Future Internet — Open Access Journal

Over the last few decades, semi-autonomous machine’s technology started to promote awareness towards the importance of human–robot interaction (HRI) for improving daily activities. More affordable social robots are being commercially released and in order to implement viable applications of HRI, a combination human-computer interaction and user experience methodologies could play a pivotal role in assessing new scenarios and evaluating new investigations. However, literature shows that it is still challenging to reach an optimal user experience with robotic companions. The aim of the study was to determine the chance to enhance the user experience with a semi-autonomous social robot, using user experience and human–computer interaction methodologies. In this study, a social robotic companion has been developed and prototyped in order to be adopted in a specific public environment such as a company workspace. The challenges emerged from this peculiar environment triggered the need for a more productive and comfortable office for the employees, and, at the same time, the usability, acceptance and likeability of the robotic companion have been evaluated. The results emphasize that, since HRI is highly interdisciplinary, the benefits of combining approaches from other fields could positively benefit from a meaningful social interaction with the users. Full article

The emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will not only leverage new and potentially disruptive business models but will also change the way software applications will be analyzed and designed. Agility is a need in a systematic service engineering as well as a co-design of requirements and architectural artefacts. Functional and non-functional requirements of IT users (in smart manufacturing mostly from the disciplines of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) need to be mapped to the capabilities and interaction patterns of emerging IIoT service platforms, not to forget the corresponding information models. The capabilities of such platforms are usually described, structured, and formalized by software architects and software engineers. However, their technical descriptions are far away from the thinking and the thematic terms of end-users. This complicates the transition from requirements analysis to system design, and hence the re-use of existing and the design of future platform capabilities. Current software engineering methodologies do not systematically cover these interlinked and two-sided aspects. The article describes in a comprehensive manner how to close this gap with the help of a service-oriented analysis and design methodology entitled SERVUS (also mentioned in ISO 19119 Annex D) and a corresponding Web-based Platform Engineering Information System (PEIS). Full article

The marine main diesel engine rotational speed automatic control plays a significant role in determining the optimal main diesel engine speed under impacting on navigation environment conditions. In this article, the application of fuzzy logic control theory for main diesel engine speed control has been associated with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Firstly, the controller is designed according to fuzzy logic control theory. Secondly, the fuzzy logic controller will be optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in order to obtain the optimal adjustment of the membership functions only. Finally, the fuzzy logic controller has been completely innovated by Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The study results will be represented under digital simulation form, as well as comparison between traditional fuzzy logic controller with fuzzy logic control–particle swarm optimization speed controller being obtained. Full article

Due to the exponential growth of the data and its services, visiting multiple webs/apps by a user raises three issues—(1) consumption of extra bytes; (2) time killing process of surfing inside the webs/apps; (3) tedious task of remembering address of webs/apps with their credentials. The data mashup is a set of techniques and user-friendly approaches which not only resolves above issues but also allows ordinary user to fetch required data from multiple disparate data sources and to create the integrated view in his defined digital place. In this paper, we have proposed an extension of existing REST protocol called Structured Data REST (SDRest) protocol and user-friendly novel approach which allows even ordinary users to develop end to end data mashup, using the innovative concept of Structured Data Mashup Box (SDMB) and One Time Configuration (OTC)-Any Time Access (ATA) models. Our implementation shows that pre-mashup configuration can easily be performed by an ordinary user and an integrated user interface view of end user data mashup can be created without any technical knowledge or programming. We have also evaluated the proposed work by comparing it with some of the related works and found that the proposed work has developed user friendly configurable approach using the current state of the art techniques to involve not only the ordinary user but also the mashup service provider and the data service provider to develop public, private and hybrid data mashup. Full article

