Abstract:Starting from this issue, we will publish one or more feature articles in the first issue of IJSI each year. This paper or these papers will serve the purpose similar to feature articles of some contemporary journals. They will probably not focus on reporting research results of the author(s), but will focus on commenting last year's progress of some selected research domain or subject and looking into the future development of this domain or subject in the coming year. These papers will form a special column which will get the common title "message of the spring". We announce our plan of publishing "message of the spring" also with the purpose of inviting live contributions to this special column. The first message of the spring published in this issue is the paper "Understanding Cognition through Synthesis and Analysis" of Christian Freksa. I hope all of our readers will like it and benefit a lot from it.

Abstract:This article discusses the interdisciplinary research area of cognitive science. It presents methods and approaches to investigating cognitive processes. Spatial cognition as a subfield of cognitive science is used to show how mental processes are connected with the physical realm through perception and action. These bridges between physical and mental permit a variety of rather distinct approaches that contribute to the investigation of the cognitive processes involved. Particular attention is given to the role of artificial intelligence approaches to help discovering cognitive processing principles. The article discusses the interplay between synthetic and analytic approaches to cognitive science and emphasizes the complementary strengths of these approaches. It shows how the environment, the context of the specific situation, and the task can reduce the cognitive effort to be taken. The trade-off between general abstract representations and specific concrete representations is shown. The power of virtual environments for testing and understanding models of cognition is demonstrated. Numerous examples are given.

Abstract:The Internet provides a global open infrastructure for exchanging and sharing of various resource all over the world. The rapid development and wide application of the Internet makes it a new mainstream platform to use, develop, deploy and execute software systems and applications. With the vision of "Internet as a computer", many technical initiatives such as pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and cloud computing emerges on this open and dynamic environment. In order to support the various new application styles and accommodate the fundamental change of the underlying infrastructure, many specific software technologies such as service-oriented architecture are proposed for current practices. While these technologies are useful and widely accepted, they have not formed a systematic solution as matured as the object-oriented technology, as a uniformed software methodology and technology system is yet to be developed.

Abstract:Computing paradigms have evolved towards integrating small and personal computing devices with large-scale and resource-sharing computing infrastructures, such as services and cloud computing (SCC) platforms during the past two decades to provide users anytime, anywhere computing capability with more flexibility, richer computing resources, more cost-effectiveness, lower risks of system failures, and less management and maintenance effort. Situation-aware (SA) applications in SCC environments have the capability to adapt SCC systems to situation changes to facilitate better human-computer interactions and continuous system availability, and satisfactory quality-of-service (QoS) for the applications. Mission-critical applications in many domains usually require situation awareness, and have started to incorporate it in SCC platforms due to the need of rapidly reconfiguring and integrating systems owned and operated by various organizations for sharing information and coordinating operations. In this paper, the concepts and characteristics of SCC and situation awareness (SAW), and the challenges and current state of the art in developing SA applications in SCC environments are discussed. Our research in this area, including the development of Adaptable Situation-aware Secure Service-based (AS3) systems and Adaptive Service-Based Systems (ASBS) with QoS Monitoring and Adaptation (M/A), is presented. Future research in this area is discussed.

Abstract:Internetware has been an emerging software paradigm to best support computing in the Internet era. Internetware emphasises accommodating the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of Internet, which directly and indirectly relates software evolvability. This paper observes that evolving non-Internetware software into the Internetware paradigm and evolving software within Internetware will be two main research and practical issues, and hence proposes an integrated approach to address these two issues. The proposed framework is based a three-dimension structure, with System Functions, System Quality and System models as dimensions. With this framework, evolving software into internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing the qualities of existing software and evolving software within Internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing software functions. The involved prototype tool, working examples and experiments conducted, are used to illustrate the proposed approach.

Abstract:Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a new software delivery model with Multi-Tenancy Architecture (MTA). An SaaS system is often mission critical as it often supports a large number of tenants, and each tenant supports a large number of users. This paper proposes a scalable index management algorithm based on B+ tree but with automated redundancy and recovery management as the tree maintains two copies of data. The redundancy and recovery management is done at the SaaS level as data are duplicated with tenant information rather than at the PaaS level where data are duplicated in chunks. Using this approach, an SaaS system can scale out or in based on the dynamic workload. This paper also uses tenant similarity measures to cluster tenants in a multi-level scalability architecture where similar tenants can be grouped together for effcient processing. The scalability mechanism also includes an automated migration strategies to enhance the SaaS performance. The proposed scheme with automated recovery and scalability has been simulated, the results show that the proposed algorithm can scale well with increasing workloads.

Abstract:Internetware applications are context-aware. They adapt their behavior based on environmental changes. However, faulty adaptation may arise when these applications face unanticipated situations. Such adaptation faults can be difficult to detect at design time. One promising approach is to statically analyze model-based context-aware applications exhaustively for all potential faults. However, it suffers from expressiveness and precision problems. To address these limitations, we propose in this paper a dynamic adaptation model (AM) approach. AM offers increased expressive power to model complex adaptation rules, and guarantees soundness in its fault detection. In addition, AM deploys an incremental rule evaluation (IRE) technique to cater for context-aware applications, such that it can effciently handle environmental changes in its fault detection. We evaluated AM using both simulated and real-world experiments with two context-aware applications. The experimental results confirmed that AM can detect real faults missed by existing work, and avoid numerous false warnings that were misreported otherwise.

Abstract:The past few decades witnessed a flurry of research activities in the area of Computer-Aided Geometric Design (CAGD), especially with relation to subdivision surfaces, where particular attention is given to the interpolation of curves or network of curves by such surfaces. This paper traces the major research landmarks pursued in this domain to achieve interpolation of points and curves by such surfaces, specifically by means of polygonal complexes. Along the way, the paper touches upon related research directions, especially the additional interpolation of normal vectors and curvatures following the same approach and under the same settings.