Sokol Kosta

Aalborg University · Department of Electronic Systems

Recommender systems (RS) have seen widespread adoption across the Internet. However, by emphasising personalisation through the optimisation of accuracy-focused metrics, \textit{over}-\textit{personalisation} may emerge, with negative effects on the user experience. A countermeasure to the problem is to diversify recommendations. In this paper, we...

—The hybrid cloud inherits the best aspects of both the public and private clouds. One such benefit is maintaining control of data processing in a private cloud whilst having nearly elastic resource availability in the public cloud. However, the public and private cloud combination introduces complexities such as incompatible security and control me...

Coastal observing systems are typically nationally funded and built around national priorities. As a result, there are presently significant differences between countries in terms of sustainability, observing capacity and technologies, as well as methods and research priorities. Ocean observing systems in coastal areas must now move toward an integ...

Workflow engines are commonly used to orchestrate large-scale scientific computations such as, but not limited to weather, climate, natural disasters, food safety, and territorial management. However, to implement, manage, and execute real-world scientific applications in the form of workflows on multiple infrastructures (servers, clusters, cloud)...

Keeping students engaged while learning programming is becoming more and more imperative. Of the several proposed techniques, gamification is presumably the most widely studied and has already proven as an effective means to engage students. However, there is a complete lack of public and customizable solutions to gamified programming education tha...

The article analyzes problems relating to public service media use of third-party services that track, collect, and analyze user behavior. The article extends a rights- based conception of privacy to privacy as a social phenomenon based in trust, relevant to public service media as “islands of trust.” However, data of European public and private me...

The IoT presents a possibility to create an innovative collabo-ration setup between human and robots within the Industry 4.0, leveraging concepts like Intelligence Augmentation (IA). This project aims to develop a safe human-robot collaboration (HRC) system. The system will feature a robotic arm and advanced sensors, inter-networked in an edge comp...

Near-real-time (nRT) ocean observations are critical for the sustainable management of coastal as well as offshore regions, including implementation of early warning systems, mitigation of pollution, response to extreme events and natural hazards. This can be achieved via the implementation of the so-called Ocean of Things, which consist of distrib...

Hybrid cloud, typically a combination of public and private cloud deployment models, is a rising paradigm due to the benefits it offers: full control of data and applications in the private cloud and elastic computing resource availability in the public cloud. This combination however brings an extra layer of complexity that can potentially erode t...

The rise of the Internet of Things has generated high expectations about the improvement in people's lifestyles. In the last decade, we saw several examples of instrumented cities where different types of data were gathered, processed, and made available to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. In this framework, sensors and actu...

The paper introduces Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL), designed as a means to represent the set of gamification concepts and rules applied to courses and exercises separately from their actual educational content. This way, GEdIL allows not only for an easy yet effective specification of gamification schemes for educational purp...

While the everything as a sensor is a typical data gathering pattern in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in contexts such as smart cities, smart factories, and precision agriculture, among others, the use of the same technique in the coastal marine environment is still not explored at full potential. Nevertheless, when it comes to maritime...

The article analyzes problems relating to public service media use of third-party services that track, collect, and analyze user behavior. The article extends a rights-based conception of privacy to privacy as a social phenomenon based in trust, relevant to public service media as “islands of trust.” However, data of European public and private med...

Sensors and actuators became first class citizens in technologically pervasive urban environments. However, the full potential of data crowdsourcing is still unexploited in marine coastal areas, due to the challenging operational conditions, extremely unstable network connectivity and security issues in data movement. In this paper, we present the...

An increasing number of organisations are harnessing the benefits of hybrid cloud adoption to support their business goals and achieving privacy and control in a private cloud whilst enjoying the on-demand scalability of the public cloud. However the complexity introduced by the combination of the public and private clouds worsens visibility in clo...

In the last decade, GPGPU virtualization and remoting have been among the most important research topics in the field of computer science and engineering due to the rising of cloud computing technologies. Public, private, and hybrid infrastructures need such virtualization tools in order to multiplex and better organize the computing resources. Wit...

This contribution analyses the use of third-party trackers by European countries media before and after the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (hereafter: GDPR) as an inroad to discuss the legal versus ethical obligations of media with regards to audiences’ privacy and the impact on the key value of trust in media. In force...

The commencement of EU’s General Data Protection (GDPR) has led to massive compliance and consent activities on websites. But did the new regulation result in fewer third party server appearances? Based on an eight months longitudinal study from February to September 2018 of 1250 popular websites in Europe and US, we present a mapping of the subtle...

