Nik Bessis

Edge Hill University · Department of Computer Science

The occurrence of natural and man-made disasters usually leads to significant social and economic disruption, as well as high numbers of casualties. Such occurrences are difficult to predict due to the huge number of parameters with mutual interdependencies which need to be investigated to provide reliable predictive capabilities. In this work, we...

To be successful, a search algorithm needs to balance exploration and exploitation. In Genetic Algorithms (GAs) this is achieved through proportionate selection of individuals and reproduction operators. GAs can suffer premature convergence, when the diversity of the population decreases over time and search gets trapped in a local optimum, returni...

A quick decision-making process in response and management of epidemics has been the most common approach, as accurate and relevant decisions have been demonstrated to have beneficial impacts on life preservation as well as on global and local economies. However, any disaster or epidemic is rarely represented by a set of single and linear parameter...

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address "soft" trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-se...

This visionary paper outlines a future intelligent building office space room system that seeks to ensure that the users of a rentable and/or shared office space do not perform actions that are likely to compromise IT security. We propose that a novel room agent leverages the emergent "smart" city paradigm so as to form an accurate a measure as pos...

We present iPACS, an automated physical access control system as a cloud service for controlling users activity, navigation and access in large residential infrastructures (e.g. apartment buildings, shopping malls). The main idea is to install on buildings, beacon Bluetooth radio transmitters that broadcast their identifier to nearby devices (e.g....

A forum or social media post can express multiple emotions, such as love, joy oranger. Emotion classification has been proven useful for measuring aspects suchas user satisfaction. Despite its usefulness, research in emotion classificationis limited, because the task is multi-label and publicly available data sets andlexica are very limited. A numb...

Today, Internet users expect web applications to be fast, performant and always available. With the emergence of Internet of Things, data collection and the analysis of streams have become more and more challenging. Behind the scenes, application owners and cloud service providers work to meet these expectations, yet, the problem of how to most eff...

Advances in computer networking, storage technologies, and high‐performance computing are helping global communities of researchers to address increasingly ambitious problems in Science collaboratively. E‐Science is the “science of this age”; it is realized through collaborative scientific enquiry which requires the utilization of non‐trivial amoun...

In urban environments there are daily issues of traffic congestion which city authorities need to address. Real-time analysis of traffic flow information is crucial for efficiently managing urban traffic. This paper aims to conduct traffic analysis using UAV-based videos and deep learning techniques. The road traffic video is collected by using a p...

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is an important natural language processing task that allows to extract the sentiment expressed in a review for parts or aspects of a product or service. Extracting all aspects for a domain without manual rules or annotations is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a method for this task based on a Convolutio...

The area of sustainable green smart computing highlights key challenges towards reducing cost and carbon dioxide emissions due to the high-energy consumption of Cloud data centres. Here, we focus on the Cloud virtual machine (VM) scheduling that is usually based on simple algorithms, e.g. VM placement on nodes with low memory usage. This approach f...

Building upon cloud, IoT and smart sensors technologies we design and de- velop an IoT as a Service (iTaaS) framework, that transforms a user device (e.g. a smart phone) to an IoT gateway that allows for fast and efficient data streams transmission to the cloud. We develop a two-fold solution, based on micro-services for the IoT (users’ smart devic...

The continuous creation of data has posed new research challenges due to its complexity, diversity and volume. Consequently, Big Data has increasingly become a fully recognised scientific field. This article provides an overview of the current research efforts in Big Data science, with particular emphasis on its applications, as well as theoretical...

This work presents the testing requirements for cloud services including unit and integration testing by identifying services that could communicate with each other according to their APIs. We also present the Elvior TestCast T3 (TTCN-3) testing tool that provides an efficient and easy to use solution for automating functional tests. This allows in...

In this article, we introduce a method for analysing specific dynamical properties associated with the movement of people on a two-dimensional (compact) space. We focus on a variety of features defined by the topology and dynamics of the system to investigate human dynamics in enclosed spaces. This can potentially have significant applications with...

In recent years, different kinds of natural hazards or man-made disasters happened that were diversified and difficult to control with heavy casualties. In this work, we focus on the rapid and systematic evacuation of large-scale densities of people after disasters to reduce loss in an effective manner. The optimal evacuation planning is a key chal...

Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE) is one of the emerging research areas that involves a number of research challenges in engineering service-oriented systems, the architecture and computing paradigm as well as the development and management of service-oriented systems. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) exploits services as the fundamental e...

Combinatorial optimization problems are typically NP-hard, due to their intrinsic complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel chaotic particle swarm optimization algorithm (CS-PSO), which combines the chaos search method with the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) for solving combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, in the ini...

An artificial intelligence strategy for the localization and monitoring of pollution-caused events caused by contamination in a lake, of a system consisting of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) and a network of wireless beacons is proposed and evaluated. Particularly the event of algae bloom is considered. For this purpose, the path planning of t...

This work presents the testing requirements for cloud services including unit and integration testing by identifying services that could communicate with each other according to their APIs. We also present the Elvior TestCast T3 (TTCN-3) testing tool that provides an efficient and easy to use solution for automating functional tests. This allows in...

Reduction of energy consumption in Cloud computing datacenters today is a hot a research topic, as these consume large amounts of energy. Furthermore, most of the energy is used inefficiently because of the improper usage of computational resources such as CPU, storage and network. A good balance between the computing resources and performed worklo...

In Cloud systems, Virtual Machines (VMs) are scheduled to hosts according to their instant resource usage (e.g. to hosts with most available RAM) without considering their overall and long-term utilization. Also, in many cases, the scheduling and placement processes are computational expensive and affect performance of deployed VMs. In this work, w...

Mining large amounts of unstructured data for extracting meaningful, accurate, and actionable information, is at the core of a variety of research disciplines including computer science, mathematical and statistical modelling, as well as knowledge engineering. In particular, the ability to model complex scenarios based on unstructured datasets is a...

Cloud computing and the future Internet concept highlight new requirements for the software engineering phases including testing and validation of modular web services. A major reason is because cloud applications are developed by services belonging to different providers, thus making software testing a really challenging issue. In this work, we pr...

The identification of non-genuine or malicious messages poses a variety of challenges due to the continuous changes in the techniques utilised by cyber-criminals. In this article, we propose a hybrid detection method based on a combination of image and text spam recognition techniques. In particular, the former is based on sparse representation-bas...

The various forms and tremendous number of spam emails have brought great challenges to accurate email classification. In this paper, we present a behavior- and time-feature-based email classification method. Based on email logs, email social networks are built through the extraction of entities and relations from the email records using the MapRed...

Participation in social sensing applications is challenged by privacy threats. Large-scale access to citizens’ data allow surveillance and discriminatory actions that may result in segregation phenomena in society. On the contrary are the benefits of accurate computing analytics required for more informed decision-making, more effective policies an...

Today, cloud computing applications are rapidly constructed by services belonging to different cloud providers and service owners. This work presents the inter-cloud elasticity framework, which focuses on cloud load balancing based on dynamic virtual machine reconfiguration when variations on load or on user requests volume are observed. We design...

In order to fully utilize all potential available network resources and make the interoperability of systems possible, we propose to integrate cloud computing and peer-to-peer (P2P) computing environments together. We utilize the mobile multi-agent technology to construct an effective hierarchical integration model named Cloud-P2P. As the original...

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are predicted to have a big impact on the logistics industry. However, currently, IoT is characterized by a diversity of standards and protocols. To make different IoT sensors and other devices interoperate, IoT Brokers are employed to facilitate decoupling of communicating IoT devices using the publish–subscri...

Over the latest years due to the emergency of new requirements in the area of healthcare domain, the software to data cloud model attracted significant attention by bridging the gap between cloud service deployment and sensitive data storage and manipulation. In particular, in FI-STAR FP7 we develop innovative cloud services for the healthcare doma...

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) logistics applications necessitates the availability of new generation 'brokers' to bridge the smart objects to each other and to the enterprise world (IT systems). Such brokers need to be able to cope with the diversity of the IoT objects in their environment, in terms of intelligence and communication...

Modern cloud computing applications developed from different interoperable services that are interfacing with each other in a loose coupling approach. This work proposes the concept of the Virtual Machine (VM) cluster migration, meaning that services could be migrated to various clouds based on different constraints such as computational resources...

In latest years, there is a corresponding growth for cloud computing services, especially for those that can be offered as modular components in order to construct Future Internet (FI) applications. In addition, the emergence of inter-clouds as the mean to achieve utilization of various services available from different providers highlights new res...

