Protein classification is a key challenge in bioinformatics, essential for understanding biological functions, molecular interactions, and drug discovery. Yet, the functional landscape of proteins cannot always be inferred from sequence or fold similarity, as structurally divergent proteins may share common biological roles. Since most molecular interactions occur at the protein surface, capturing the geometric and biochemical features of these surfaces is essential for accurate functional inference. In this work, we introduce ProCLR, a graph-based framework that models protein surfaces as simplified, attribute-rich 3D geometric graphs, and applies supervised contrastive learning to learn discriminative embeddings. Our method integrates a geodesicaware clustering strategy to reduce surface complexity while preserving functional features. We evaluate ProCLR using two encoder architectures-Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graph Attention Networks (GATs)-on the SHREC'21 and SHREC'19 benchmarks. Experimental results show that ProCLR effectively captures functional patterns, achieving competitive performance with significantly reduced graph sizes, as measured by sensitivity, specificity, precision, accuracy, and F1-score.

Abstract This paper sheds light on the complexity of designing Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems where a high number of things reside and thus must collaborate despite their reduced size, restricted connectivity, and constrained storage limitations. To address this complexity, a novel concept referred to as thing artifact is devised abstracting the roles that things play in an IoT ecosystem. The abstraction focuses on 3 crosscutting aspects, namely functionality in terms of what to perform, life cycle in terms of how to behave, and interaction flow in terms of with whom to exchange. Building upon the concept of data artifact commonly used in data-driven business applications design, thing artifacts engage in relations with peers to coordinate their individual behaviors and hence avoid conflicts that could result from the quality of exchanged data. Putting functionality, life cycle, interaction flow, and relation together contributes to abstracting IoT ecosystems design. A system implementing a thing artifact-based ecosystem along with some experiments is presented in the paper as well.

Summary In the context of Internet of Things, thingsourcing is poised to promote the collective behavior that should prevail among things despite their independent nature being confined into silos. By analogy with crowdsourcing where crowds of (sometimes anonymous) people are contacted for their expertise, thingsourcing abstracts crowds of things and provides the necessary mechanisms for composing things together so they collectively satisfy users' demands. However, to ensure successful discovery of things according to these demands' requirements, an ontology‐based semantic description of things is deemed necessary. This article presents an approach for enriching things' descriptions semantically in preparation for their composition with respect to specific scripts that define who will do what, when, and where. A system demonstrating semantic thingsourcing along with a case study about dairy supply‐chain is presented in this article as well.

International audience

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) established the key reference architectural framework for Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The NFV framework supports several phases (e.g., design, deploy, and manage) that make up the life-cycle of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) along with their connectivity through the Network Service (NS) concept. Furthermore, coupled with Software-Defined Networking (SDN), NFV provides a dynamic reshaping of the network control plane. For a proper NS provisioning, network providers should anticipate and handle all the possible and practical VNFs composition scenarios, even those that are either rarely or never used. This results in costly, tedious, and time-consuming procedures when designing, deploying, and managing NSs. To overcome these limitations, NSs can be further improved by using techniques that have not been deeply explored yet. In this paper, we advocate for routing VNFs with re-configurable wiring capabilities as a novel concept that would allow agile and dynamic VNFs wiring from design-time to run-time. To validate this work, we developed a proof-of-concept as a plugin on top of ETSI Open Source MANO, as well as, a running vehicle platooning prototype. The performed experiments show that our approach: (i) performs better than the SDN-based solution in terms of latency and Mean Time-To-Operation (MTTO), and (ii) shows that the associated cost, with regard to SDN-based solution. remains acceptable.