The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption, but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper, we advance on previous ide...

Trading cryptocurrency on current digital exchange platforms is a trust-based process, where the parties involved in the exchange have to fully trust the service provider. As it has been proven several times, this could lead to funds being stolen, either due to malicious service providers that simply disappear or due to hacks that these platforms m...

Data from sensors incorporated into mobile devices, such as networked navigational sensors, can be used to capture detailed environmental information. We describe here a workflow and framework for using sensors on boats to construct unique new datasets of underwater topography (bathymetry). Starting with a large number of measurements of position,...

The data crowdsourcing paradigm applied in coastal and marine monitoring and management has been developed only recently due to the challenges of the marine environment. The pervasive internet of things technology is contributing to increase the number of connected instrumented devices available for data crowd-sourcing. A main issue in the fog/edge...

Fast technology development has influenced the widespread use of low‐power devices in different scientific, environmental, and everyday life areas, giving birth to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we focus on the context of marine studies, addressing the problem of marine bathymetry data processing and analysis via pervasive and Internet‐conn...

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a technique for increasing the performance of mobile apps and reducing their energy consumption through code and data offloading. Developers may build MCC applications on a public cloud. The public cloud may offer economies of scale, but there are some considerations to take into account. Cloud providers charge their...

This work demonstrates a real-time 3D hand tracking application that runs via computation offloading. The proposed framework enables the application to run on low-end mobile devices such as laptops and tablets, despite the fact that they lack the sufficient hardware to perform the required computations locally. The net- work connection takes the pl...

Antivirus software are the most popular tools for detecting and stopping malicious or unwanted files. However, the performance requirements of traditional host-based antivirus make their wide adoption to mobile, embedded, and hand-held devices questionable. Their computational- and memory-intensive characteristics, which are needed to cope with the...

This paper presents the case study of a non-intrusive porting of a monolithic C++ library for real-time 3D hand tracking, to the domain of edge-based computation. Towards a proof of concept, the case study considers a pair of workstations, a computationally powerful and a computationally weak one. By wrapping the C++ library in Java container and b...

Data crowdsourcing is one of most remarkable results of pervasive and internet connected low-power devices making diverse and different “things” as a world wide distributed system. This paper is focused on a vertical application of GPGPU virtualization software exploitation targeted on high performance geographical data interpolation. We present an...

Recommender systems (RS) have seen widespread adoption across the Internet. However, by emphasizing personalization through the optimization of accuracy-focused metrics, over-personalization may emerge, with negative e ects on the user experience. A countermea- sure to the problem is to diversify recommendations. In this paper, we present a solutio...

Sensors incorporated into mobile devices provide unique opportunities to capture detailed environmental information that cannot be readily collected in other ways. We show here how data from networked navigational sensors on leisure vessels can be used to construct unique new datasets, using the example of underwater topography (bathymetry) to demo...

Generic Virtualization Service (GVirtuS) is a new solution for enabling GPGPU on Virtual Machines or low powered devices. This paper focuses on the performance analysis that can be obtained using a GPGPU virtualized software. Recently, GVirtuS has been extended in order to support CUDA ancillary libraries with good results. Here, our aim is to anal...

Low-power devices are usually highly constrained in terms of CPU computing power, memory, and GPGPU resources for real-time applications to run. In this paper, we describe RAPID, a complete framework suite for computation offloading to help low-powered devices overcome these limitations. RAPID supports CPU and GPGPU computation offloading on Linux...

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) helps increasing performance of intensive mobile applications by offloading heavy tasks to cloud computing infrastructures. The first step in this procedure is partitioning the application into small tasks and identifying those that are better suited for offloading. The method call partitioning strategy splits the code...

During the last years, researchers have proposed solutions to help smartphones improve execution time and reduce energy consumption by offloading heavy tasks to remote entities. Lately, inspired by the promising results of message forwarding in opportunistic networks, many researchers have proposed strategies for task offloading towards nearby mobi...

The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption but the growth of smartphones’ battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper we advance on the previous i...

This position paper presents a novel heterogeneous CPU-GPU multi-level cloud acceleration focusing on applications running on embedded systems found on low-power devices. A runtime system performs energy and performance estimations in order to automatically select local CPU-based and GPU-based tasks that should be seamlessly executed on more powerf...