With the high popularity of the Internet, online trading has gradually replaced the traditional shopping model and extended to every corner of social life. However, online trading cannot avoid failures; thus, understanding how firms can best recover customers in online contexts to keep customer loyalty is very important. This study investigates the mechanisms by which customer participation types (physical, mental, and emotional) promote customers’ perceived justice and post-recovery satisfaction from a mental accounting perspective. Furthermore, the moderating effects of two modes of online apology speech acts (direct and indirect) on customer participation and perceived justice are investigated. A total of 1083 Chinese tourists who have purchased a Wi-Fi rental service in the past year were contacted according to the database provided by two travel agencies, and 329 stated having experienced an online recovery service and participated in the survey; 297 valid questionnaires were collected. Among them, 48.82% were males and 51.18% females. Most of the respondents were aged 20–35 years. By carrying out data analysis by partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS, the results show that, first, only mental and physical participation can enhance perceived justice, while emotional participation does not influence perceived justice. Second, the positive influence of mental participation on perceived justice is most significant. Third, only when the service staff adopts the indirect mode to express an online apology, mental and physical participation can enhance perceived justice. Full article

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has widely been used in the last few years. Its applications focus on auto identification, tracking, and data capturing issues. However, RFID suffers from the main problem of tags collision when multiple tags simultaneously respond to the reader request. Many protocols were proposed to solve the collision problems with good identification efficiency and an acceptable time delay, such as the blocking anti-collision protocol (BA). Nevertheless, most of these protocols assumed that the RFID reader could decode the tag’s signal only when there was one tag responding to the reader request once each time. Hence, they ignored the phenomenon of the capture effect, which results in identifying the tag with the stronger signal as the multiple tags simultaneously respond. As a result, many tags will not be identified under the capture effect. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to take the capture effect phenomenon into consideration in order to modify the blocking BA protocol to ensure a full read rate, i.e., identifying all the tags in the frame without losing any tag. Moreover, the modifications include distinguishing between collision and interference responses (for the period of staying tags) in the noisy environments, for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of the identification. Finally, the simulation and analytical results show that our modifications and MBA protocol outperform the previous protocols in the same field, such as generalized query tree protocols (GQT1 and GQT2), general binary tree (GBT), and tweaked binary tree (TBT). Full article

Chinese event extraction uses word embedding to capture similarity, but suffers when handling previously unseen or rare words. From the test, we know that characters may provide some information that we cannot obtain in words, so we propose a novel architecture for combining word representations: character–word embedding based on attention and semantic features. By using an attention mechanism, our method is able to dynamically decide how much information to use from word or character level embedding. With the semantic feature, we can obtain some more information about a word from the sentence. We evaluate different methods on the CEC Corpus, and this method is found to improve performance. Full article

Mobile edge computing is a new communication paradigm, which stores content close to the end users, so as to reduce the backhaul delay and alleviate the traffic load of the backbone networks. Crowd participation is one of the most striking features of this technology, and it enables numerous interesting applications. The dynamics of crowd participation offer unprecedented opportunities for both content caching and data forwarding. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the dynamics of crowd participation, from the perspective of opportunistic caching and forwarding, and discuss how we can exploit such opportunities to allocate content and select relays efficiently. Some existing issues in this emerging research area are also discussed. Full article

Caching close to users in a radio access network (RAN) has been identified as a promising method to reduce a backhaul traffic load and minimize latency in 5G and beyond. In this paper, we investigate a novel community detection inspired by a proactive caching scheme for device-to-device (D2D) enabled networks. The proposed scheme builds on the idea that content generated/accessed by influential users is more probable to become popular and thus can be exploited for pro-caching. We use a Clustering Coefficient based Genetic Algorithm (CC-GA) for community detection to discover a group of cellular users present in close vicinity. We then use an Eigenvector Centrality measure to identify the influential users with respect to the community structure, and the content associated to it is then used for pro-active caching using D2D communications. The numerical results show that, compared to reactive caching, where historically popular content is cached, depending on cache size, load and number of requests, up to 30% more users can be satisfied using a proposed scheme while achieving significant reduction in backhaul traffic load. Full article

