Publications

  • 2018
    Haithem Mezni, Tarek Abdeljaouad

    A cloud services recommendation system based on Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis

    Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2018

    Abstract

    Cloud computing is an attractive paradigm which offers variant services on demand. Many available cloud services offer the same or similar functionalities, which made it challenging for cloud users to choose a suitable service that meets with their preferences. Existing service selection approaches were not enough to solve this challenge. That’s why researchers went for recommendation approaches trying to find a solution. Cloud service recommendation has become an important technique for cloud services. It helps users decide whether a service satisfies their requirements or not. However, two main recommendation problems remain unsolved yet, data sparsity and cold start. In addition, existing solutions mostly tried to adapt techniques inherited from Web service and e-commerce domains. This approach is not always adequate due to many reasons such as the cloud architecture, the various service models, etc. To address the problems stated above, we propose a Collaborative Filtering based recommendation system for cloud services using Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis (Fuzzy FCA). Fuzzy FCA has a solid mathematical foundation and it’s based on the lattice theory. The lattice representation will give an explicit description of our cloud environment (users, services, ratings, etc.) and, then, extract the pertinent information from it (similar users to an active user, ratings of each similar user, top services, etc.) which will make the recommendations more suitable. Experimental results confirmed our expectations and proved the efficiency of such an approach.

    Haithem Mezni, Mayssa Fayala

    Time-aware service recommendation: Taxonomy, review, and challenges

    Software: Practice and Experience, 2018

    Abstract

    Nowadays, a huge number of available Web services offer the same functionalities and a high quality of service, which makes the selection of suitable services a difficult task. In such situation, the services must be differentiated by additional criteria such as users’ ratings. To meet this goal, recommendation techniques become a natural choice to cope with the challenging task of optimal service selection and to help consumers satisfy their needs and preferences. However, most existing models on service recommendation are static, whereas in the real world, the perception and popularity of Web services may continually change, and users’ preferences and habits also shift frequently. Time is becoming an increasingly important factor in recommender systems, since time effects influence users’ preferences to a large extent. In addition, quality-of-service performance of Web services is strongly linked to the service status and network environments, which are variable against time. Recently, a wide range of service recommendation approaches, dealing with the time dimension in user modeling and recommendation strategies, have been proposed. Thus, the purpose of this survey is to present a comprehensive study and analysis of the state-of-the-art on time-aware service recommendation. We identify the techniques used in recommender systems to provide the best services. Moreover, we present a classification of time-aware recommender systems based on the target recommendation time, the type of relationship between users, and the type of feedback. Besides, we present a comparison between time-aware recommendation approaches, and we discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, challenges and requirements of time-aware service recommendation as well as the future directions are identified according to the studied approaches.

    Wissem Inoubli, Sabeur Aridhi, Haithem Mezni, Mondher Maddouri, Engelbert Mephu Nguifo

    An experimental survey on big data frameworks

    Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018

    Abstract

    Recently, increasingly large amounts of data are generated from a variety of sources.Existing data processing technologies are not suitable to cope with the huge amounts of generated data. Yet, many research works focus on Big Data, a buzzword referring to the processing of massive volumes of (unstructured) data. Recently proposed frameworks for Big Data applications help to store, analyze and process the data. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of Big Data and we survey existing Big Data frameworks. We also present an experimental evaluation and a comparative study of the most popular Big Data frameworks with several representative batch and iterative workloads. This survey is concluded with a presentation of best practices related to the use of studied frameworks in several application domains such as machine learning, graph processing and real-world applications.

    Haithem Mezni, Mariem Kbekbi

    Reusing process fragments for fast service composition: a clustering-based approach

    Enterprise Information Systems, 2018

    Abstract

    With the proliferation of Web services over the Internet and due to the increasing complexity of users’ needs, Web service composition has emerged as a powerful method of software reuse, allowing to deliver complete business processes as a set of interacting services. To guarantee a rapid and secure service composition, fragments of available business processes at different granularities may be considered as a composition unit and recombined to deliver effective compositions. Despite the benefits of this method, most of the existing works do not take into consideration the reuse of service process fragments (SPF). Reusing SPFs allows, not only to minimize the composition time, but also to improve the reliability of the composition process. In this paper, we propose a Web service composition approach that aims to combine service process fragments rather that atomic services. We adopt a powerful mathematical model called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to define the relationships between services and fragments. Moreover, we exploit the regrouping capabilities of FCA by proposing algorithms for the extraction of candidate fragments’ combinations. A scoring function is also defined to determine the quality level of each SPF and its ability to participate in a composition. The experimental studies proved the effectiveness of our FCA-based approach compared to existing state-of-the-art solutions.

    Haithem Mezni, Mokhtar Sellami

    A negotiation-based service selection approach using swarm intelligence and kernel density estimation

    Software: Practice and Experience, 2018

    Abstract

    Nowadays, the cloud computing environment is becoming a natural choice to deploy and provide Web services that meet user needs. However, many services provide the same functionality and high quality of service (QoS) but different self-adaptive behaviors. In this case, providers’ adaptation policies are useful to select services with high QoS and high quality of adaptation (QoA). Existing approaches do not take into account providers’ adaptation policies in order to select services with high reputation and high reaction to changes, which is important for the composition of self-adaptive Web services. In order to actively participate to compositions, candidate services must negotiate their self-* capabilities. Moreover, they must evaluate the participation constraints against their capabilities specified in terms of QoS and adaptation policies. This paper exploits a variant of particle swarm optimization and kernel density estimation in the selection of service compositions and the concurrent negotiations of their QoS and QoA capabilities. Selection and negotiation processes are held between intelligent agents, which adopt swarm intelligence techniques for achieving optimal selection and optimal agreement on providers’ offers. To resolve unknown autonomic behavior of candidate services, we deal with the lack of such information by predicting the real QoA capabilities of a service through the kernel density estimation technique. Experiments show that our solution is efficient in comparison with several state-of-the-art selection approaches.

