This paper describes the Dubuque Electricity Portal, a city-scale system aimed at supporting voluntary reductions of electricity consumption. The Portal provided each household with fine-grained feedback on its electricity use, as well as using incentives, comparisons, and goal setting to encourage conservation. Logs, a survey and interviews were used to evaluate the user experience of the Portal during a 20-week pilot with 765 volunteer households. Although the volunteers had already made a wide range of changes to conserve electricity prior to the pilot, those who used the Portal decreased their electricity use by about 3.7%. They also reported increased understanding of their usage, and reported taking an array of actions - both changing their behavior and their electricity infrastructure. The paper discusses the experience of the system's users, and describes challenges for the design of ECF systems, including balancing accessibility and security, a preference for time-based visualizations, and the advisability of multiple modes of feedback, incentives and information presentation.

The Dubuque Water Portal is a system aimed at supporting voluntary reductions of water consumption that is intended to be deployed city-wide. It provides each household with fine-grained, near real time feedback on their water consumption, as well as using techniques like social comparison, weekly games, and news and chat to encourage water conservation. This study used logs, a survey and interviews to evaluate a 15-week pilot with 303 households. It describes the Portal's design, and discusses its adoption, use and impacts. The system resulted in a 6.6% decrease in water consumption, and the paper employs qualitative methods to look at the ways in which the Portal was (or wasn't) effective in supporting its users and enabling them to reduce their consumption. The paper concludes with a discussion of design implications for residential feedback systems, and possible engagement models.

In this paper, we propose a dynamic service discovery framework from Web services representation chain. The major components include Web service chains precategorizing module, service exploration engine, services container, chain change detection module with associated control parameters. From the working research prototype, our proposed mechanism enables businesses to easily retrieve up-to-date Web services linked and nested multi-level deep in the service description documents. In addition, a federated Web services discovery portal is illustrated to show how the research results are aggregated from hyperlinked WSIL documents as well as UDDl registries for achieving more accurate services exploration result.

In this paper, we present the Web services outsourcing manager framework via a mathematical model for dynamic business processes configuration using existing Web services to meet customers' requirements. An XML-based annotation document is proposed to capture the business requirements and used to dynamically generate search scripts for an advanced Web services discovery engine to find Web services from UDDI registries and Web service inspection language documents. A list of available Web services is returned for further composition and optimization to produce the final business process. This paper proposes a novel mechanism to map a service selection problem into a solution space {0,1} to utilize gold optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms (GA). A working research prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the on-demand Web services flow composition.

In this paper, a manageable Web services hub framework and enabling technologies for e-sourcing are proposed for buyers, suppliers, service providers and trading partners to register business, user and service information as well as to provision and subscribe to services. The proposed framework enables a business to dynamically configure its business processes to integrate with existing Web services provided by other enterprises based on service requirements. Next, a multi-level security mechanism ensuring secure communications in a hub or among hubs is presented. An advanced Web services discovery mechanism is introduced after that for looking up multiple UDDI registries and aggregating results in an efficient manner. A working system of this framework, Managed e-Hub, which provides an infrastructure for enabling next generation e-utilities in a secure and controlled environment, is also presented in this paper. Some further research ideas are given at the end of the paper.