We present an occlusion-aware unsupervised neural network for jointly learning three low-level vision tasks from monocular videos: depth, optical flow, and camera motion. The system consists of three different predicting sub-networks simultaneously coupled by combined loss terms and is capable of computing each task independently on test samples. Geometric constraints extracted from scene geometry which have traditionally been used in bundle adjustment or pose-graph optimization are formed as various self-supervisory signals during our end-to-end learning approach. Different from prior works, our image reconstruction loss also takes account of optical flow. Moreover, we impose novel 3D flow consistency constraints over the predictions of all the three tasks. By explicitly modeling occlusion and taking utilization of both 2D and 3D geometry relationships, abundant geometric constraints are formed over estimated outputs, enabling the system to capture both low-level representations and high-level cues to infer thinner scene structures. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset demonstrates the effectiveness and improvement of our approach: (1) monocular depth estimation outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and is comparable to stereo supervised ones; (2) optical flow prediction ranks top among prior works and even beats supervised and traditional ones especially in non-occluded regions; (3) pose estimation outperforms established SLAM systems under comparable input settings with a reasonable margin. Full article

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are designed to collect information by means of a large number of energy-limited battery sensor nodes. Therefore, it is important to minimize the energy consumed by each sensor, in order to extend the network life. The goal of this work is to design an intelligent WSN that collects as much information as possible to process it intelligently. To achieve this goal, an agent is sent to each sensor in order to process the information and to cooperate with neighboring sensors while mobile agents (MA) can be used to reduce information shared between source nodes (SN) and send them to the base station (Sink). This work proposes to use communication architecture for wireless sensor networks based on the multi-agent system (MAS) to ensure optimal information collection. The collaboration of these agents generates a simple message that summarizes the important information in order to transmit it by a mobile agent. To reduce the size of the MA, the sensors of the network have been grouped into sectors. For each MA, we have established an optimal itinerary, consuming a minimum amount of energy with data aggregation efficiency in a minimum time. Successive simulations in large-scale wireless sensor networks through the SINALGO (published under a BSD license) simulator show the performance of the proposed method, in terms of energy consumption and package delivery rate. Full article

Cloud computing systems are popular in computing industry for their ease of use and wide range of applications. These systems offer services that can be used over the Internet. Due to their wide popularity and usage, cloud computing systems and their services often face issues resource management related challenges. In this paper, we present v-Mapper, a resource consolidation scheme which implements network resource management concepts through software-defined networking (SDN) control features. The paper makes three major contributions: (1) We propose a virtual machine (VM) placement scheme that can effectively mitigate the VM placement issues for data-intensive applications; (2) We propose a validation scheme that will ensure that a cloud service is entertained only if there are sufficient resources available for its execution and (3) We present a scheduling policy that aims to eliminate network load constraints. We tested our scheme with other techniques in terms of average task processing time, service delay and bandwidth usage. Our results demonstrate that v-Mapper outperforms other techniques and delivers significant improvement in system’s performance. Full article

One of the most important research topics nowadays is human action recognition, which is of significant interest to the computer vision and machine learning communities. Some of the factors that hamper it include changes in postures and shapes and the memory space and time required to gather, store, label, and process the pictures. During our research, we noted a considerable complexity to recognize human actions from different viewpoints, and this can be explained by the position and orientation of the viewer related to the position of the subject. We attempted to address this issue in this paper by learning different special view-invariant facets that are robust to view variations. Moreover, we focused on providing a solution to this challenge by exploring view-specific as well as view-shared facets utilizing a novel deep model called the sample-affinity matrix (SAM). These models can accurately determine the similarities among samples of videos in diverse angles of the camera and enable us to precisely fine-tune transfer between various views and learn more detailed shared facets found in cross-view action identification. Additionally, we proposed a novel view-invariant facets algorithm that enabled us to better comprehend the internal processes of our project. Using a series of experiments applied on INRIA Xmas Motion Acquisition Sequences (IXMAS) and the Northwestern–UCLA Multi-view Action 3D (NUMA) datasets, we were able to show that our technique performs much better than state-of-the-art techniques. Full article

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an evolving network architecture paradigm that focuses on the separation of control and data planes. SDN receives increasing attention both from academia and industry, across a multitude of application domains. In this article, we examine the current state of obtained knowledge on military SDN by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR). Through this work, we seek to evaluate the current state of the art in terms of research tracks, publications, methods, trends, and most active research areas. Accordingly, we utilize these findings for consolidating the areas of past and current research on the examined application domain, and propose directions for future research. Full article