    Fatma Lahmar, Haithem Mezni

    Multicloud service composition: A survey of current approaches and issues

    Software: Evolution and Process, 2018

    Abstract

    During the last decade, cloud computing became a natural choice to host and provide various computing resources as on-demand services. To better satisfy user requirements, cloud services may be combined while considering the constraints of the virtualized environment, including security policies, resources availability, and interoperability. Extensive surveys have been conducted to study the major issues related to the cloud service composition problem. However, very few works have studied such issues in a multicloud setting. To fill this gap, we provide in this paper a systematic literature review on multicloud service composition. We start with a background on service composition in single clouds. Then, we present the multicloud taxonomy, and we study how service composition was tackled by researchers in multicloud environments. Finally, we identify the challenges and the requirements of multicloud service composition, as well as the future directions.

    Haithem Mezni, Mokhtar Sellami, Jaber Kouki

    Security-aware SaaS placement using swarm intelligence

    Software: Evolution and Process, 2018

    Abstract

    Cloud computing has emerged as a new powerful service delivery model to cope with resource challenges and to offer various on-demand services (eg, software, storage, network, etc.). Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the most popular service models. To meet the increasing demands of users, SaaS can be offered in a composite form. Although this approach offers some advantages like flexibility and reusability, it raises a question about how to manage composite SaaS in the distributed and the highly dynamic cloud environment. In this paper, we address one of the major SaaS resource management issues referred to as SaaS placement problem. As existing efforts only focus on SaaS placement problem from the perspective of resources utilization to optimize SaaS performance and minimize resource usage, in this paper, we also incorporate security concerns in SaaS placement strategy. In fact, security risk is one of the major factors influencing the efficiency of the composite SaaS. We adopt a multi-swarm variant of particle swarm optimization to propose a security-aware SaaS placement method. Also, a cooperative learning strategy is hybridized to the placement algorithm, which makes information of best candidate servers be used more effectively to generate better placement plan. Experiments show that our solution outperforms existing SaaS placement approaches.

    Haithem Mezni, Mokhtar Sellami

    Multi-cloud service composition using Formal Concept Analysis

    Journal of Systems and Software, 2018

    Abstract

    Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in exploiting Cloud environments to deliver various types of resources as services. To improve the efficiency of software development, service reuse and composition is viewed as a powerful means. However, effectively composing services from multiple clouds has not been solved yet. Indeed, existing solutions assume that the services participating to a composition come from a single cloud. This approach is unrealistic since the other existing clouds may host more suitable services. In order to deliver high quality service compositions, the user request must be checked against the services in the multi-cloud environment (MCE) or at least clouds in the availability zone of the user. In this paper, we propose a multi-cloud service composition (MCSC) approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We use FCA to represent and combine information of multiple clouds. FCA is based on the concept lattice which is a powerful mean to classify clouds and services information. We first model the multi-cloud environment as a set of formal contexts. Then, we extract and combine candidate clouds from formal concepts. Finally, the optimal cloud combination is selected and the MCSC is transformed into a classical service composition problem. Conducted experiments proved the effectiveness and the ability of FCA based method to regroup and find cloud combinations with a minimal number of clouds and a low communication cost. Also, the comparison with two well-known combinatorial optimization approaches showed that the adopted top-down strategy allowed to rapidly select services hosted on the same and closest clouds, which directly reduced the inter-cloud communication cost, compared to existing approaches.

    Sami Rojbi, Anis Rojbi, Mohamed Salah Gouider

    Toward an Inclusive Digital Information Access: Full Keyboard Access & Direct Navigation

    Alexandrov, D., Boukhanovsky, A., Chugunov, A., Kabanov, Y., Koltsova, O. (eds) Digital Transformation and Global Society. DTGS 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 859. Springer, Cham., 2018

    Abstract

    The laws prohibit the discrimination of people with special needs. Accessibility has become a legal obligation for the State, which must ensure equal opportunities for access to services and knowledge. Many people have difficulty in accessing graphical interfaces or controlling the mouse. To promote a high degree of web usability, w3c guidelines emphasize the need to allow the user to interact with web pages not only through a pointing device, but through the keyboard as well. Among their appearance, access keys implementations were criticized. This article gives an overview about access keys drawbacks and presents perspectives on how to support web app interaction through a keyboard.

    Amina Houari, Wassim Ayadi, Sadok Ben Yahia

    A new FCA-based method for identifying biclusters in gene expression data

    International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics 9 (11), 1879-1893, 2018

    Abstract

    Biclustering has been very relevant within the field of gene expression data analysis. In fact, its main thrust stands in its ability to identify groups of genes that behave in the same way under a subset of samples (conditions). However, the pioneering algorithms of the literature has shown some limits in terms of the quality of unveiled biclusters. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm, called BiFCA+, for biclustering microarray data. BiFCA+ heavily relies on the mathematical background of the formal concept analysis, in order to extract the set of biclusters. In addition, the Bond correlation measure is of use to filter out the overlapping biclusters. The extensive experiments, carried out on real-life datasets, shed light on BiFCA+’s ability to identify statistically and biologically significant biclusters.