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to extract and assess influence relations between concepts, based on a variation of the Kuramoto Model. The initial evaluation focusing on an unstructured dataset provided by the abstracts and articles freely available from PubMed [7], shows the potential of our approach, as well as suggesting its applicab...

In this chapter, we shall present two case studies based on large unstructured datasets. The former specifically considers the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), which is the most common depression assessment tool, suggesting the severity and type of depression an individual may be suffering from. In particular, we shall assess a method which ap...

Broadcast schemes play an important role in the performance of mobile ad hoc networks, which are a clear example of ubiquitous wireless multi-hop networks where nodes collaborate in a distributed way. They are widely used as a dissemination mechanism and as a part of the discovery phase of routing protocols. The simple flooding algorithm is the usu...

Sensor technologies have been widely used to make transportation clean, efficient, connected, and safe. Roadside wireless sensor and networking technology represents a cost-effective solution and can leverage the deployment of the system as a whole. Sensors installed in cars continuously gather important information, such as air bags, distance dete...

The aim of this work is to explore the potential of visualization in order to visualize and manage risks and threats by performing security data analysis. We perform a an analysis of data visualization for identifying and understanding security threat and identify data set(s) to be used with a visualization library in order to visualize activities...

The present work explores theoretical threads which may be used to inform the design of interactive systems that exhibit digital materiality. The research is motivated by current thinking on sociomateriality and distributed organizing as populated in different scholarships. From the range of conceptual foundations, the paper picks on the concept of...

Mental disorders impose significant socio-economic and geo-political challenges which, if not addressed, have the potential to overwhelm the ability of healthcare systems globally to accommodate the growing demands both in human and resource management terms. From a treatment perspective there is a need to implement multi-modal systems where patien...

The new version of the Internet Protocol (IP) known as the Internet Of Things (IoT) or IPv6 has significantly increased the IP address space from around 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses to around 340 trillion new IPv6 identifiers. This large pool of addresses ensures the continued expansion of the Internet in the future. IoT extends the human-centric vie...

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs), which allow communications between vehicles and with the road infrastructure, have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade. Many routing protocols have been proposed for VANET and their performance is normally evaluated using simulation-based studies. However, conducting reliable simulation studies is not...

Disastrous events are one of the most challenging applications of multi-hop ad hoc networks, due to possible damages of existing telecommunication infrastructure. The deployed cellular communication infrastructure might be partially or completely destroyed after a natural disaster. Multi-hop ad hoc communication is an interesting alternative to dea...

This survey paper is intended to provide an overview of the main ad hoc paradigms that can be applied to disaster response networks, highlighting their applicability to important tasks in disaster relief operations. In this way, we also review the main works found in the literature which employed ad hoc networks in disaster scenarios. Finally, we p...

The discovery and integration of big data and Internet of Things (IoTs) highlight new challenges in the area of risks. This work focuses on the analysis of literature review approaches by presenting a study that includes works for resource discovery and data integration, social search engines, ranking techniques, and social graphs in order to provi...

Tactical Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are widely deployed in military organizations that have critical needs of communication even with the absence of fixed infrastructure. The lack of communication infrastructure and dynamic topology makes MANETs vulnerable to a wide range attacks. Tactical military operations are among the prime users of ad-ho...

The topological and dynamical properties of real-world networks have attracted extensive research from a variety of multi-disciplinary fields. They, in fact, model typically big datasets which pose interesting challenges, due to their intrinsic size and complex interactions, as well as the dependencies between their different sub-parts. Therefore,...

In this paper, we focus on proposing tools for enabling scientists analyze and interpret large-scale datasets about earthquakes in a way which will complement current analytical tools and thinking thus, complement current effort on understanding the event itself. Apart from briefing current trends on analytical techniques we focus on illustrating t...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that aims to represent the physical world, change the way we interact with the things around us. IoT describes every system through uniquely identifiable and interconnected objects (things). Things have the capacity for sensing, processing or actuating information about entities available from wi...

Over the years, more cloud computing systems have been developed providing flexible interfaces for inter-cloud interaction. This work approaches the concept of inter-cloud by utilizing APIs, open source specifications and exposed interfaces from cloud platforms such as OpenStack, OpenNebula and others. Despite other works in the area of inter-cloud...