Summary Despite the elasticity and pay‐per‐use benefits of cloud computing (aka fifth utility computing), organizations adopting clouds could be locked into single cloud providers, which is not always a “pleasant” experience when these providers stop operations. This is a serious concern for those organizations that who would like to deploy (core) business processes on the cloud along with tapping into these two benefits. To address the lock‐into concern, this paper proposes an approach for decomposing business processes into fragments that would run over multiple clouds and hence multiple providers. To develop fragments, the approach considers both restrictions over owners of business processes and potential competition among cloud providers. On the one hand, restrictions apply to each task in a business process and are specialized into budget to allocate, deadline to meet, and exclusivity to request. On the other hand, competition leads cloud providers to offer flexible pricing policies that would cater to the needs and requirements of each process owner. A policy handles certain clouds' properties referred to as limitedness, non‐renewability, and non‐shareability that impact the availability of cloud resources and hence the whole fragmentation. For instance, a non‐shareable resource could delay other processes should the current process do not release this resource on time. During fragmentation, interactions between owners of processes and providers of clouds happen according to two strategies referred to as global and partial. The former collects offers about cloud resources from all providers, while the latter collects such details from particular providers. To evaluate these strategies' pros and cons, a system implementing them, as well as demonstrating the technical feasibility of the fragmentation approach using credit‐application case study, is also presented in the paper. The system extends BPMN2‐modeler Eclipse plugin and supports interactions of processes' owners with clouds' providers that result to identifying the necessary fragments with focus on cost optimization.

In the Internet of Things (IoT), mutation aims to enhance functionality and survivability of a thing in the context of dynamic environments by allowing the thing to satisfy a need or seize a potential opportunity. In this paper, we propose a framework based on thing mutation as a countermeasure to certain security threats that could impact things' operations (e.g., sensing and communicating). We then provide a case study which focuses on battery draining attack and propose a mutation-based strategy as a countermeasure to this attack.

Microservices have emerged as an alternative solution to many existing technologies allowing to break monolithic applications into “small” fine-grained, highly-cohesive, and loosely-coupled units. However, identifying microservices remains a challenge that could undermine this migration success. This paper proposes an approach for microservices automatic-identification from a set of business processes (BP). The approach is multi-models combining different independent models that represent a BP's control dependencies, data dependencies, semantic dependencies, respectively. the approach is also based on collaborative clustering. A case study about renting bikes is adopted to illustrate and demonstrate the approach. In term of precision, the results show how BPs as inputs permit to generate better microservices compared to other approaches discussed in the paper, as well.

Summary This paper stresses out the struggle of organizations when managing multiple variants of the same business process. Each variant constitutes a response to structural and/or functional needs that overtime become unsustainable due to the multiplicity and complexity of these needs. To mitigate this struggle, a knowledge‐based approach for capturing these versions into a single configurable business process and splitting this process into fragments is discussed in the paper. The approach builds a configuration knowledge base to track the business process variability (ie, particularities of each business process variant). Variants are represented as a new configurable process structure tree resulting from fragmenting a business process. Implementation of the approach is, also, reported in this paper.

Detecting radicalization on social networks is crucial to the fight against violent extremism and terrorism. In most cases, online radicalization has clear warning indicators that can be detected at the early stages of the radicalization process. In this paper, we focus on mining radicalization indicators from online messages by exploiting structured domain knowledge. More precisely, we propose an approach to automatically annotate social messages with concepts from a domain ontology. Annotations are then exploited within an inference phase to identify the messages exhibiting a radicalization indicator. We conducted a set of experiments on a sample extracted from a public dataset that contains radicalized individuals along with their social messages (i.e. Tweets). Obtained results show the effectiveness of our approach compared to a baseline method.

International audience

Abstract: This paper discusses the blend of cognitive computing with the Internet-of-Things that should result into developing cognitive things. Today’s things are confined into a data-supplier role, which deprives them from being the technology of choice for smart applications development. Cognitive computing is about reasoning, learning, explaining, acting, etc. In this paper, cognitive things’ features include functional and non-functional restrictions along with a 3 stage operation cycle that takes into account these restrictions during reasoning, adaptation, and learning. Some implementation details about cognitive things are included in this paper based on a water pipe case-study.

