Jameela Al-Jaroodi

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being developed to provide useful interactions between physical systems and environments and cyber world for a variety of applications. CPS are designed with a set of software and interconnected distributed hardware components that are linked with physical elements to provide advanced monitoring and control mechanisms geared towards enhancing the targeted physical system or environment. These components function seamlessly to offer specific functionalities that help enhance human lives, physical system operations and environments. While CPS can offer many smart enhancements for improving physical processes, the development of such complex systems composed of many distributed and heterogeneous components is extremely difficult. This is due to the many communication, computing, and networking challenges. Using an appropriate middleware that provides a framework to support developing and operating diverse CPS applications is a novel method to address these challenges. The availability of advanced middleware services and platforms can provide effective approaches for enhancing CPS application development processes as well as provide more robust environments for operating CPS applications. Such middleware can significantly reduce the time needed to design, build, test, and operate robust CPS applications. However, designing a common middleware platform for diverse types of CPS applications is not trivial. This paper investigates the middleware challenges for CPS, based on the different types of CPS applications being developed and their specific challenges. In addition, the paper discusses the current efforts of developing middleware platforms for CPS and the open research issues in the field.

Project-based learning (PBL) was proven to be a very useful model to give students hands on experiences and allow them to be active learners rather than passive listeners. In this paper we introduce a tool to help enhance the project development experiences for information technology (IT) students. The main purpose of this tool is to help reuse web information to enable IT projects for students. This tool is called InetRetriever and it can be easily used by students to retrieve, in real-time, any required real information from the web and to implement, execute, and test their projects with real life data. As PBL is becoming an integral part of many information technology (IT) courses, and in many cases real data is essential for many types of projects, it becomes important to make such data available and accessible easily. In various cases, students focus gets shifted from the real objectives of a project when they spend a lot of their time trying to find data or create methods to get them this data. Furthermore, many projects fail and cannot demonstrate their real capabilities when they are tested and demonstrated using small sets of sample data or some fabricated data sets because the students could not include real data available on the Internet. Another possibility here is that students could not even complete their projects because of the difficulties in retrieving the required data and the excess amount of time they spend on that tasks rather than on the real tasks in the project. Therefore, InetRetriever was developed to overcome this obstacle. It was tested in different information technology courses to enable effective and realistic project-based learning. Using this tool we observed increased student interest in the project development and higher levels of interactions and learning.

As the costs of healthcare services rise and healthcare professionals are becoming scarce and hard to find, it is imminent that healthcare organizations consider adopting health information technology (HIT) systems. HIT allows health organizations to streamline many of their processes and provide services in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. The latest technological trends such as Cloud Computing (CC) provide a strong infrastructure and offer a true enabler for HIT services over the Internet. This can be achieved on a pay-as-you-use model of the “e-Health Cloud” to help the healthcare industry cope with current and future demands yet keeping their costs to a minimum. Despite its great potential, HIT as a CC model has not been addressed extensively in the literature. There are no apparent frameworks which clearly encompass all viable schemes and interrelationships between HIT and CC. Therefore, analyzing and comparing the effectiveness of such schemes is important. In this paper we introduce the concept of “e-Health Cloud” highlighting many of its constituents and proposing building an e-health environment and elucidating many of the challenges confronting the success of the e-Health Cloud. We will also discuss different possible solutions to address challenges such as security and privacy.

This paper develops and compares different sensor network architecture designs that can be used for monitoring underwater pipeline infrastructures. These architectures are underwater wired sensor networks, underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks, RF (Radio Frequency) wireless sensor networks, integrated wired/acoustic wireless sensor networks, and integrated wired/RF wireless sensor networks. The paper also discusses the reliability challenges and enhancement approaches for these network architectures. The reliability evaluation, characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages among these architectures are discussed and compared. Three reliability factors are used for the discussion and comparison: the network connectivity, the continuity of power supply for the network, and the physical network security. In addition, the paper also develops and evaluates a hierarchical sensor network framework for underwater pipeline monitoring.

Stock investors all agree that one of the hardest things they have to do is keep up with the rapid changes in the markets. The Internet carries a huge amount of up-to-the minute information for investors such as current stock prices, exchange rates, sales volumes, latest deals, trading averages, organizations’ performance and financial information, oil and other goods prices, and much more. Although such stock-related information is publicly and freely available on the Internet, investors face difficulties tracking the changes and updates fast enough to make sound investment decisions. This paper proposes a system to monitor stock and other stock-related information available from web services or dynamic HTML documents on the Internet. This system can deal with public information available on the Internet on a single or multiple websites and from a single or multiple web services as the information sources. The system allows investors to use these sources to create personalized stock monitoring criteria and then receive updated notifications from the system based on the specified criteria. The public information is treated as a set of Internet variables used to define stock monitoring criteria based on the specific investor’s requirements. Based on the defined criteria, SMS and/or email notification messages can be generated and sent to the investor notifying him/her whenever the criteria are met. A number of applications related to stock investments can benefit form this system to provide real-time useful information to the investors.

A Middleware Service for Increasing Applications Integration Availability