INSERTech

Workshop on INnovative SERvice Technologies
co-located with Autonomics 2008

Contents

1. Scope
2. Organizing Committee
3. Important Dates
4. Talks and Speakers

Scope

ICT, Telecommunications and Future Internet are likely to converge rapidly in the service arena. This convergence is blurring the borders among different application contexts: a telecommunication service could be configured, activated, and controlled by Web applications, or an IT application could include functionalities implemented by using service capabilities deployed in a telecommunication network.

Moreover, Web2.0 trend is demonstrating that Users are more and more willing of taking an active role in producing, sharing and consuming data, information, contents and services within large communities. ICT, Telecommunications and Future Internet convergence will foster a deep innovation in the direction of a decentralized open ecosystem, for broad federations of Players allowing not only Providers but above all people (individuals, playing the role of "Prosumers") to be at the center of Information Society.

This innovation trend will create huge development opportunities but, at the same time, will dramatically increase complexity and level of decentralization of required service and networking platforms. Current infrastructures will not be able to sustain such trends so technologies and solutions are urgently required. High level requirements of such service ecosystems are:

• enabling new services and innovative business models
• flexibility in composing services
• scalability in executing services
• scalability in handling huge data-clouds
• fault robustness
• savings in capex due to optimisation of h/w and s/w resources
• savings in opex due to simplification of management and OAM
• savings in energy

This workshop will address above trend and the related requirements from the specific point of view of the Industry: technology providers and service providers will present visions, perspectives and potential technologies and solutions.

Organizing Committee

Important Dates

Talks and Speakers

1. Eliezer Dekel (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
2. Alejandro Bascuñana (Ericsson)
3. Dominic Greenwood (Whitestein Technologies AG)
4. Andries Stam (Almende BV)
5. Massimo Paolucci (DoCoMo Euro-Lab)
6. José Lozano (Telefónica I+D)
7. Roberto Minerva (Telecom Italia)

Below, you find more details to the talks of the people listed above.

Eliezer Dekel (IBM Haifa Research Lab)

• Title: Data as a Cloud Service-Challenges and Opportunities
• Author(s): Eliezer Dekel
• Abstract: With the advent of cloud computing there is a need to revisit our approach to data. When an application can be executing anywhere in the cloud it means that the data required by this application should be available to it wherever it's running. When we consider also the SLA of the application, requirements like latency, consistency and resiliency come into play. This calls for a new approach for handling data. An approach that will make the right data available wherever needed, whenever needed by autonomously caching, replicating, versioning, migrating, and persisting data in the cloud. In this talk we will discuss the requirements from such a service, and review some possible solutions and challenges.
• The Speaker: Eliezer Dekel is managing the Distributed Middleware group in the IBM Haifa Research Lab. He led the development of the Distribution and Consistency Services (DCS) component for WebSphere. The DCS component is the foundation for WebSphere's High Availability. It is the first virtual synchrony group communication implementation that is part of commercial application server. Another technology developed by the Distributed Middleware group is the RMM a high throughput low latency publish/subscribe messaging technology. This technology is now available as a low latency product offering from IBM: WMQ LLM. Eliezer Dekel is a University Ambassador to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since joining the Haifa Research Lab in 1992, he has been involved in research in the areas of distributed and fault-tolerant computing, service-oriented technology, and software engineering. He is currently working on technologies for providing Quality of Service, with a focus on dependability, in very large scale multi-tier environment. Eliezer has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Minnesota, and a B.Sc. in mathematics from Ben Gurion University, Israel. Prior to joining the IBM Haifa Research Lab, Eliezer served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas computer science department for over ten years. He is also a subject area editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Alejandro Bascuñana (Ericsson)