International audience

Despite the smooth weaving of the Internet-of-Things into people's daily lives, many challenges, such as diversity and multiplicity of things' development technologies and communication standards, and users' reluctance due to privacy invasion, are slowing down this weaving. This paper tackles the challenge of things' passive nature that has confined them into a data-supplier role. Empowering things with additional capabilities would make them proactive so, that, they can for instance, reach out to peers exposing collaborative attitude and (un)form dynamic communities when necessary. In this paper, this empowerment takes shape through thing agentification that relies on norms (specialized into business and social) to regulate the operations of things and commitments to ensure thing compliance with these norms. No-compliance would lead to sanctions over things, which should affect their credibility and reputation. A proof-of-concept and missing-child case study technically illustrate thing agentification.

This paper presents an approach for detecting and tackling obstacles that could fail the execution of social business processes. Existing approaches target regular (nonsocial) business processes and thus, rely mainly on business logs that contain details such as who executes what, when, and where. However, interactions between a business process's three components namely task, machine, and person, are overlooked. This deprives process engineers from valuable details that could help detect and tackle obstacles. These details refer to task-2task, machine-2-machine, and person-2-person interactions and are recorded in social logs. Both business and social logs are part of an architecture that includes monitor, solver, and crawler components. A system implementing the architecture is also presented in the paper and illustrates how logs are developed and structured using eXtensible Event Stream format.

This paper presents a system for tracking the execution of social actions over Facebook along with the execution of business tasks. Putting social actions like post and comment together, results into developing social flows. Webhooks is used to "listen" to the changes happening over Facebook pages. Keywords: Business Task, Facebook, Social Action, and Social Flow.

Over the years, different development waves have shaped the Web. Introduced as a tool to browse Web sites, the Web now is a dynamic and robust platform upon which enterprises conduct e-Business. One of these waves known as Web 2.0 (or social Web) is putting pressure on how enterprises should ensure a productive use of Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Misuse cases of these applications are on the rise and the lack of guidelines and awareness is a main reason. This paper presents an approach for "controlling" the social actions that Web 2.0 applications allow users to execute. These actions are identified after analyzing some representative Web 2.0 applications and then defined in terms of stakeholders, content, and tools. The control over these actions is defined with UML Object Constraint Language (OCL) and then demonstrated through a prototype system.

This paper presents a credibility model to assess trust of Web services. The model relies on consumers' ratings whose accuracy can be questioned due to different biases. A category of consumers known as strict are usually excluded from the process of reaching a majority consensus. We demonstrated that this exclusion should not be. The proposed model reduces the gap between these consumers' ratings and the current majority rating. Fuzzy clustering is used to compute consumers' credibility. To validate this model a set of experiments are carried out.

This paper discusses how social Web services are held responsible for the actions they take at run time. Compared to (regular) Web services, social Web services perform different actions, for instance establishing and maintaining networks of contacts and forming with some privileged contacts strong and long lasting collaborative groups. Assessing these actions' outcomes, to avoid any violation, occurs through commitments that the social Web services are required to bind to. Two types of commitments are identified: social commitments that guarantee the proper use of the social networks in which the social Web services sign up, and business commitments that guarantee the proper development of composite Web services in response to users' requests. Detecting commitment violation and action prohibition using monitoring results in imposing sanctions on the “guilty” social Web services and taking corrective actions. A system for commitment management in terms of definition, binding, monitoring, and violation detection is also discussed in this paper.

This paper discusses the value-added of diversity to support fault tolerant Web Services operation. Web Services offering the same functionality are gathering into the same virtual space referred to as diversity group. Besides the group additional components are used including: composite manager, group manager, and Web service manager. The first component invokes the diversity groups and either resumes or aborts the overall execution in case of failures. The second component oversees Web services execution and the interactions between them. Finally, the last component monitors a Web service execution and reports either failure or success to the group manager. An architecture and a set of experiments showing the use of diversity to design and deploy fault tolerant Web services is presented in this paper.