Fatos Xhafa

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnic University of Catalonia

Food surplus donation has emerged as a popular means to counter the food wastage issue that the world has been facing in recent years. The fact that this also addresses the food insecurity challenge is an added bonus. The matching of the surplus donors with the receivers needs the constant availability of willing volunteers to make this movement a...

In this paper, we present a novel framework for enriching time series data in smart cities by supplementing it with information from external sources via semantic data enrichment. Our methodology effectively merges multiple data sources into a uniform time series, while addressing difficulties such as data quality, contextual information, and time...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems in smart cities. With the support of open and real-time data, these networks of inter-connected vehicles constitute an `Internet of vehicles’ with the potential to significantly enhance citizens’ mobility and last-mile delivery in urban, peri-urban,...

Collective Intelligence for Smart Cities begins with an overview of the fundamental issues and concepts of smart cities. Surveying the current state-of-the-art research in the field, the book delves deeply into key smart city developments such as health and well-being, transportation, safety, energy, environment and sustainability. In addition, the...

Transport activities and citizen mobility have a deep impact on enlarged smart cities. By analyzing Big Data streams generated through Internet of Things (IoT) devices, this paper aims to show the efficiency of using IoT analytics, as an agile optimization input for solving real-time problems in smart cities. IoT analytics has become the main core...

With the popularization of satellite technology and the normal development of satellite use, the number of mission planning and operation of satellites has increased significantly, including large and intelligent satellites, as well as small and low-cost satellites. With the large-scale use of satellites, people’s demand for scheduling systems has...

Transport and citizens’ mobility (T&M) activities represent a key sector in the worldwide economies, contributing to social and economic progress in modern societies. T&M activities also constitute an important source of energy consumption, as well as environmental and social issues. In the face of sharp urbanization worldwide, metropolitan areas h...

Smart cities provide more benefits in terms of environment and increase the quality of life, efficiency in projects regarding smart cities, and solving urban problems (Benevolo, 2016). Internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data collective intelligence would be three key elements to complete and perfect smart cities. Hence, with those t...

Due to the special handling requirements for various project cargo orders, it is time-consuming for workers to search for such information manually. In addition, considering workers with different experiences in handling project cargo orders may affect the quality of the mobile crane selection. The improper crane used to handle the oversize cargo m...

Parking coordinates transportation and land use in urban areas as one of the most critical assets to bring revenues to cities. Averagely, in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Melbourne, parking coverage takes more than 31% of land use. Hence, an IoT-based advanced automobile parking navigation platform (IAPNP) is designed...

In this chapter, the concept of semantic data streams and semantic stream processing are discussed as topics of interest in the context of smart cities and collective intelligence. The discussion is done from the perspective of the semantic web. In order to do so, the semantic web technology basis is first elaborated. The RDF-Stream format is discu...

The concept of \"Smart City\” has been a proliferating topic in the past two decades. Among the widespread discussion on this concept, two main features could be observed. The first one aims to leverage information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures and innovative solutions to tackle citywide issues, including economic development,...

The city’s smart firefighting IoT platform mainly contains three components: fire monitoring, fire extinguishing, and fire management. In China, the city’s smart firefighting IoT platform serves as one of the most important IoT application platforms for nationwide IoT architecture implementation. In the chapter, a smart firefighting IoT platform wo...

In this chapter, one of the emerging technologies, namely blockchain, is discussed to create the foundation of technology and information management in the peer-to-peer network to enhance the functionalities and reliability of connected systems in smart cities. Three areas are involved in the blockchain discussion, namely (i) definition and overvie...

The current carbon-based energy network is undergoing changes and revolutions driven by the ever-growing concerns on carbon emissions and air pollutions and the safety and convenience of energy consumption. This global evolutionary transformation is toward a smart energy network as it is reinforced by the emergence of low-cost bandwidth and the rap...

In the general sense, a data stream can be defined as an unbound sequence of time-varying, coherent data, which is in the process of being transmitted. The broad definition shows many of the typical properties of data streams, which should be understood very clearly as they form the fundamentals of many challenges related to processing data streams...

