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Web of Things (WoTs)

An Approach to Designing and Evaluating Web of Things (WoT) Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged a popular technology that underpinning several innovative products and services. Internet of Everything (IoE) or Web of Things (WoT) are real or virtual networks of things (or services) that can be meaningfully quarried or combined in order to build and provide different types of services. Recently, we have a book chapter, Using Reference Architecture for Design and Evaluation of Web of Things Systems, has been included a newly published book, Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web, edited by Michael Sheng, Yongrui Qin, Lina Yao, and Boualem Benatallah. The abstract of our book chapter is below as it may interest to some of the readers. The book chapter provides a methodological approach and technical details about applying a reference architectures to support the design and evaluation of Web of Things Systems. The research involved students from a software architecture course offered at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The abstract of the chapter is below:

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Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

I’m very glad to share that Australian Quarterly has included my article on Smart Cities in the special edition of the best articles published in 2016. Apart from an endorsement of the  potential value of the article on an important topic like Smart Cities, the best part of this news is that the special edition is completely free for distribution that is why I have attached it here for download . This article provides a vision and strategies for conceiving and implementing projects that can contribute to building and evolving Smart Cities, which is an umbrella term used for socio-technical innovation for improving the liveability of cities, regions, and suburbs. In this article, I have particularly emphasise the importance of building and sustaining strong collaborative ties among governments, councils, private sectors, and universities for co-conceiving and materialising Smart Cities initiatives and projects. I have particularly highlighted the role and importance of Smart Campus as an experimental testbed for supporting the collaborations for Smart Cities projects.Read More »Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Energy monitoring and management systems play a vital role in helping achieve the strategic as well as operational goals for Smart Cities/Smart Buildings. Whilst sustainability friendly mans of generating energy can go a long way of making a country/city/region carbon neutral, which is an agenda of any smart city initiative, energy monitoring and management systems can contribute significantly by brining innovation in energy distribution and utilisation. Having noticed our Smart Cities initiative‘s increasing activities and widespread engagements in not only South Australia but other parts of the country, the German-Australian Chamber invited us to be a partner in the organisation of a seminar on “energy efficiency in buildings” on November 22, 2016. The draft of the program can be download here. According to the program, I’ll be giving an opening talk, Smart Cities Initiatives and Supporting Energy Management Systems, for which I’ll be relying on our research and development activities on Smart Cities related initiatives and projects over the last 18 months. The seminar’s goal is to initiative and groom productive and fruitful dialogue between German companies and Australian  academic institutions in order to Read More »German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

We have entered in an exciting phase of our smart cities research and development initiative. We have been having a series of very productive and fruitful workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather ideas, suggestions, and proposals from a wide variety of colleagues and partners (current and potential) for firming up the foundations and structure of our initiative. Last week (October 27), we organised a workshop involving more than a dozen participants from local councils and different agencies of the state department. The purpose of the workshop was to brainstorming and organise the ideas and needs of the councils/government that can be converted into researchable projects to support innovation and entrepreneurship in Adelaide in the area of Smart Cities. Our strong and ongoing collaboration with the Adelaide Smart Cities Studio was hugely helpful in an offer to host the event in one of the buildings of the council, next door to the Adelaide Smart City Studio, and the Studio’s manager Beth Worrall was extremely helpful and actively engaged in the workshop. We invited representatives from several councilsRead More »Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

Systemization of Knowledge about Architecting Cloud-Based Systems

We have been expanding our research on engineering systems with/for Cloud based infrastructures. One of the key challenges of engineering cloud-based systems is designing and evaluating appropriate architectures. Being a relatively new area, knowledge about designing and evaluating cloud-based systems is scarce and but growing. We observed the need of systematically identifying and synthesizing the knowledge about the architectural challenges and solutions for cloud-based systems. For this goal, we used systematic literature review, a well known method of Evidence Based Software Engineering.

I am very glad to share that after several months rigours and tireless efforts, we have published our work in a premier Software Engineering journal, Software: Practice and Experience. The paper can be found on this link and the abstract of the paper is below:Read More »Systemization of Knowledge about Architecting Cloud-Based Systems

Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City

Smart City initiatives in different parts of the world are gaining momentum and such initiatives are inspiring governments, councils, private sectors, and citizens everywhere – As the Lord Mayor of Amsterdam once said that Smart Cities are just like “Football teams” that every city wants to have one its own. Since starting our Smart Cities initiative at the University of Adelaide and joining the steering committee of the Adelaide city initiative, I have been observing more and more initiatives and activities about smart cities at different  levels. Last week, I was approached to make a presentation about Smart City during a workshop of It services team of Charles Sturt City council. The purpose of the workshop was to have the staff envisage Bowden, a relatively new development in Adelaide, as a smart area of quality living for people in different demographic categories. Despite being extremely snowed under with several tasks with hard deadlines, I accepted the invitation of making a short presentation on smart city and ICT driven innovation to inspire the participant before their brainstorming session on coming up with smart city services.Read More »Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City

Smart Campuses – Experimental Platforms for Smart Cities

Smart Cities initiatives are gaining popularity in almost every corner of the World – increasing urbanisation and myriad of socio-economic challenges are forcing governments and public sector organisations to leverage Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for conceiving and materialising innovative solutions for socio-economic challenges under a broad umbrella of Smart Cities. Since Smart Cities initiatives present significant socio-technical challenges, Smart Campuses can be leveraged as Test and Experimentation Platforms (TEPs) for devising, deploying, and evaluating theories and applications for Smart City services. That means Smart Campuses can become suitable living labs for solutions that may find their ways for smart city initiatives. For our Smart Cities initiative, we have been working on developing and implementing a few projects related to Smart Campus at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Most of our projects will be conceived and designed in close collaboration with all the key stakeholders (e.g., students, staff, and management) and leveraging our knowledge and expertise in engineering software intensive systems using Internet of Everything (IoEs), Big Data, and Cloud Computing. We have identified some of the potential benefits of building a Smart Campus below. Read More »Smart Campuses – Experimental Platforms for Smart Cities

Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace Completed

A few years ago we started an exciting and challenging project to design and implement a reference architecture for providing Tools as a Service (TaaS). That project was aimed at developing and evaluating an infrastructure that can host and provision tools for supporting engineering efforts in general and software engineering in particular. There is no doubt that the project turned out to be more challenging than we anticipated but I’m glad that one phase of that project has been successfully completed through Aufeef Chuahan’s PhD project. It is a great pleasure to state that Aufeef has successfully completed and submitted his PhD thesis for assessment – its a big achievement for him. We will be making the reference architecture and its implementation public very soon.Read More »Reference Architecture for Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace Completed