The success of Android is based on its unified Java programming model that allows to write platform-independent programs for a variety of different target platforms. In this paper we describe the first, to the best of our knowledge, offloading platform that enables Android devices with no GPU support to run Nvidia CUDA kernels by migrating their ex...

The increasing complexity of smartphone applications and services necessitate high battery consumption but the growth of smartphones' battery capacity is not keeping pace with these increasing power demands. To overcome this problem, researchers gave birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) research area. In this paper we advance on previous ideas...

The mHealth wearable devices have been adopted in the last few years and have improved the human well-being. However, mobile devices are still quite resource constrained and mHealth applications require high availability. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is one alternative to aid mobile devices by providing remote powerful infrastructure. The objective...

The concepts of wisdom of crowd and collective intelligence have been utilized by mobile application developers to achieve large-scale distributed computation, known as crowd computing. The profitability of this method heavily depends on users' social interactions and their willingness to share resources. Thus, different crowd computing application...

During the last years, researchers have proposed solutions to help smartphones offload heavy tasks to remote entities in order to improve execution time and reduce energy consumption. Lately, inspired by the promising results of message forwarding in opportunistic networks, many researchers have proposed strategies for task offloading towards nearb...

The proliferation of mobile devices combined with advances in the area of low-power wireless communication, such as Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth 4.0, gave rise to a new computation paradigm known as Device–to–Device (D2D) offloading. In this scenario, devices collaborate with each other using short wireless links to create ad-hoc P2P networks for dis...

Presenting results of the RAPID project at the Google I/O Extended event.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) combines mobile computing and cloud computing aiming to aid performance of mobile devices. The idea is simple: thin devices offload heavy methods to resource-rich servers in the clouds. We believe that in the near future MCC will adopt more advanced offloading techniques. In particular, in this paper we envision a scena...

Mobile-cloud offloading mechanisms delegate heavy mobile computation to the cloud. In real life use, the energy tradeoff of computing the task locally or sending the input data and the code of the task to the cloud is often negative, especially with popular communication intensive jobs like social-networking, gaming, and emailing. We design and bui...

This paper presents small world in motion (SWIM), a new mobility model for ad hoc networking. SWIM is relatively simple, is easily tuned by setting just a few parameters, and generates traces that look real-synthetic traces have the same statistical properties of real traces in terms of intercontact times, contact duration, and frequency among node...

The Internet of the future will be of things: Large scale IoT systems integrating various technologies (tracking, wired and wireless sensor and actuator networks, enhanced communication protocols, distributed intelligence for smart objects) will change the way we live and interact with the environment. Unfortunately, a standardization for IoT syste...

In this work we introduce Clone2Clone (C2C), a dis-tributed peer-to-peer platform for cloud clones of smart-phones. C2C shows dramatic performance improvement that is made possible by offloading communication be-tween smartphones on the cloud. Along the way toward C2C, we study the performance of device-clones hosted in various virtualization envir...

Thanks to their power, the many sensors they embed, and their inherent connectivity to Internet, smartphones are certainly becoming the primary source of multimedia content and the main tool for content sharing. In this demo, we analyze the complexity of real-time video streaming among smartphone users. Firstly, we show that the traditional solutio...

The limited battery of smartphones makes it hard for users to fully exploit their devices. Recent research considers of-floading mobile computation to the cloud to improve efficiency and to extend battery life. We design Clone2Clone (C2C), a distributed p2p platform for software cloud clones of smartphones. Upon C2C we implement CloneDoc, a secure...

Current offloading mechanisms for mobile energy-hungry apps consider the cloud as a separate remote support to the mobile devices. We take a different approach: We present CDroid, a system residing partially on the device and partially on a cloud software clone coupled with the device, and uses the cloud-side as just-another-resource of the real de...

The present invention relates to a method and a system of using the networked virtual machines of mobile devices such as smartphones in the cloud to provide mobile applications and services, such as distributed data searching and sharing, collaborative virus scanning, and crowd-sourced traffic monitoring. The system according to the present inventi...

The cloud seems to be an excellent companion of mobile systems, to alleviate battery consumption on smartphones and to backup user's data on-the-fly. Indeed, many recent works focus on frameworks that enable mobile computation offloading to software clones of smartphones on the cloud and on designing cloud-based backup systems for the data stored i...

The battery limits of today smartphones require a solution. In the scientific community it is believed that a promising way of prolonging battery life is to offload mobile computation to the cloud. State of the art offloading architectures consists of virtual copies of real smartphones (the clones) that run on the cloud, are synchronized with the c...