This paper presents log likelihood ratio (LLR) based relay selection scheme for a cooperative amplify and forward relaying system. To evaluate the performance of the aforementioned system model, a three state Markov chain based fading environment has been presented to toggle among Rayleigh, Rician, and Nakagami-m fading environment. A simulation is carried out while assuming that there is no possibility of direct transmission from the source and destination terminal. Simulation results on the basis of Bit Error Rate (BER), Instantaneous Channel Capacity, and Outage probability have been presented and compared for different cases. In each case, the best performance of the proposed algorithm is obtained with a Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulation scheme. Full article

The cloud-computing concept has emerged as a powerful mechanism for data storage by providing a suitable platform for data centers. Recent studies show that the energy consumption of cloud computing systems is a key issue. Therefore, we should reduce the energy consumption to satisfy performance requirements, minimize power consumption, and maximize resource utilization. This paper introduces a novel algorithm that could allocate resources in a cloud-computing environment based on an energy optimization method called Sharing with Live Migration (SLM). In this scheduler, we used the Cloud-Sim toolkit to manage the usage of virtual machines (VMs) based on a novel algorithm that learns and predicts the similarity between the tasks, and then allocates each of them to a suitable VM. On the other hand, SLM satisfies the Quality of Services (QoS) constraints of the hosted applications by adopting a migration process. The experimental results show that the algorithm exhibits better performance, while saving power and minimizing the processing time. Therefore, the SLM algorithm demonstrates improved virtual machine efficiency and resource utilization compared to an adapted state-of-the-art algorithm for a similar problem. Full article

A conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) cannot have an infinite lifetime without a battery recharge or replacement. Energy Harvesting (EH), from environmental energy sources, is a promising technology to provide sustainable powering for a WSN. In this paper, we propose and investigate a novel predictive energy management framework that combines the Maximal Power Transferring Tracking (MPTT) algorithm, a predictive energy allocation strategy, and a high efficiency transmission power control mechanism: First, the MPTT optimal working point guarantees minimum power loss of the EH-WSN system; Then, by exactly predicting the upcoming available energy, the power allocation strategy regulates EH-nodes’ duty cycle accurately to minimize the power failure time; Ultimately, the transmission power control module further improves energy efficiency by dynamically selecting the optimum matching transmission power level with minimum energy consumption. A wind energy powered wireless sensor system has been equipped and tested to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Results indicate that compared with other predictive energy managers, the proposed mechanism incurs relatively low power failure time while maintaining a high-energy conversion rate. Full article

Frame repetition (FR) is a common temporal-domain tampering operator, which is often used to increase the frame rate of video sequences. Existing methods detect FR forgery by analyzing residual variation or similarity between video frames; however, these methods are easily interfered with by noise, affecting the stability of detection performance. This paper proposes a noise-level based detection method which detects the varying noise level over time to determine whether the video is forged by FR. Wavelet coefficients are first computed for each video frame, and median absolute deviation (MAD) of wavelet coefficients is used to estimate the standard deviation of Gaussian noise mixed in each video frame. Then, fast Fourier transform (FFT) is used to calculate the amplitude spectrum of the standard deviation curve of the video sequence, and to provide the peak-mean ratio (PMR) of the amplitude spectrum. Finally, according to the PMR obtained, a hard threshold decision is taken to determine whether the standard deviation bears periodicity in the temporal domain, in which way FR forgery can be automatically identified. The experimental results show that the proposed method ensures a large PMR for the forged video, and presents a better detection performance when compared with the existing detection methods. Full article

A data center network is vulnerable to suffer from concealed low-rate distributed denial of service (L-DDoS) attacks because its data flow has the characteristics of data flow delay, diversity, and synchronization. Several studies have proposed addressing the detection of L-DDoS attacks, most of them are only detect L-DDoS attacks at a fixed rate. These methods cause low true positive and high false positive in detecting multi-rate L-DDoS attacks. Software defined network (SDN) is a new network architecture that can centrally control the network. We use an SDN controller to collect and analyze data packets entering the data center network and calculate the Renyi entropies base on IP of data packets, and then combine them with the hidden Markov model to get a probability model HMM-R to detect L-DDoS attacks at different rates. Compared with the four common attack detection algorithms (KNN, SVM, SOM, BP), HMM-R is superior to them in terms of the true positive rate, the false positive rate, and the adaptivity. Full article