Industrial internship opportunities

I've started the recruitment for the next wave of SOA governance & security related internships.

UK, SOA Governance, BT, summer 2012, http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/index_files/BT%20AGH%20krakow%20uni%20internship%20offer.pdf

Sweden, SOA Security, Axiomatics, summer 2011, http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/index_files/axiomatics%20AGH%20krakow%20uni%20internship%20offer.pdf

Obviously students from AGH-UST, especially from the katedra informatyki, will be considered first.

Yield RIF console

I've been working on policy-rule translation for a while now and a while back I published this little translation console: http://yieldrif.appspot.com/*. There, users can translate rules to/from DroolsML (http://www.jboss.org/drools), RIF-PRD (http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wiki/PRD), JessML (www.jessrules.com) and edit translators (XSLT).

If you have any comments on the translators and/or rules, please do let me know. I'll do my best to keep them updated.

I will hopefully post more on this in the coming weeks. Indeed, Mark Proctor (http://markproctor.com/), the JBoss Rules Lead, has agreed to do some work on Drools XML output (aka DroolsML) in exchange for RIF-PRD and RuleML translators.

* Thanks Guillaume Laforge (http://glaforge.free.fr/weblog/) for your great work on Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/), Grails (http://www.grails.org/), Gaelyk (http://gaelyk.appspot.com/) and letting us use the source of your Groovy console app (http://groovyconsole.appspot.com/).

POM dependency graph

I increasingly write my code in Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/). However, there are times where I cannot escape the hard reality of Maven, OSGi and other handsome Java tools...

Here is what I'm talking about:

I didn't make this up, this is the dependency graph of the drools-guvnor sources. Don't get me wrong, the Drools folks are doing an excellent job. But dealing with this kind of things when one needs to go through the sources is just...

CFP: European Workshop on Practical Aspects of Service Oriented Computing Governance

Doing my job as organizer:

http://home.agh.edu.pl/~pdl/e-passing/

European Workshop on Practical Aspects of Service Oriented Computing Governance (E-PASSING 10)
December 1-3, 2010, Ayia Napa, Cyprus

Overview

The way enterprises conduct business today is changing greatly. The enterprise has become more pervasive with a mobile workforce, outsourced data centers, different engagements with customers, suppliers and distributed sites. In addition, companies seeking to optimize their processes across supply chains are implementing integration strategies that increasingly include their customers and suppliers. This amplifies the need for the governance of end-to-end transactions between business partners and the customer.

The advantages of Service Computing to allow organizations to integrate service oriented resource regardless of their origins, re-use these assets in different contexts and manage the required contextualization efficiently are well known. However, there are still many challenges to be solved in this important field of research. The wide variety of tools, techniques, and technological solutions that can be implemented render the domain of SOC governance difficult to manage. In particular, the aspects of policy definition and enforcement, service asset visibility and alignment of services to business objectives have seen a lot of hype in the past years but very few concrete and effective solutions.

The European workshop on practical aspects of service oriented computing governance (E-PASSING), collocated with the 2010 European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS), is meant to be an opportunity for academic and industrial communities to discuss innovative implementations and techniques advancing the state-of-the-art in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) governance.


Topics

The workshop invites original submissions from both researchers and practitioners in the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:

* Mechanisms, tools and policies for developing, deploying, using, and evolving SOC assets; including service identification, service registration, SLAs, flexible exposition and versioning.

* Policy & rule types, languages and enforcement mechanisms for SOC governance.

* Interoperability and interchangeability between policy & rule languages and enforcement mechanisms.

* Management of policy & rule conflicts, policy combinations.

* Usability of policy & rule based service oriented systems.

* Design-time governance practices, which involves, for example, rules for the development of services that align with business goals and offer the greatest benefit at the lowest risk.

* Runtime governance practices, which, in part, involves the enforcement of rules to assure that services are executed legally and securely.

* SOC governance implementation descriptions and discussions.


Important Dates

Paper submission: September 20, 2010
Authors notification: October 30, 2010
Final paper submission: November 20, 2010


Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above. All papers will receive a peer-review. Papers should be formatted according to the IEEE proceedings guidelines, between 4 to 10 pages (Templates: Word Template (ZIP), LaTex Package (ZIP)).

Papers should be submitted electronically via the web-based submission system at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=epassing10


Publication

All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings book, published by CEUR-WS (http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/index.html) under an ISSN reference, and on paper support. The best papers of the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a journal special issue.


Workshop Venue

Ayia Napa, Cyprus The workshop is to be held in conjunction with The 8th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS2010)

Program Chairs

* Pierre de Leusse, AGH-UST (Poland)
* Nektarios Georgalas, BT (UK)
* Panos Periorellis, Microsoft (UK)
* Krzysztof Zielinski, AGH-UST (Poland)


Program Committee (to be completed)

* David Brossard, Axiomatics AB (Sweden)
* Nick Cook, Newcastle University (UK)
* Theo Dimitrakos, BT (UK)
* Mike Fisher, BT (UK)
* Howard Foster, City University (UK)
* Gabriela Gheorghe, University of Trento (Italy)
* Andrew Gordon, Unisys (USA)
* Aad van Moorsel, Newcastle University (UK)
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)


Contact

For more information and inquiries about the workshop, please contact Pierre de Leusse (pdl (at) agh.edu.pl).