• Title: Towards an end-to-end user generated service paradigm
• Author(s): Alejandro Bascuñana
• Abstract: Internet is moving from an user generated content paradigm (WEB 2.0) to a more advanced stage where users are able to generate not only contents but also services and applications based on basic blocks provided by service providers . Users will be able to generate services that will help them to manage their daily tasks, spare time, etc. Furthermore this new technology will be used to allow end users working within professional environments, such as the medical one, engineering one, etc to develop applications that later on will be used within their professional life. Another key feature of this new paradigm is the possibility of sharing those Services and Applications among several users and even to charge for their use. Today there are several initiatives in this direction and there are already some platforms that are running under this paradigm such as: Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. There are also EU research projects working about this and extending the paradigm towards the convergence of Internet and the Telecom World. This is the case of OPUCE (FPVI 34101). OPUCE is developing a new framework where the convergence of both Internet and Telecom Networks is becoming a reality. The main purpose of OPUCE is to bridge advances in networking, communication and information technology services towards a unique service environment where personalized services will be dynamically created and provisioned by the end-user itself regardless of ambiance and location. OPUCE will produce an open service infrastructure to enable users for easy service creation and deployment in heterogeneous environments, allowing services to be accessed in a seamless way by a multitude of devices connected via different networks.
• The Speaker: Alejandro Bascuñana Muñoz, is Senior Systems Engineer in the innovation unit at the Ericsson R&D centre located in Madrid, Spain. He obtained his Ph.D. Telecommunications Engineer degree in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 2006. MSc Degree in Computer Science in the University of Alicante, Spain, in 1996. His Current research interests are network databases, integration of heterogeneous environments and end user service creation and execution environments. He has been strongly involved in European as well as Spanish research project

Dominic Greenwood (Whitestein Technologies AG)

• Title: Goal-driven on-demand product creation for prosumer devices
• Author(s): Dominic Greenwood
• Abstract: Driven by ongoing investments in NGN and SOA, telecommunications business models and products are evolving at a rapid pace. Traditional monolithic, slowly evolving products are now being supplanted by open and dynamic markets of encapsulated service components from which customers can define and assemble their own products in real-time and on-demand. To enable this inversion of business perspective, this paper proposes a goal-driven autonomic communication technology for deployment on customer terminal devices. The solution combines the benefits of seamless connectivity management, with the capability of autonomically locating and assembling distributed service components and content from disparate, heterogeneous sources.
• The Speaker: Dominic Greenwood is responsible for Advanced Technologies innovation at Whitestein Technologies AG. In this role he leads product innovation drawing on his knowledge of intelligent distributed systems, software agent and autonomous systems, autonomic computing and service-oriented computing. From 2000 through 2003, Dr. Greenwood was a Member of Research Staff in the Network Agent Research group of Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc., based in Sunnyvale, California. In this position he was involved in several key agent-related research and technology transfer activities, including the development of international standards. Prior to that, Dr. Greenwood was with Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd. for three years in the role of Senior Research/Development Engineer with responsibility for distributed network management product innovation and research activities.

Andries Stam (Almende BV)

• Title: Towards composition of distributed evolving services: the CREDO approach
• Author: Andries Stam, Alfons Salden (Almende BV)
• Abstract: ICT Service providers face increasing demands on dynamic, flexible and scalable orchestration of their software services. These demands complicate the validation and verification of such orchestrations as-a-whole. Within the European CREDO research project, we develop techniques for the modeling, validation and verification of compositional distributed services. Our approach is based on two principles. Firstly, we adopt a clear formal separation between the service components and the coordination glue that binds them together. Secondly, we develop modeling techniques which support automated verification and model checking. In this paper, we apply the CREDO tools to ASK CS, a system for connecting people to other people via context-aware response systems. We gradually transform the existing centralized system into a flexible orchestration of distributed service components.
• The Speaker:Andries Stam is a Researcher at Almende B.V., a dutch research company focussing on self-organisation in complex adaptive systems. Andries received a MsC in Computer Science from the University of Leiden and will defend his PhD thesis on the behavioural modeling of evolving distributed systems near December 2008. For six years, he worked as a consultant for various companies in The Netherlands. He participated in the Dutch research project ArchiMate on Enterprise Architecture and the ITEA project Trust4all on trust principles for embedded systems. He is currently involved in the European CREDO project on the modeling and analysis of evolutionary structures for distributed services. Andries' research interests include model-driven software development, distributed systems and coordination principles for evolving software systems. He has published in the areas of software engineering, coordination languages, and enterprise architecture.

