Jose Luis Fernandez-Marquez

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Institute of Services Science (ISS)

In the last decade, bio-inspired self-organising mechanisms have been applied to different domains, achieving results beyond traditional approaches. However, researchers usually use these mechanisms in an ad-hoc manner. In this way, their interpretation, definition, boundary (i.e. when one mechanism stops, and when another starts), and implementati...

Localizing dynamically changing diffuse event sources in real environments is still an open problem in wireless sensor networks (WSN). The dynamism of the environment, the energy limitations of the sensors, and the noise associated to the sensors' measurements pose a challenge that begs a realistic solution. In this article we propose a decentraliz...

This paper proposes Tuple MapReduce, a new foundational model extending MapReduce with the notion of tuples. Tuple MapReduce allows to bridge the gap between the low-level constructs provided by MapReduce and higher-level needs required by programmers, such as compound records, sorting or joins. This paper presents as well Pangool, an opensource fr...

Measuring the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires the collection of relevant and reliable data. To do so, Citizen Science can provide an essential source of non-traditional data for tracking progress towards the SDGs, as well as generate social innovations that enable such progress. At its core, citizen science relies...

Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among the millions of posts being added every day can be difficult, and in current approaches developing an automatic data analysis project requires time and technical skills. This work presents a new app...

We address the problem of estimating a photo's geographical location. Success in this estimation enables many impactful applications, like facilitating Disaster Management circumstances. However, this is also a very challenging task. Due to the complexity of the problem, we restrict the area of geolocation to a single city, treating geolocation as...

Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among millions of posts being posted every day can be difficult, and developing a data analysis project usually requires time and technical skills. This study presents an approach that provides flexible s...

Rapid impact assessment in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster is essential to provide adequate information to international organisations, local authorities, and first responders. Social media can support emergency response with evidence-based content posted by citizens and organisations during ongoing events. In the paper, we propose Tr...

Dataset used in the article "A Conceptual Probabilistic Framework for Annotation Aggregation of Citizen Science Data".

Rapid impact assessment in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster is essential to provide adequate information to international organisations, local authorities, and first responders. Social media can support emergency response with evidence-based content posted by citizens and organisations during ongoing events. In the paper, we propose Tr...

Over the last decade, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to science by collecting or analyzing data. This public participation in science, also known as citizen science, has contributed to significant discoveries and led to publications in major scientific journals. However, little attention has been paid to data quality issues. I...

Species identification can be challenging for biologists, healthcare practitioners and members of the general public. Snakes are no exception, and the potential medical consequences of venomous snake misidentification can be significant. Here, we collected data on identification of 100 snake species by building a week-long online citizen science ch...

Social Media provides a trove of information that, if aggregated and analysed appropriately can provide important statistical indicators to policy makers. In some situations these indicators are not available through other mechanisms. For example, given the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, it is essential for governments to have access to reliable data o...

Increase in access to mobile phone devices and social media networks has changed the way people report and respond to disasters. Community-driven initiatives such as Stand By Task Force (SBTF) or GISCorps have shown great potential by crowdsourcing the acquisition, analysis, and geolocation of social media data for disaster responders. These initia...

The use of social media to support emergency operators in the first hours of the response phases can improve the quality of the information available and awareness on ongoing emergency events. Social media contain both textual and visual information, in the form of pictures and videos. The problem related to the use of social media posts as a sourc...

E²mC aims to demonstrate the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowdsourced information within both the Rapid Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). Copernicus is a European Commission programme developing information services based on satellite eart...

BACKGROUND Wet markets are critical for food security and sustainable development in their respective regions. Due to their cultural significance, they attract numerous visitors and consequently generate tourist-geared information on the Web (ie, on social networks such as TripAdvisor). These data can be used to create a novel, international wet ma...

Background Wet markets are markets selling fresh meat and produce. Wet markets are critical for food security and sustainable development in their respective regions. Due to their cultural significance, they attract numerous visitors and consequently generate tourist-geared information on the Web (ie, on social networks such as TripAdvisor). These...

In the first hours of a disaster, up-to-date information about the area of interest is crucial for effective disaster management. However, due to the delay induced by collecting and analysing satellite imagery, disaster management systems like the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) are currently not able to provide information products u...