Wedding and next move

That should be in the previous post about the 2nd part of the summer 2009, but it's so important I thought it deserved its own post!

So yes Anna and I now share the same family name. The ceremony was nice, see some of the photos on my Facebook [1] account for more details. It was also the occasion for our families to meet – for the first time – and it all went smoothly. Funny moment when my parents “discretely” whispered to me during the ceremony that the rings were on the wrong hand...turns out in Poland and in France THE hand is not the same.

After this, I went to Krakow for a job interview at the Distributed Group of AGH University [2]. This went just as well as the wedding and I was offered a job on the spot! And guess what, I'm starting on the 1st of December. Needless to say that Anna and I are delighted, we'll finally be able to settle somewhere – and in Krakow s'il vous plaît!

[1] http://www.facebook.com/pierre.de.leusse (I've just realised that I'm a resource on the Facebook website, this is so cool and so geeky!)

[2] http://portal.ics.agh.edu.pl

Summer tour 2009 part 2, more submissions and writing up

It seems a bit late to write about the second part of last summer but here goes.

Following ICWS, I kept writing on my thesis (and still am) as well as polishing an article for a special edition “Security and Trust Management for Dynamic Coalitions” of the Wiley's Journal on Security and Communication Networks [1].

This was hard work that finally paid off thanks to David, Aris and couldn't have been done without Theo's guidance [2]. For the record this was a 6 months long denouement, with the 1st submission in January (2009) of 70ish pages which was accepted with major revisions, the 2nd submission of 20 pages long but which didn't comprise a change log that specified what and why we did changes in function of the reviews provided, before finally this last one...

By the way kudos to the reviewers for not only accepting the tedious task of going through and reviewing 70 pages of technical text but also doing it as well as they did! This is probably the best pieces of reviewing I have seen to date.

[1] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/114299116/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

[2] David Brossard, Nektarios Georgalas and Theo Dimitrakos

Summer tour 2009 part 1, AFIN and ICWS

AFIN’09 [1], in Glyfada, earlier this summer was a blast. These IARIA conferences might have a bad reputation amongst the academic community but I keep having a good time. This time I hooked up with some old acquaintance from Luxembourg University and met Reijo Savola from VTT amongst other Finns. We talked a bit about the GEMOM project [2] which seem to share a set of common goals with what we are working on at BT [3]. Hopefully further discussions with Reijo and Habtamu Abie from the Norwegian Computing Center will happen and be fruitful!

At the very opposite, ICWS [4], one of the top event in SOA in the academic calendar was very disappointing…Organisation was poor and the sessions I went to were almost empty. In addition, how can a paper on federated identity such as [5] can even make it to a research conference (especially one like ICWS) is staggering. As far as I can see there is no innovation, XACML solutions have been out there for 2-3 years at least now. Works from industry leaders like Layer 7, Vordel, Microsoft, Axiomatics and academic organisations like Newcastle, Vrije Universiteit and plenty others have been completely missed…very poor choice of paper. A quick look at that paper and its related work section will, I think, shock any SOA security researcher.

[1] The First International Conference on Advances in Future Internet, AFIN 2009, June 18-23, 2009 - Athens/Glyfada, Greece, http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/AFIN09.html

[2] Genetic Message Oriented Genetic Middleware (GEMOM), A FP7 European Project - January 2008 – June 2010, http://www.gemom.eu

[3] Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing the Service Oriented Infrastructure: research challenges and emerging solutions, Handbook on communications and information security, Stavroulakis, P, 2009, To be published

[4] IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA, http://conferences.computer.org/icws/2009/

[5] Regina N. Hebig, Christoph Meinel, Michael Menzel, Ivonne Thomas, Robert Warschofsky, A Web Service Architecture for Decentralised Identity- and Attribute-based Access Control, Proc. 7th IEEE ICWS (Application and Industry Track), Los Angeles, USA, July 2009

SOA governance architecture at ICWS

Later this summer, at ICWS [1], I will be presenting some of the ideas developed during the last few months on SOA governance [2]. In our quest to find a way to render business capabilities (e.g. web services) exposure and management easier, we have developed an architectural model that describes how to go at it.

The main points covered are resource (e.g. a software artefact such as a service) contextualisation, visibility, adaptation and life-cycle management as well as policy administration and process management. I know, there is a lot to cover in just 8 standard IEEE style pages, but apparently we’ve managed to do a good enough job for the reviewers to accept the paper.

If you would like more information on the topic please do drop me an email.

