Meetings take up a large amount of time, especially at the upper managerial levels. To help meetings progress smoothly and reach desired goals, meeting facilitators are frequently called in.... Show More

Meetings take up a large amount of time, especially at the upper managerial levels. To help meetings progress smoothly and reach desired goals, meeting facilitators are frequently called in. Facilitators have at their disposal a number of techniques, including thinkLets. Through the use of thinkLets, facilitators can plan the meeting beforehand, deciding which activities to perform at each point. However, even with the use of thinkLets, designing a meeting is not an easy task, in particular for novice facilitators. A number of considerations must be made when selecting activities and designing the meeting dynamics. In this paper, the authors discuss this problem and present a framework and a system to assist the design of meetings, electronic or otherwise, using thinkLets and compatibility rules. The framework implements rules to help facilitators select and link thinkLets together in and orderly fashion, designing the meeting in the process.

Resource Acquisition service is a network-based service that acquires sufficient resources to satisfy the application requirement. Set-top-boxes (STB) are good sources of resource providers... Show More

Resource Acquisition service is a network-based service that acquires sufficient resources to satisfy the application requirement. Set-top-boxes (STB) are good sources of resource providers delivering this type of service collaboratively. Unfortunately, the accessibility of STBs is controlled by end-node users. It leads to uncertainty of the amount of resource available to the service operators. As an incentive, STB holders acting as resource provider can be remunerated for sharing the resources. Resource acquisition schemes can explore the available resources and provide the upper layer applications with sufficient resources to satisfy the requirements in service level agreement. A remuneration model is developed to reflect the rational decision of resource providers. The authors investigate the resource acquisition scheme under various load distribution and topologies of peer neighbourhood and find that cost-aware Requisition Algorithm can improve the service quality requirement fulfilment in a low cost.

Various approaches uses business process models as starting point to derive software services. The first and the important task for developing service-oriented models is service identification.... Show More

Various approaches uses business process models as starting point to derive software services. The first and the important task for developing service-oriented models is service identification. However, the majority of existing methods for service identification are developed manually because, on the one hand, they are based on the competence of the developers and, on the other hand, the business process models do not comprise sufficient knowledge to identify services automatically. The integration of Business Process Modeling (BPM), Model-Driven Development (MDD), and Ontology-based Semantic Annotation (OSA) allows the automation of the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) services development. Three steps are used for developing an SOA solution: service identification, service specification and finally service realization. In this paper, the authors illustrate a method called MOOSI (Multi-Objective Optimization-based Service Identification) that automatically identifies the architecturally significant elements from an annotated business process model in order to specify service model artifacts. The main goal of this work is to support the automation of the development process of service-oriented enterprise information system. The implementation results of our proposed method are discussed. This result shows that MOOSI can achieve high performance in terms of execution time and important quality in terms of modularization quality of identified services compared with other solution.

Health Information eXchange (HIX) is a part of Happiness Cloud Service Platform of Happiness Guangdong in Guangdong Province of China based on innovation of cloud-based business model. This article... Show More

Health Information eXchange (HIX) is a part of Happiness Cloud Service Platform of Happiness Guangdong in Guangdong Province of China based on innovation of cloud-based business model. This article illustrates the hospital health care business services system based on cloud computing. major business functions of HIX includes integrated mobile medical information services, and mobile health information services. Key cloud service platform capabilities include appointment of HIX registration, doctor-patient interaction and Health Manager System, medical statistical analysis, and the other integrated support module including service platform and platform management provided by two major cloud computing technologies of SaaS and PaaS. Medical cloud services of HIX is an innovative business model for cloud computing, that is, the medical and health services provided to the public going though by cloud computing all over Guangdong Province in China.

With software projects are becoming increasingly complicated, soft skills such as collaboration, effective communication, rhetoric, socio-cultural, accountabilities and collision resolution in... Show More

With software projects are becoming increasingly complicated, soft skills such as collaboration, effective communication, rhetoric, socio-cultural, accountabilities and collision resolution in real-life software projects, as well as computer programming are badly required for team members to cooperate and finish the strenuous projects. Therefore it is fundamental for software engineering students to improve such skills, if they want to accelerate the success of teamwork. Nowadays, the ability of effective cooperation and communication is much more important than raw programming talent. Teams with average programmers who communicate well are more likely to success than those with superstars but not good at communication. At the same time, these soft skills are just difficult to teach and learn which require true collaboration and communication between students. The traditional learning activities for training soft skills are insufficient based on the facts that teachers and mentors pay too much attention on professional and technical abilities instead of soft skills. In this paper, a novel learning model called Problem and Task Based Learning is proposed which includes Problem-Based Learning, Task-Based Learning, and Web3D technologies. This new model could elevate the teamwork skills in software engineering and overcome the common limitations of the traditional course. This paper also presents two courses using this learning model-a Task-game course and a virtual 3D meeting, as well as some experimental results obtained from the students and the teachers who have participated in the two case studies. Both students and teachers are from Software Engineering Department of Tsinghua University.