Food donation is an absolute necessity for today’s society in order to counter the wastage of edible food. The key to this food movement is volunteer availability which aids in delivering the surplus food to a geographically distant receiver audience. Incentives attract a greater participation of volunteers who contribute to a greater food mobility...

With the emergence of fog and edge computing, new possibilities arise regarding the data-driven management of citizens’ mobility in smart cities. Internet of Things (IoT) analytics refers to the use of these technologies, data, and analytical models to describe the current status of the city traffic, to predict its evolution over the coming hours,...

In this final chapter, we outline a vision for a technological revolution in agriculture that would work to regain a sense of balance between food production and natural ecosystems. We promote an ecological engineering approach to crop production that draws on experience from the organic and conservation agriculture movements. However, we expand on...

In this introductory chapter we highlight some fundamental concepts, architectures and definitions related to IoT-based Computational Modeling for Next Generation Agro-ecosystems. We distinguish and discus the paradigms of Cloud-to-thing Continuum as a large digital ecosystem comprising IoT, Edge, Fog, and Cloud Computing, data cycles from data gat...

In this chapter, we study some research issues from IoT-based spectrum trading in Wireless Communication in a strategic setting. We consider the scenario in which there are multiple secondary users (such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), institutional organizations, foundations, etc.) having available un-utilized spectrum and multiple terti...

Food waste is currently a major challenge for the world. It is the precursor to several socioeconomic problems that are plaguing modern society. To counter and to, simultaneously, stand by the undernourished, surplus food redistribution has surfaced as a viable solution. Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-mediated food redistribution i...

Fog and Edge computing are opening up new opportunities to implement novel features of mobility, edge intelligence and end-user support. The successful implementation and deployment of Fog layers, as part of Cloud-to-thing-computing, largely depends on optimized allocation of tasks and applications to Fog and Edge nodes. Similarly as in other large...

The fast development in IoT and Cloud technologies has propelled the emergence of a variety of computing paradigms, among which Fog and Edge computing are salient computing technologies. Such new paradigms are opening up new opportunities to implement novel application scenarios, not possible before, by supporting features of mobility, edge intelli...

Food waste is a major challenge for the present world. It is the precursor to several socioeconomic problems that are plaguing the modern society. To counter the same and to, simultaneously, stand by the undernourished, surplus food redistribution has surfaced as a viable solution. Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-mediated food redis...

The interest of Industry 4.0 in Smart Contracts and blockchain technologies is growing up day by day. Smart Contracts have enabled new kinds of interactions whereby contractors can even fully automate processes they agree on. This technology is really appealing in Internet of Things (IoT) domain because smart devices generate events for software ag...

Saline water covers approximately 360000000 km <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , approximately 71% of Earth’s surface and 90% of Earth’s biosphere. The ocean contains 97% of Earth’s water, and oceanographers have stated that less than 5% of the World Ocean has been explored. The...

In the Internet of Things (IoT) + Fog + Cloud architecture, with the unprecedented growth of IoT devices, one of the challenging issues that needs to be tackled is to allocate Fog service providers (FSPs) to IoT devices, especially in a game-theoretic environment. Here, the issue of allocation of FSPs to the IoT devices is sifted with game-theoreti...

We develop and extend a line of recent works on the design of mechanisms for heterogeneous tasks assignment problem in ’crowdsourcing’. The budgeted market we consider consists of multiple task requesters and multiple IoT devices as task executers. In this, each task requester is endowed with a single distinct task along with the publicly known bud...

In this chapter, we study some research issues from IoT-based crowdsourcing in a strategic setting. We have considered the scenario in IoT-based crowdsourcing, where there are multiple task requesters and multiple IoT devices as task executors. Each task requester has multiple tasks, with the tasks having start and finish times. Based on the start...

This edited book is based on the research papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Intelligent, Interactive Systems and Applications (IISA2019), held on June 28–30, 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand. Interactive intelligent systems (IIS) are systems that interact with human beings, media or virtual agents in intelligent computing environment...