Massimo Paolucci (DoCoMo Euro-Lab)

• Title: Bringing Pervasive services to Mobile Users
• Author: Massimo Paolucci
• Abstract: We are living in a world in which digital services are increasingly provided at the "street level". Such services which include information services such as public transport information, payment systems, and ticketing are becoming one of the media through which we interact with the environment in which we live. In this trend, mobile phones are the tool through which we gain access to these services, and through them to operate in the real world. This poses new problems of how to discover services in a new contextual way, how to provision them in such a way that they make sense to a busy user on the run, and how to support the user when things go wrong. In this talk I will discuss our experience with developing a mobile platform to deploy on mobile phones that for intelligent service provisioning, and I will try to highlight the emerging challenges for the Autonomic computing.
• The Speaker: Massimo Paolucci is a senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-labs where he is conducting research on service provisioning and composition to mobile users exploiting web services, and semantic web technology. Before joining DOCOMO he worked on semantic web services and agent technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Massimo has been a member of the UDDI technical committee, and a member of the OWL-S coalition. He served in the organising committee of ISWC as PC member is a number of AI related conferences including ISWC, ICWS, IJCAI, AAMAS and numerous workshops.

José Lozano (Telefónica I+D)

• Title: Toward Autonomic Digital Home Management
• Author: José Lozano
• Abstract: Digital Home Services Management is becoming one of the main challenges for telecommunications operators as the heterogeneity and complexity of end users devices grows dramatically. Moreover, home network topology and composition can be changed by end users without any control from the service provider side. In addition to these complexity problems, the number of customers that a traditional telco operator manages adds a scalability problem to the equation.
  Traditional centralized management paradigms lacks from the flexibility and dynamicity needed to deal with these highly personalized scenarios. The adaptability and evolvability of Autonomic Systems is envisioned as the key technology in order to overcome this difficult situation. This talk explains how Telefonica I+D is trying to apply Autonomic Communications principles to manage Digital Home Environments.
• The Speaker: José A. Lozano received a MS degree in Telecommunication from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Currently, he is the Head of the Autonomic Communications Division in Telefónica I+D. He has worked since 1996 in the area of Network and Services Management Systems where he has been involved in a number of activities spanning from technological and strategic consultancy to innovation projects. He has also been research teacher in the Electronic Department of Universidad de Malaga. José A. has published numerous technical papers on Network and Services Management and Autonomic Communications. He is the industrial co-chair of the ACF (Autonomic Communications Forum) Service Composability Management Working Group and the Principal Representative of Telefónica I+D in the TeleManagement Forum.

Roberto Minerva (Telecom Italia)

• Title: Easing the Customer Experience on a Home Network from an Operator Perspective using Autonomic Networking
• Author: Roberto Minerva
• Abstract: The presentation will analyze (through examples) the burden left to user in establishing a working Home Network. On the other side Operators that want to ease the customer experience have to cope with solutions and procedures stemming from different ecosystems (Consumer Electronics, Networking, and Telecommunications). This typically yields to a misuse of the Home Networks and a poor User experience. Consequently services and functions are not wholly used and exploited by Users. Autonomic Networking together with for Plug and Play solutions can dramatically reduce the problems of Customers. In this context the Operators can gain a role in the Home Networking exceeding the mere provision of connectivity. The presentation will go through a few usage scenarios.
• The Speaker: Roberto Minerva, Manager, focal point for Long Term Research within the Future Center & Technical Communication department of Telecom Italia. He held many responsibilities within Telecom Italia Lab: Network Intelligence, Wireless Architecture and Business Services Area Manager. Roberto has a Master Degree in Computer Science. Since 1987 he has been involved in the development of Service Architectures for Telecom (TINA, OSA/Parlay and SIP), in activities related to IMS, and in the definition of services for the Business market (context-awareness, ambient intelligence and automotive).