The extraction of meaningful, accurate, and relevant information is at the core of Big Data research. Furthermore, the ability to obtain an insight is essential in any decision making process, even though the diverse and complex nature of big data-sets raises a multitude of challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the automat...

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to define semi-automatically fuzzy partition rules to provide a powerful and accurate insight into cardiac arrhythmia. In particular, we define a text mining approach applied to a large dataset consisting of the freely available scientific papers provided by PubMed. The information extracted is then integr...

Inter-cloud is an approach that facilitates scalable resource provisioning across multiple cloud infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on the performance optimization of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using the meta-scheduling paradigm to achieve an improved job scheduling across multiple clouds. We propose a novel inter-cloud job scheduling...

Evaluation The evaluation was carried out on two data-sets as discussed in [2, 3], namely a data set containing information regarding air accidents and near-misses, and another data set containing the seismeic activity in the Mediterranean regions. These were organised as a collection of both structured and unstructured data. The best reduced netwo...

Self-adaptation provides software with flexibility to different behaviours (configurations) it incorporates and the (semi-)autonomous ability to switch between these behaviours in response to changes. To empower clouds with the ability to capture and respond to quality feedback provided by users at runtime, we propose a reputation guided genetic sc...

Communications among crewmembers in rescue teams and among victims are crucial to relieve the consequences and damages of a disaster situation. A common communication system for establishing real time communications between the elements (victims, crewmembers, people living in the vicinity of the disaster scenario, among others) involved in a disast...

Private clouds and public clouds are turning mutually into the open integrated cloud computing environment, which can aggregate and utilize WAN and LAN networks computing, storage, information and other hardware and software resources sufficiently, but also bring a series of security, reliability and credibility problems. To solve these problems, a...

In latest years, the concept of interconnecting clouds to allow common service coordination has gained significant attention mainly because of the increasing utilization of cloud resources from Internet users. An efficient common management between different clouds is essential benefit, like boundless elasticity and scalability. Yet, issues related...

Networks are widely used to model a variety of complex, often multi-disciplinary, systems in which the relationships between their sub-parts play a significant role. In particular, there is extensive research on the topological properties associated with their structure as this allows the analysis of the overall behaviour of such networks. However,...

Managing resources, context and data in mobile clouds is a challenging task. Specific aspects of spontaneity, large interaction space and dynamic interaction share a metaphorical resemblance to chemistry, chemical reactions and solutions. In this paper, it is argued that by adopting a nature-inspired chemical computing model, a mobile cloud resourc...

There is an increasing interest in Internet of Things (IoT) and healthcare is considered to be one of the most common applications of it. Using the IoT paradigm, various devices including smart-phones and sensor-embedded healthcare applications can be used for monitoring health. In this study, we model an IoT use case scenario with regard to monito...

In the big data era, the speed of analytical processing is influenced by the storage and retrieval capabilities to handle large amounts of data. While the distributed crunching applications themselves can yield useful information, the analysts face difficult challenges: they need to predict how much data to process and where, such that to get an op...

This chapter is focused on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and wireless communications as enabling technologies for future Smart Cities. The chapter first reviews the main advances and achievements in both fields, highlighting the major research projects developed in Europe and USA as well as the suitability of Wireless Access in Vehicular Envi...

Detection of faulty nodes and network energy saving have become the hottest research topics. Furthermore, current fault detection algorithms always pursue high detection performance but neglect energy consumption. In order to obtain good fault detection performance and save the network power, this paper proposes a low energy consumption distributed...

This book covers the latest advances in the rapid growing field of inter-cooperative collective intelligence aiming the integration and cooperation of various computational resources, networks and intelligent processing paradigms to collectively build intelligence and advanced decision support and interfaces for end-users. The book brings a compreh...

This book presents current progress on challenges related to Big Data management by focusing on the particular challenges associated with context-aware data-intensive applications and services. The book is a state-of-the-art reference discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on the theories, practices, standards and strategi...

E-Science is the “science of this age”; it is realized through collaborative scientific enquiry which requires utilization of non-trivial amounts of computing resources and massive data sets. In this paper we explore the e-Science knowledge base through co-citation analysis of extant literature. Our objective is to use the knowledge domain visualiz...