This book highlights the latest research findings, methods and techniques, as well as challenges and solutions related to Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing (UPC). In this regard, it employs both theoretical and practical perspectives, and places special emphasis on innovative, mobile and internet services. With the proliferation of wireless techn...

The fast development of Internet of Things (IoT) computing and technologies has prompted a decentralization of Cloud-based systems. Indeed, sending all the information from IoT devices directly to the Cloud is not a feasible option for many applications with demanding requirements on real-time response, low latency, energy-aware processing and secu...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a disruptive technology for the current and future of computing and communication. IoT is characterized by a variety of heterogeneous technologies and devices able to be connected to the Internet. Current and future research and development efforts aim at adding artificial intelligence to IoT systems, ena...

In the IoT+Fog+Cloud architecture, with the ever increasing growth of IoT devices, allocation of IoT devices to the Fog service providers will be challenging and needs to be addressed properly in both the strategic and non-strategic settings. In this paper, we have addressed this allocation problem in strategic settings. The framework is developed...

With the fast development of large-scale Internet-based systems and their penetration into every human life activity, trust, trustworthiness and trustworthy computing have become cross-cutting features of all such systems being business, e-commerce, social networking, collaborative systems, etc. Indeed, users’activity in Internet-based systems each...

PhotoDNA is a perceptual fuzzy hash technology designed and developed by Microsoft. It is deployed by all major big data service providers to detect Indecent Images of Children (IIOC). Protecting the privacy of individuals is of paramount importance in such images. Microsoft claims that a PhotoDNAhash cannot be reverse engineered into the original...

We investigate the problem of hiring experts from outside of the hospital(s) in e-healthcare through mechanism design with and without money. We handle the following scenarios: (1) multiple patients and multiple experts with patients having zero budget and (2) single or multiple patients and multiple experts with patient(s) having some positive bud...

Central to many location-based services is the problem of processing concurrent continuous range queries over a large scale of moving objects. Most relevant works to this problem mainly investigate the centralized search algorithms based on a single server for handling range queries. However, due to the limited resources of a single server, these a...

Currently we are witnessing a rapid integration of social networks and cloud computing, especially on storing social media contents on cloud storage due to its cheap management and easy accessing at any time and from any place. However, how to securely store and share social media contents such as pictures/videos among social groups is still a very...

The fast development in the production of small, low-cost satellites is propelling an important increase in satellite mission planning and operations projects. Central to satellite mission planning is the resolution of scheduling problem for an optimised allocation of user requests for efficient communication between operations teams at the ground...

In the age of pervasive computing and social networks, it has become commonplace to retrieve opinions about digital contents in games. In the case of multi-player, open world gaming, in fact even in “old-school” single players games, it is evident the need for adding new features in a game depending on users comments and needs. However this is a ch...

Our daily life is characterized by the continuous interaction with many devices and technologies, which build a digital ecosystem around each person. In this context, if, for example, it is necessary to investigate the commission of a crime, the adoption of digital forensic sciences is of fundamental importance. These disciplines are in fact concer...

In this paper two new ways for efficient secure outsourcing the decryption of key-policy attribute-based encryption (\(KP-ABE\)) with energy efficiency are proposed. Based on an observation about the permutation property of the access structure for the attribute based encryption schemes, we propose a high efficient way for outsourcing the decryptio...

With the fast development of mobile computing and increasing computing capacities of mobile devices, new collaborative applications and platforms are appearing to support collaboration on the move. Indeed, nowadays, members of a team can be not only geographically distributed but they can also work anytime and anywhere thanks to the use of mobile d...

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) represent a family of powerful machine learning-based techniques used to solve many real-world problems. The various applications of ANNs can be summarized into classification or pattern recognition, prediction and modeling. As with other machine learning techniques, ANNs are getting momentum in the Big Data era fo...

Number of devices needing wireless communication is more than ever. The main ingredient of wireless communication-the spectrum-is limited and due to the unprecedented growth of smart devices the demand for spectrum is high. To serve all the devices needing wireless communication, intelligent spectrum sensing and its trading has been the hot topic o...

