve competitive advantage from cloud computing adoption.

To facilitate organizational effort in achieving a harmonious cloud environment, the authors propose a comprehensive ambidexterity framework integrating the CVF approach. This framework maps IT ambidexterity onto the CVF. As CVF considers internal and external factors that ambidexterity theory does not cover, integrating two theories can provide more comprehensive implications and discussions regarding cloud computing adoption.

Cloud computing is relatively a new type of technology demanding a new method of management techniques to attain security and privacy leading to customer satisfaction regarding “Business Protection” measure. As cloud computing businesses are usually composed of multiple colocation sites/departments, the purpose of this paper is to propose a benchmark operation to measure and compare the overall integrated people-process-performance (PPP) among different departments within cloud computing organization. The purpose of this paper is to motivate staff/units to improve the process performance and meet the standards in a competitive approach among business units.

The research method was conducted at Cirrus Ltd, which is a cloud computing service provider where a focus group consists of six IT professionals/managers. The objective of the focus group was to investigate the proposed technique by selecting the best practices relevant criteria, with the relevant sub-criteria as a benchmarking performance tool to measure PPP via an analytic hierarchy processing (AHP) approach. The standard pairwise comparative AHP scale was used to measure the performance of three different teams defined as production team, user acceptance testing team and the development team.

Based on best practice performance measurement (reviewed in this paper) of cloud computing, the proposed AHP model was implemented in a local medium-sized cloud service provider named “Cirrus” with their single site data center. The actual criteria relevant to Cirrus was an adaptation of the “Best practice” described in the literature. The main reason for the adaptation of criteria was that the principle of PPP assumes multiple departments/datacenters located in a different geographical area in large service providers. As Cirrus is a type of SMEs, the adaptation of performance measurement was based on teams within the same data center location. Irrelevant of this adaptation, the objective of measuring vendors KPI using the AHP technique as a specific output of PPP is also a valid situation.

This study provides guidance for achieving cloud computing performance measurement using the AHP technique. Hence, the proposed technique is an integrated model to measure the PPP under monitored cloud environment.

The proposed technique measures and manages the performance of cloud service providers that also implicitly act as a catalyst to attain trust in such high information-sensitive environment leading to organizational effectiveness of managing cloud organizations.

As Pervasive Computing environments become more richly populated with sensors and computing power it may be possible for the environment to observe and interpret user actions and pre‐emptively provide accurate support for those actions. This requires accurate inference of user intent. Though individual user acts may be inferable from environmental context sensing, the inference of intent for which appropriate support might be offered is more challenging. Numerous researchers have used probabilistic techniques such as Bayesian Analysis techniques to attempt such inference. Unlike a desktop environment, however, pervasive computing environments are extremely heterogeneous, so any heuristics used must be tailored to the physical environment and the users in question. Thus these techniques are only likely to be accurate if configured with accurate knowledge of routine user behavior. Many existing approaches attempt to learn such knowledge from operational data, but this often requires user involvement in training and expert configuration of probabilistic processing structure. In this paper we examine a complimentary approach where users are presented with an intuitive interface to support the direct configuration of probabilistic structure by users with appropriate knowledge. By treating an intent inference system for a particular pervasive computng environment as an autonomic system, we approach the problem as the design of an intuitive governance interface for this system. We then present the design and usability evaluation of this governance interface.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

This study aims to find out the current state of cloud-based library services in selected academic and special libraries of Bangladesh. The study also explored some pertinent problems faced by librarians in implementing this new technology in library services and activities.

The study used a mixed-method approach with a range of exploratory research questions. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the libraries. A set of structured questionnaires was designed to address the objectives of the study. For in-depth analysis, short interviews with the library professionals were also conducted.

Only four libraries made use of cloud computing services, and they maintained a partial cloud environment. Most responding librarians treated cloud computing as a dynamically scalable infrastructure for applications, data and file storage with charges imposed. Most of the respondents (90%) preferred cloud computing for “Software-as-a-Service”. Due to the high subscription rate (70%), unreliable online payment system (60%) and trading system (60%), librarians treated cloud computing as a burden in providing library services and activities. Respondent librarians were also interviewed for exploring their views on cloud computing in library services. For adopting cloud computing in library services of Bangladesh, “sufficient financial allocation” and “organizations’ positive decision over cloud computing” were mentioned as challenging tasks by the respondents. Finally, the study suggested some solutions to the problem and proposed a model for a cloud-based library system that can be replicated in libraries and information centres of other developing countries too.

This paper encapsulates the overall scenario of cloud-based library activities and services in Bangladesh. Based on the available secondary sources, no empirical study on librarians’ perceptions of cloud computing in library services of Bangladesh has been carried out before this study. Thus, this is perhaps the first attempt to quantitatively measure cloud-based services in Bangladeshi libraries.

To effectively develop privacy policies and practices for cloud computing, organizations need to define a set of guiding privacy objectives that can be applied across their organization. It is argued that it is important to understand individuals’ privacy values with respect to cloud computing to define cloud privacy objectives.

For the purpose of this study, the authors adopted Keeney’s (1994) value-focused thinking approach to identify privacy objectives with respect to cloud computing.

The results of this study identified the following six fundamental cloud privacy objectives: to increase trust with cloud provider, to maximize identity management controls, to maximize responsibility of information stewardship, to maximize individual’s understanding of cloud service functionality, to maximize protection of rights to privacy, and to maintain the integrity of data.

One limitation is generalizability of the cloud privacy objectives, and the second is research bias. As this study focused on cloud privacy, the authors felt that the research participants’ increased knowledge of technology usage, including that of cloud technology, was a benefit that outweighed risks associated with not having a random selection of the general population. The newness and unique qualities of privacy issues in cloud computing are better fitted to a qualitative study where issues can emerge naturally through a holistic approach opposed to trying to force fit an existing set of variables or constructs into the context of privacy and cloud computing.

The findings of this research study can be used to assist management in the process of formulating a cloud privacy policy, develop cloud privacy evaluation criteria as well as assist auditors in developing their privacy audit work plans.

Currently, there is little to no guidance in the literature or in practice as to what organizations need to do to ensure they protect their stakeholders privacy in a cloud computing environment. This study works at closing this knowledge gap by identifying cloud privacy objectives.

The impact of Ubiquitous Computing on Learning is not confined within technical dimension. Besides its technical facilitation, this new computing paradigm also challenges human’s belief on learning, and compels us to rethink on the design of learning resources and environments. The paper explores the concept of Ubiquitous Learning, and proposes a conceptual framework for a Ubiquitous Learning Environment (ULE) design and implementation. A ULE is established on the combination between Real World and Virtual Space, Personal Space and Shared Space. Learning in a ULE is conducted in the interactions among three essential communicative elements: Social Human, Object in real world, and Artifact in virtual space. A learning process is a social transfer process between tacit and explicit knowledge. Context‐Awareness is indispensable to all kinds of interactions in a ULE. In particular, this paper gives a discussion to context‐awareness supported Interoperability and Adaptability in a ULE, and suggests a five‐dimensional (Who, What, How, When, Where) representation approach for modeling context and providing context‐awareness information. In the practical dimension, this paper presents a design framework for a ULE implementation by integrating the applications of present affordable learning devices, such as networked PCs (Personal Computer), PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), mobile phones, sensors, and RFIDs. A basic learning system architecture in a ULE and a prototype ubiquitous language learning system are also addressed in this paper.