BPM (Business Process Management) is a set of methodologies used to discover, model, analyze, and improve business processes. These methodologies have produced long standing standards like BPMN, XPDL and BPMN-XML. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platforms deal specifically with process automation - software robots automatically executing business processes instead of human users. A central piece of RPA platforms is the representation (i.e. model and serialization) of an automated business process, so that it can be understood and executed by software machines. However, modern RPA platforms use custom, proprietary representations of processes. Standard representations of processes like XPDL and BPMN-XML could instead offer a wider flexibility and interoperability among RPA platforms. In this paper, we analyze two such standard representations (i.e. serializations) of business processes, XPDL and BPMN-XML, and try to determine which one is the most useful for representing a business process for an RPA platform.

We explore in this paper the interests and challenges of students regarding web and mobile technologies. Our study is based on a survey among undergraduate students, students that attend a Web Programming course. In particular, we study the challenges students have in following a successful career in web or mobile development and we have found that the most important one is the large effort required for keeping up to date with the fast changing web and mobile technologies. Overall, the attitude of the surveyed undergraduate students towards web development and mobile development is rather positive, as more than 60% of them said that they are interested in a career in web or mobile development. We also found out that most of them prefer working on back-end web technologies. As for the specific web technologies students are interested on, they are highly varied. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the interests and challenges of students regarding web and mobile technologies, which can guide the development of effective teaching and learning approaches in this area.

This paper presents a study on using Agile methodologies in the teaching process at the university/college level during the Covid-19 pandemic, online classes. We detail a list of techniques inspired from software engineering Agile methodologies that can be used in online teaching. We also show, by analyzing students grades, that these Agile inspired techniques probably help in the educational process.

In this paper we present two algorithms that can be used for EATS (Extractive Automatic Text Summarization) of theological New Testament exegesis texts. Both algorithms represent input text as sentence embeddings (i.e. they do not rely on the classical bag-of-words TF-IDF model), the first algorithm is based on graph clustering and the other one is an evolutionary algorithm. In the graph-based algorithm, the sentence embeddings are represented as vertices in a graph, then the graph is clusterized and the best sentence from each cluster is extracted as candidate for the text summary. In the second algorithm, the sentences from the initial text are represented in a binary model and they are evolved based on a fitness function that encompasses various desired qualities of the text summary. We have tested both algorithms on a theological texts dataset, but also on general, standard, dataset DUC2002 and we have obtained good ROUGE scores.

We analyze in this paper the design architecture of a web-based personalized query suggestion system usable in information retrieval contexts. Our system comes in the form of a transparent proxy for the Google search engine (although it can work with other search engines too, with minimal code changes) that is able to personalize the list of query suggestions provided by Google, based on the recent user web browsing history. The most important design choices are presented with a special focus on the integration with the Google search engine. The integration analysis is directed by the well known application integration criteria. We have made our system transparent to the user when searching information on Google and we have shown through performance tests that our system has very small computational costs for the user experience.

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We introduce in this paper a bandwidth aggregation routing solution for multihoming sites. Our routing solution interconnects two distinct multihomed network sites (i.e. network sites that have two or more uplinks to the Internet) and routes local flows between these two network sites. It routes local flows dynamically through several outgoing network paths/links depending on the load (i.e. congestion level) on each path. If a network path/uplink becomes more congested, fewer local flows are routed through it. We detail two path load estimation strategies: one based on RTT measurements and the other based on throughput measurements, both implying passive network measurements. Our multihoming solution outperforms the ECMP-based (i.e. Equal-Cost Multipath) solution in terms of total aggregated throughput and inter-flow fairness.

Powerlists are recursive data structures that together with their associated algebraic theories could offer both a methodology to design parallel algorithms and parallel programming abstractions to ease the development of parallel applications This has been also proved by a concrete development of such a framework that allows easy, efficient, and reliable implementation of Java parallel programs on shared memory systems. The paper presents a highly scalable version of this framework by extending it to distributed memory systems based on an MPI implementation. Through this extension we may use the framework to develop Java parallel programs also on distributed memory systems such as clusters. The design of the framework enables flexibility in defining the appropriate execution type depending on the execution system and its characteristics. Therefore, it is possible to choose MPI execution (that also could be combined with multithreading) if the available system includes an MPI platform, or simple multithreading execution. Examples are given and performance experiments are conducted. The performance analysis of these applications emphasises the utility and the efficiency of this framework extension.

Parallel programs based on the Divide&Conquer paradigm could be successfully defined in a simple way using powerlists. These parallel recursive data structures and their algebraic theories offer both a methodology to design parallel algorithms and parallel programming abstractions to ease the development of parallel applications. The paper presents how programs based on powerlists can be implemented in Java using the JPLF framework we developed. The design of this framework is based on powerlists theory, but in the same time follows the object-oriented design principles that provide flexibility and maintainability. Examples are given and performance experiments are conducted. The results emphasize the utility and the efficiency of the framework.

This paper describes a design framework for TCP-friendly and media-friendly rate control algorithms for multimedia streaming applications. The idea of this framework is to start from a TCP-friendly Rate Control (TFRC) transmission rate and then alter this transmission rate so that it tracks the media characteristics of the stream (e.g., bitrate) or other application characteristics like the client buffer fill level. In this way, the media-friendly property of the algorithm is achieved. We give three rules that guide how the TFRC throughput should track the evolution of the stream's media characteristics and remain TCP-friendly in the long term. We also present, as proof of concept, four simple media-friendly and TCP-friendly congestion control algorithms built using the aforementioned framework. These congestion control algorithms are better suited for multimedia streaming applications than traditional TCP congestion control or smooth congestion control algorithms like TFRC. We have performed evaluations of two of the four proposed media-friendly and TCP-friendly congestion control algorithms under various network conditions and validated that they represent viable transport solutions, better than TFRC, for variable bitrate video streams. More specifically, our two media-friendly and TCP-friendly congestion control algorithms maintained a TCP-friendly throughput in the long term in all experiments and avoided an empty buffer at the client side in situations when TFRC could not achieve this.

This paper describes UTFRC - utility-driven TCP-friendly rate control, a congestion control mechanism more suitable for streaming layered scalable video streams incest-effort networks than TFRC. UTFRC relies on the original TFRC for achieving a stable throughput, but uses the throughput outputted by TFRC only as a guideline and shapes this throughput, on a coarser granularity scale, according to media characteristics of the video stream. This way, UTFRC is TCP-friendly when computing available bandwidth, but it is also media-sensitive (i.e., media-friendly).We present two versions of UTFRC, a simple one based only on of the video stream and an advanced one which takes into account also the client prefetching buffer value, but other media characteristics of the stream can also be considered. UTFRC improves the perceived quality of video streams in best-effort network conditions.

In this paper, we present a TCP-friendly congestion control that is at the same time media-friendly (i.e. sensitive to media characteristics). These types of rate controls are more suitable for multimedia streaming applications than the classical TCP congestion control and smooth TCP-friendly rate controls. We build our media-friendly rate control by combining the notion of TCP-friendliness with a general optimization framework for bandwidth sharing in computer networks. The resulting control is sensitive to network conditions (i.e. TCP-friendly) and also to multimedia stream characteristics (i.e. media-friendly) which makes it more suitable for controlling the transmission rate of multimedia streaming applications and should improve the perceived quality of video streams in best-effort network conditions.