Social Networks Analysis has become a common trend among scholars and researchers worldwide. A great number of companies, institutions and organisations are interested in social networks data mining. Information published on many social networks, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram constitute an important asset in many application fields, overall s...

In this paper some issues related to the efficiency of processing IoT data are addressed through semantic data enrichment and edge computing. The aim is to cope with big data streams at various levels, from the lowest level of data capturing to the highest level of Cloud platforms and applications. The objective is thus to extract full knowledge co...

Nowadays security concerns of computing devices are growing significantly. This is due to ever increasing number of devices connected to the network. In this context, optimising the performance of intrusion detection systems (IDS) is a key research issue to meet demanding requirements on security of complex and large scale networks. Within the IDS...

Cloud Computing services are essential to modern society. The increasing number of people and organisations using these types of services results in a higher demand in datacenters, which in turn, is raising energy consumption and carbon footprint. Reducing energy consumption has become a subject of interest to many researchers, who approach the pro...

Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is the next emerging technology in cloud computing research. Small clouds operating as a group may exploit the DaaS efficiently to perform the substantial amount of work. In this paper, an auction framework is studied and evaluated when the small clouds are strategic in nature. We present the system model and formal definit...

Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is the next emerging technology in cloud computing research. Small clouds operating as a group may exploit the DaaS efficiently to perform the substantial amount of work. In this paper, an auction framework is studied and evaluated when the small clouds are strategic in nature. We present the system model and formal definit...

This book presents original contributions on the theories and practices of emerging Internet, Data and Web technologies and their applications in businesses, engineering and academia. As a key feature, it addresses advances in the life-cycle exploitation of data generated by digital ecosystem technologies. The Internet has become the most prolifera...

These transactions publish research in computer-based methods of computational collective intelligence (CCI) and their applications in a wide range of fields such as performance optimization in IoT, big data, reliability, privacy, security, service selection, QoS and machine learning. This thirty-third issue contains 9 selected papers which present...

This book presents the proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent, Interactive Systems and Applications (IISA2018), held in Hong Kong, China on June 29–30, 2018. It consists of contributions from diverse areas of intelligent interactive systems (IIS), such as: autonomous systems; pattern recognition and vision systems; e-enabled sys...

Modern online education (eLearning) needs are being evolved accordingly with more and more demanding pedagogical and technological requirements. On one hand, advanced learning resources, such as interactive video-lectures, 3D simulations, serious games and virtual laboratories are based on costly computational infrastructures. On the other hand, eL...

Orchestration is a well known topic in old web services literature. Anyway, what Orchestration means for Cloud services is not yet Clear. Services, especially at lower layers of Cloud Architecture, are complex: Scientific literature has focused on the problem of dealing with proper, efficient and even optimal allocation of Resources when deploying...

The fast development of IoT in general and wearable smart sensors in particular in the context of wellness and healthcare are demanding for definition of specific infrastructure supporting real time data analysis for anomaly detection, event identification, situation awareness just to mention few. The explosion in the development and adoption of th...

We develop and extend a line of recent works on the design of mechanisms for heterogeneous tasks assignment problem in 'crowdsourcing'. The budgeted market we consider consists of multiple task requesters and multiple IoT devices as task executers; where each task requester is endowed with a single distinct task along with the publicly known budget...

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospitals. Earlier, this interest- ing healthcare scenario of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts o...

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospitals. Earlier, this interesting healthcare scenario of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts of...

Throughout the past decade, there has been an extensive research on scheduling the hospital resources such as the operation theatre(s) (OTs) and the experts (such as nurses, doctors etc.) inside the hospitals. With the technological growth, mainly advancement in communication media (such as smartphones, video conferencing, smartwatches etc.) one ma...

Nowadays Smart systems have become commonplace in our lives: domotics, social networks, automotive, smart application, virtual reality are having each time more and more users. One recent example of smart spaces can be found in domains like cultural heritages sites, museums or libraries where the use of new technologies grows up fast, namely, distr...

