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Reproducibility of research is essential for science. However, in the way modern computational biology research is done, it is easy to lose track of small, but extremely critical, details. Key details, such as the specific version of a software used or iteration of a genome can easily be lost in the shuffle or perhaps not noted at all. Much work is being done on the database and storage side of things, ensuring that there exists a space-to-store experiment-specific details, but current mechanisms for recording details are cumbersome for scientists to use. We propose a new metadata description language, named MEtaData Format for Open Reef Data (MEDFORD), in which scientists can record all details relevant to their research. Being human-readable, easily editable and templatable, MEDFORD serves as a collection point for all notes that a researcher could find relevant to their research, be it for internal use or for future replication. MEDFORD has been applied to coral research, documenting research from RNA-seq analyses to photo collections.

Part 3: Policy Management; International audience; Enterprises nowadays are subscribing access to several Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for reliability, redundancy and better revenues underlying the service extension, while providing good Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, a dynamic decision-making framework is presented for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based voice/video call routing in multihomed network. The decision engine takes multiple criteria into account while computing the routing decision (attributes from context of the request, platform’s latest conditional parameters, business objectives of the company, etc.). Two Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, namely Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) and an extended version of Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) are used for decision calculation in outsourcing and provisioning enforcement modes respectively. The proposed solution gives higher throughput and lower call dropping probability while fulfilling the desired goals, taking into account the multiple attributes for choosing the best alternative.

Part 6: PhD Workshop: Monitoring and Security; International audience; Integrated management copes with management of heterogeneous and complex systems in a multi-level dimension (network, systems, services). In this context, monitoring activity has to be concerned with efficiency and autonomy. This paper presents work in progress to define a framework for self-adaptive monitoring relying on the characterization of governability, adaptability and configurability.

Part 6: PhD Workshop: Monitoring and Security; International audience; One way to build large-scale autonomous systems is to develop open peer-to-peer architectures in which peers are not pre-engineered to work together and in which peers themselves determine the social norms that govern collective behaviour. A major practical limitation to such systems is security because the very openness of such systems negates most traditional security solutions. We propose a programme of research that addresses this problem by devising ways of attack detection and damage limitation that take advantage of social norms described by electronic institutions. We have analysed security issues of open peer-to-peer multi-agent systems and focused on probing attacks against confidentiality. We have proposed a framework and adapted an inference system, which shows the possibility of private information disclosure by an adversary. We shall suggest effective countermeasures in such systems and propose attack response techniques to limit possible damages.

Part 1: Security Management; International audience; VoIP infrastructures are exposed to a large variety of security attacks, but the deployment of security safeguards may deteriorate their performance. Risk management provides new perspectives for addressing this issue. Risk models permit to reduce these attacks while maintaining the quality of such a critical service. These models often suffer from their complexity due to the high number of parameters to be configured. We therefore propose in this paper a self-configuration strategy for support- ing runtime risk management in VoIP architectures. This strategy aims at automatically adapting these parameters based on an econometric feedback mechanism. We mathematically describe this self-configuration strategy, show how it can be integrated into our runtime risk model. We then evaluate its deployment based on a proof-of-concept prototype, and quantify its performance through an extensive set of simulation results.

Part 2: PhD Workshop: Autonomic Network and Service Management; International audience; The Intensive Care Unit is a complex, data-intensive and critical environment in which the adoption of Information Technology is growing. As physicians become more dependent on the computing technology to support decisions, raise real-time alerts and notifications of patient-specific conditions, this software has strong dependability requirements. The dependability challenges are expressed in terms of availability, reliability, performance, usability and maintenance of the system. Our research focuses on the design and development of a generic autonomous ICU service platform. COSARA is a computer-based platform for infection surveillance and antibiotic management in ICU. During its design, development and evaluation, we identified both technological and human factors that affect robustness. We presented the identified research questions that will be addressed in detail during PhD research.

Part 5: P2P and Aggregation Schemes; International audience; This paper presents a diffusive load balancing algorithm for peer-to-peer systems. The algorithm reduces the differences of the available capacities of the nodes in the system using service migrations between nodes in order to obtain similar performance for all nodes. We propose algorithms for handling homogeneous services, i.e., services with equal resource requirements, and for heterogeneous services, i.e., services with diverse resource requirements. We have investigated the effect of load balancing in a simulated peer-to-peer system with a skip-list overlay network. Our simulation results indicate that in case that the churn (nodes joining or leaving) is negligible, a system that hosts services with small resource requirements can maintain equal performance for all nodes with a small variance. In case that churn is high, a system that hosts homogeneous services with large resource requirements can maintain equal node performance within a reasonable variance requiring only few service migrations.