Citizen Cyberscience (CCS) projects are online projects that engage participants with no necessary prior scientific experience in online tasks of very varied types and that contribute to the scientific research in different domains. Many research studies confirm the usefulness of CCS projects to researchers while less has been done to explore their...

Analytics tools have been widely used over the last years for the development of web-based application and services. Analytics data allows improving user interfaces through planning, executing, and evaluating actions intended to increase user engagement. Measuring and improving user engagement in citizen science projects is not different from other...

Pervasive systems are intended to make use of services and components that they encounter in their environment. Such systems are naturally spatial in that they can only be understood in terms of the ways in which components meet and interact in space. Rather than treating spatiality separately from system components, researchers are starting to dev...

This paper presents The ONE-SAPERE simulator, the first simulator combining an opportunistic network environment simulator with a middleware for pervasive systems, the SAPERE Middleware, which has already been released for Android devices and PCs.

Context-aware pervasive software is responsive to various contexts and their changes. A faulty implementation of the context-aware features may lead to unpredictable behavior with adverse effects. In software testing, one of the most important research issues is to determine the sufficiency of a test suite to verify the software under test. Existin...

In this chapter, Jose Luis Fernandez-Marquez et al. propose an approach to engineering self-organizing software systems toward self-adaptation and resilience from an architectural point of view. They argue that the adaptation of complete systems is different from the adaptation of single components within the systems and propose an architectural ap...

Next generation of socio-technical infrastructures will be characterized by the presence of complex networks of pervasive systems, composed of thousands of heterogeneous devices consuming and producing high-volumes of interdependent data. Smart-cities represent an example of these future digital scenarios: by using wide area mobile ad-hoc networks...

Although the research area of self-organising systems is well established, their construction is often ad hoc. Consequently, such software is difficult reuse across applications that require similar functionality of have similar goals. The development of self-organising applications and, a fortiori, self-organising mobile applications is therefore...

Service-oriented programming has dramatically changed the way software applications are developped, promoting reusability of code and easing the design of complex applications. Actual techniques for automatic composition of services present several limitations to be used in the context of future pervasive scenarios: (1) limited scalability due to c...

A new category of services based on data propagation among mobile devices is evolving. Traditionally, distributed applications are engineered on top of a mobile infrastructure in an ad hoc manner that does not conform to standard software engineering practices, such as modularization and reuse. Furthermore, current service-oriented approaches are n...

As described in the previous chapter, self-organizing systems exhibit adaptation and resilience features, but the assessment and measurement of these features is not trivial, even if it would be very useful in order to quantify the adaptation and the resilience of different approaches and to compare systems. In this chapter, Matteo Risoldi, Jose Lu...

This paper discusses the notion of self-organising mechanisms, such as spreading or gossip, provided as services on top of which more complex applications can be built. Their functionality is provided as the result of the interactions among several entities, possibly distributed across several nodes. Self-organising services are either provided as...

This tutorial will first review the main bio-inspired self-organizing mechanisms available from the literature, such as gradient, gossip, or digital pheromone, explaining the links and relationships between them. The talk will then present these mechanisms under the form of design patterns, detailing what problem they address and what solution they...

This paper shows how to use a well defined set of self-organizing services for establishing and preserving a confidential and adaptive channel between two communicating entities on top of an ad-hoc mobile network.

This paper describes the notion of context-aware data flows sensitive to their environment, other nearby flows, propagating and behaving according to self-organising principles. This paves the way for a new category of spatially-situated pervasive services based on data propagation among mobile devices.

This paper presents Tuple MapReduce, a new foundational model extending MapReduce with the notion of tuples. Tuple MapReduce allows to bridge the gap between the low-level constructs provided by MapReduce and higher-level needs required by programmers, such as compound records, sorting, or joins. This paper shows as well Pangool, an open-source fra...

Nowadays, emergent technologies are providing new communication devices (e.g. mobile phones, PDS's, smart sensors, laptops) that form complex infrastructures that are not widely exploited due to their requirements such scalability, real-time responses, or failure tolerance. To deal with these features, a new software tendency is to provide entities...

Self-organising assembly systems (SOASs) are advanced assembly systems that play an active role in their own design and during production. Agentified modules participate in their own arrangement in the system layout, monitor themselves and self-adapt to production conditions. In previous works, we addressed the design phase of the assembly system....