Natural disasters cannot be predicted well in advance, but it is still possible to decrease the loss of life and mitigate the damages, exploiting some peculiarities that distinguish them. Smart collection, integration, and analysis of data produced by distributed sensors and services are key elements for understanding the context and supporting dec...

Big Data has become the cornerstone of modern knowledge based system. However, taking advantage of the knowledge found in big data sets requires advanced solutions to store, access and analyze data in a feasible way, either online, offline or both. Such solutions comprise on the one hand a better understanding of computational needs for big data an...

Number of devices needing wireless communication is more than ever. The main ingredient of wireless communication-the spectrum-is limited and due to the unprecedented growth of smart devices the demand for spectrum is high. To serve all the devices needing wireless communication, intelligent spectrum sensing and its trading has been the hot topic o...

Scientific community is now spending more and more efforts in defining and developing effective methodologies and technologies in order to easy design and development of Cloud solutions. In order to exploit the features of existing Cloud services and Resources Orchestration becomes a hot research topic. In this scenario, Cloud Designers promote reu...

In this paper, we compare the performance of Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) for normal and uniform distributions of mesh clients considering two Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) architectures. As evaluation metrics, we consider throughput, delay, jitter and fairness index metrics. For simulations,...

Nowadays, it is very popular to make friends, share photographs, and exchange news throughout social networks. Social networks widely expand the area of people’s social connections and make communication much smoother than ever before. In a social network, there are many social groups established based on common interests among persons, such as lea...

In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of different routing protocols in a many-to-one communication within a Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN). Seven groups with three stationary sensor nodes sense the temperature, humidity and wind speed and send these data to a stationary destination node that collect them for statistical a...

During the past recent years there is an increasing interests in Cloud Services Orchestration. Efficient and even optimal allocation of Cloud resources is one of the main problems on which the scientific and development community has focused their effort. Some proposals for standards and middleware are now available for Cloud users and designers. H...

Big Data has become an enabling technology for many of the today’s innovations. Given the exponential rate at which the data is produced there is a clear necessity for scalable solutions to control the overwhelming flow of new streams of information and extract information out of DaaS Clouds. In this paper we review and analyze some VM deployment m...

The future of the Internet is to be found in Internet of Things (IoT) where every device communicates with others by making simple but intelligent decisions. To leverage the power of IoT, smart devices and objects need to be endowed with intelligent capabilities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate a selected Artificial Intelligence (...

Data as a Service (DaaS) is the next emerging technology in cloud computing research. Small clouds operating as a group may exploit the DaaS efficiently to perform substantial amount of work. In this paper an auction framework is studied when the small clouds are strategic in nature. We present the system model and formal definition of the problem....

Monitoring users’ emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. In the learning context, emotions can be used to increase students’ attention as well as to improve memory and reasoning. In this context, tutors should be prepared to create affective learning situations and encourage collaborative knowle...

During the last decade, scheduling the healthcare services (such as staffs and OTs) inside the hospitals have assumed a central role in healthcare. Recently, some works are addressed in the direction of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) for the critical healthcare scenarios from outside of the medical unit, in both strategic and non-st...

This book gathers the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Broad-Band Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications, held on November 8–10, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. Information networking is currently undergoing a rapid evolution. Different kinds of networks with different characteristics are emerging and being integrated in he...

This book presents the latest, innovative research findings on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud, and Internet Computing. It gathers the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, held on November 8–10, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. These computing technologies have rapidly established themselves as...

This book presents research papers from diverse areas on novel Intelligent Systems and Interactive Systems and Applications. It gathers selected research papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent and Interactive Systems and Applications (IISA2017), which was held on June 17–18, 2017 in Beijing, China. Interactive Intellige...

In this paper, aiming at providing secure cloud data sharing services in cloud storage, we propose a scalable and controllable cloud data sharing framework for cloud users: Scanf. Towards proposing this framework, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive: PRE+, which can be seen as the dual of traditional proxy re-encryption (PRE) primitive. All...