Part 5: P2P and Aggregation Schemes; International audience; Recently, numerous management approaches have emerged in order to manage networks and services in a decentralized and autonomous way. Some of them propose to minimize their cost by using a situated view when collecting aggregates for the decision making process, while others propose to improve their accuracy by using a more conventional approach which is global view. So far, little attention is given to the evaluation of situated view while many studies propose to evaluate global approaches. As a consequence, there is no work in the literature that compares the performance of situated and global aggregation schemes. Being able to choose the suitable approach for a given context is still a real challenge. Mastering it will ensure the e fficiency of the autonomous management system. In this paper, we present a comparative study of situated and global schemes deployed over large scale and dynamic networks. We consider two factors: network and information dynamics. We implement typical aggregation schemes from each category and then we compare them according to the accuracy of the estimated aggregates and the e ciency of the decision making process.

Part 6: PhD Workshop: Monitoring and Security; International audience; This paper describes a protocol detection using statistic information about a flow extended by packet sizes and time characteristics, which consist of packet inter-arrival times. The most common way of network traffic classification is a deep packet inspection (DPI). Our approach deals with the DPI disadvantage in power consumption using aggregated IPFIX data instead of looking into packet content. According to our previous experiments, we have found that applications have their own behavioral pattern, which can be used for the applications detection. With a respect to current state of development, we mainly present the idea, the results which we have achieved so far and of our future work.

Part 2: PhD Workshop: Autonomic Network and Service Management; International audience; The autonomic paradigm has been introduced in order to cope with the growing complexity of management. In that context, autonomic networks and systems are in charge of their own configuration. However, the changes that are operated by these environments may generate vulnerable configurations. In the meantime, a strong standardization effort has been done for specifying the description of configuration vulnerabilities. We propose in this paper an approach for integrating these descriptions into the management plane of autonomic systems in order to ensure safe configurations. We describe the underlying architecture and a set of preliminary results based on the Cfengine configuration tool.

Part 2: PhD Workshop: Autonomic Network and Service Management; International audience; Nowadays, even with the existence of many Cloud Providers (CP) in the market, it is still impossible to see CPs who guarantee, or at least offer, an SLA specification to Cloud Users (CU) interests: not just offering percentage of availability, but also guaranteeing specific performance parameters for a certain Cloud application. Due to (1) the huge size of CPs’ IT infrastructures and (2) the high complexity with multiple inter-dependencies of resources (physical or virtual), the estimation of specific SLA parameters to compose Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with trustful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tends to be inaccurate. This paper proposes the initial design and preliminary approach for an SLA Support System for CC (SLACC) in order to estimate in a formalized methodology - based on available CC infrastructure parameters - what CPs will be able to offer/accept as SLOs or KPIs and, as a consequence, which increasing levels of SLA specificity for their customers can be reached.

Part 2: PhD Workshop: Autonomic Network and Service Management; International audience; To cope with the ever-growing number of wired and wireless networks, we introduce the notion of so-called symbiotic networks. These networks seamlessly operate across layers and over network boundaries, resulting in improved scalability, dependability, and energy efficiency. This particular Ph.D. research focuses on software services operating in such symbiotic networks. When two or more networks merge, the services provided on them may be combined into a service composition that is much more than the sum of its parts. Driven by two distinct use cases, we aim to enable fully autonomous service composition and resource provisioning. For the first use case, an in-building over-the-top service platform, we describe a software architecture and a set of generic resource provisioning algorithms. The second use case, which focuses on wireless body area networks, will allow us to expand our research domain into highly dynamic symbiotic network environments, where services appear and disappear more frequently.

Part 3: Policy Management; International audience; Our cities are already covered by a myriad of diverse wireless access networks. The most ubiquitous access networks are the well organized homogeneous and centralized operator-based cellular networks that sustain their business model on a captive client basis. However, a new billing paradigm is rising, where a client can choose to connect to the provider that best comply with his/her current requirements and context. Inside this paradigm, this paper presents a distributed, rule-based pricing strategy aimed to improve the quality of service and to increase the global income of a service provider. The performance and reliability of the rule-based decisions is supported by a Finite State Transducers-based inference machine specially designed to manage networking systems. We show, with simulations, that, using our strategy, the operators can make the new billing paradigm profitable while the clients benefit from the economic advantages of competition and of the quality given by a pricing-based network balance mechanism.