[1] IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009) http://conferences.computer.org/icws/2009/

[2] de Leusse, P., Dimitrakos, T., and Brossard, D., A governance model for SOA, IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Academic achievements

Workshop organisation
Burton Group & BT - SOA governance

Technical committee
MESH 2009, MESH 2010, AFIN 2010, SECURWARE 2011

Technical reviewer
Wiley Security and Communication Networks Journal - special issue on Security and Trust Management for Dynamic Coalitions
Third IFIP International Conference on Trust Management

Session Chair
MESH 2008, AFIN 09, SECURWARE 10

Book chapter
Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing the Service Oriented Infrastructure: research challenges and emerging solutions, Handbook on communications and information security, Stavroulakis, P, 2009, To be published

Journal article
de Leusse, P., Brossard, D. and Georgalas, N. (2010), Securing business operations in an SOA. Security and Communication Networks, 3: 456–485. doi: 10.1002/sec.188

Dimitrakos, T., Brossard, D. and de Leusse, P., Securing Business Operations in SOA, BT Technology Journal, vol.27, no.2 (https://www.btplc.com/Innovation/Journal/BTTJ/current/HTMLArticles/Volume26/22Securing/Default.aspx)

Conference/Worshop papers
de LEUSSE, P., Dimitrakos, T., SOA-based security governance middleware, SECURWARE 2010: the fourth international conference on Emerging security information, systems and technologies : 18–25 July 2010, Venice, Italy, eds. Reijo Savola, et al., IEEE, 2010, ISBN-13 978-0-7695-4095-5.

de Leusse, P., Dimitrakos, T., and Brossard, D., A governance model for SOA, IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), July 6-10, 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA

de Leusse, P., Panos Periorellis, Dimitrakos, T., and Srijith K. Nair, Self Managed Security Cell, a security model for the Internet of Things and Services, The First International Conference on Advances in Future Internet, AFIN 2009, IEEE Computer Society, June 18-23, 2009, Athens/Vouliagmeni, Greece, Best paper award

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P. and Dimitrakos, T., A semi autonomic infrastructure to manage non functional properties of a service
In UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008, 8-11 September, Edinburgh, UK, National e-Science Centre, 2008

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P. and Maierhofer, A., Secure & Rapid Composition of Infrastructure Services in the Cloud, In The Second International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications, SENSORCOMM 2008, 25-31, August 2008, Cap Esterel, France, pp 770-775, IEEE Computer Society, 2008

de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Dimitrakos, T. and Watson, P., An architecture for non functional properties management in distributed computing, Doctoral Consortium on Software and Data Technologies - Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium on Software and Data Technologies, DCSOFT 2008, In Conjunction with ICSOFT 2008
2008, Pages 26-37

Demo
de Leusse, P., Kwolek, B., Zielinski, K., A middleware infrastructure for multi-rule-engine distributed systems, Towards a service-based internet : third European conference, ServiceWave 2010 : Ghent, Belgium, December 13–15, 2010 : proceedings / eds. Elisabetta Di Nitto, Ramin Yahyapour. — Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag, cop. 2010. — (Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; ISSN 0302-9743 ; 6481). — ISBN-10 3-642-17693-2 ; ISBN-13 978-3-642-17693-7.

de Leusse, P., Kwolek, B., Zielinski, K., A common interface for multi-rule-engine distributed systems, RuleML-2010 Challenge : 4th international rule challenge : Web rule symposium, p. 21–23, 2010 : proceedings., eds. Monica Palmirani, et al. Washington, DC, USA, October. (http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-649/)

de Leusse, P. and Brossard, D., Distributed systems security governance, a SOA based approach, Third IFIP International Conference on Trust Management, Springer, June 15-19, 2009, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

Technical reports
de Leusse, P., Periorellis, P., Watson, P., CS-TR No 1037 Enterprise Service Bus: An overview, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Jul 2007

Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” 2009

The Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” version 2009 has arrived [1]. Of course it mentions that with the current crisis, SOA governance is more than ever of importance for organisations. But more importantly the report mentions that albeit the market (of SOA governance technologies) is still in turmoil, the companies have dramatically matured. This might mean that we could finally get some policy enforcement and governance common specifications...yes I'm an idealist...Please note that the report does mention the non existence of SOA governance interoperability common specification.

Governance seems to have officially passed the stage of being just “stick it into a registry so that we know where it is” (i.e. resource visibility) and we can read in this report a little bit about integration, interaction, monitoring, validation and life cycle management. I do keep hearing about governance product that are in fact “just” registries and repositories.

In fact, I'm quite pleased with this report as the very topic of my research in underlined as a “very apparent key data point”: “Customers are looking to govern their interactions with business partners and services provided by the cloud”.

We even get a quick definition (their own): "SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality".

[1] Gartner report “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets”, available at http://www.softwareag.com/Corporate/Images/Software_AG_Article4_SOA_tcm16-37108.pdf