Pervasive service ecosystems are a new par-adigm for the design of context-aware systems featur-ing adaptivity and self-awareness. A theoretical and practical framework has been proposed for address-ing these scenarios, taking primary inspirations from natural ecosystems and grounding upon two basic ab-stractions: "live semantic annotations" (LSAs)...

Investigations of self-organizing mechanisms, of-ten inspired by phenomena in natural or societal systems, have yielded a wealth of techniques for the self-adaptation of complex, large-and ultra-large-scale software systems. The principled design of self-adaptive software using prin-ciples of self-organization remains challenging. Several studies h...

The possibility to have millions of computational devices interconnected across urban environments opens up novel application areas. In such highly distributed scenarios, applications must gain awareness as a result of opportunistic encounters with co-located devices, a departure from traditional reasoning approaches. We envision situated awareness...

In large scale networks, agents must use partial knowledge obtained from local interactions to reason about their environment. They require efficient mechanisms to allow them to retrieve and aggregate information beyond their communication range. Even though proposals have been presented for gathering information in large scale wireless sensor netw...

This paper discusses the notion of “core bio-inspired services” - low-level services providing basic bio-inspired mechanisms, such as evaporation, aggregation or spreading - shared by higher-level services or applications. Design patterns descriptions of self-organising mechanisms, such as gossip, morphogenesis, or foraging, show that these higher-...

Pervasive service ecosystems are emerging as a new paradigm for understanding and designing future pervasive computing systems featuring high degrees of scale, openness, adaptivity and toleration of long-term evolution. A key issue in this context is making certain patterns of behaviour emerge without any supervision or design-time intention, and a...

Bio-inspired mechanisms have been extensively used in the last decade for solving optimisation problems and for decentralised control of sensors, robots or nodes in P2P systems. Different attempts at describing some of these mechanisms have been proposed, some of them under the form of design patterns. However, there is not so far a clear catalogue...

This article defines and analyzes a collection of algorithms for persistent storage of data at specific geographical zones exploiting the memory of mobile devices located in these areas. Contrarily to other approaches for data dissemination, our approach uses a viral programming model. Data performs an active role in the storage process. It acts as...

Today's software applications increasingly feature a great deal of openness, dynamism and unpredictable behavior, forcing to shift design and engineering from traditional, centralized approaches to nature-inspired, self-organizing techniques. Among the others, biology has been adopted as a source of inspiration to solve some of the issues proper of...

Localizing dynamically changing diffuse event sources in real environments is still an open problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The dynamism of the environment, the energy limitations of the sensors, and the noise associated to the sensor's measurements is a challenge that a realistic solution has to deal with. In this paper we propose a dec...

The optimisation in dynamic and noisy environments brings closer real-world optimisation. One interesting proposal to adapt the PSO for working in dynamic and noisy environments was the incorporation of an evaporation mechanism. The evaporation mechanism avoids the detection of environment changes, providing a continuous adaptation to the environme...

This paper studies the use of highly dynamic networks as infrastructures for persistent storage of data that offer services at specific geographical zones in a decentralized and distributed way. We propose a new algorithm, based on repulsion techniques, to self-organize the nodes that store and serve the information. In this work, we focus on the e...

Dealing with imprecise information is a common characteristic in real-world problems. Specifically, when the source of the information are physical sensors, a level of noise in the evaluation has to be assumed. Particle Swarm Optimization is a technique that presented a good behavior when dealing with noisy fitness functions. Nevertheless, the prob...

This paper presents a new exploration mechanism based on a heterogeneous multi-agent system that combines attractive and repulsive agents. We provide experimental results about the performance of our mechanism in dynamic environments when resources continuously appear and disappear.

This work extends the Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for working on dynamic environments. We propose an evaporation mechanism to solve the outdated memory problem. We empirically show that our evaporation mechanism is able to achieve self-adaption without any knowledge on when changes occur.

Investigations of self-organizing mechanisms, of-ten inspired by phenomena in natural or societal systems, have yielded a wealth of techniques for the self-adaptation of complex, large-and ultra-large-scale software systems. The principled design of self-adaptive software using prin-ciples of self-organization remains challenging. Several studies h...

Large and ultra-large scale software systems re-quire substantial self-adaptation capabilities. Investigations of self-organizing mechanisms, often inspired by phenomena occurring in natural or societal complex adaptive systems, have produced an array of self-adaptation techniques that are eminently scalable, since they build emergent and stable gl...