With the recent increase in data volumes and algorithm complexity, clinical researchers are increasingly facing problems associated with information tracking, analysis reproducibility and the verification of scientific outputs. Systems are required that provide provenance data capture and management as support for analyses. This paper presents a provenance enabled system that is used in the N4U project, which aims to provide detailed trace ability to support research analysis processes in the study of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. To facilitate the orchestration of complex, large-scale analyses in this project we have adapted CRISTAL, a workflow and provenance tracking solution. The use of CRISTAL has provided a rich environment for neuroscientists to track the evolution of both data and workflows in N4U.

In recent years, malware has grown extremely rapidly in complexity and rates of system infection. Current generation anti-virus and anti-malware software provides system protection through the use of locally installed monitoring agents, which are dependent upon vendor generated signature and heuristic based rules. However, because these monitoring agents are installed within the systems they are trying to protect, they themselves are potential targets of attack by malware. Pathogen overcomes this issue by using a real-time system monitoring and analysis framework that utilises Virtual Machine introspection (VMI) to allow the monitoring of a system without the need for any locally installed agents. One of the main research problems in VMI is how to parse and interpret the memory of an executing system from outside of that system. Pathogen's contribution is a lightweight introspection framework that bridges the semantic gap.

The ability to seamlessly bridge clouds across organisational and administrative boundaries will play a vital role in establishing the utility of cloud computing for large-scale collaborative processes. Managing human and environmental contexts across geographical, network and administrative boundaries is a process that can benefit from a federation of cloud platforms. In the absence of a mature standard that defines access, control, management and coordination mechanisms between clouds in a federation, we explore these issues through a use-case of managing the dissemination and consumption of contextual information. The use-case is driven by the deployment of a broker-based context provisioning system, for homogenous cloud deployments that reside in different administrative domains. The discussion is driven by the aim to highlight key issues and challenges for enabling cloud federation for large-scale context provisioning, which forms the main contribution of this article.

Context aware middleware infrastructures have traditionally been implemented with a modular approach to allow different components to work cooperatively and supply context synthesis and provision services. In this paper, we discuss the important requirements that arise when such a middleware is deployed in a distributed environment and present the design and implementation of context aware middleware for ubiquitous systems (CAMUS) with which the authors have attempted to meet those requirements. Issues related to distributed coordination within the middleware in terms of component discovery and management and multiple context domains are also discussed.

Large-scale distributed systems, such as ubiquitous computing environments, require a service delivery mechanism in order to keep track of the vast set of services offered and make them available to interested clients. The amount of services and clients, their context, and loose coupling between them makes service delivery in ubiquitous environments different from other systems. This paper presents a solution to overcome these issues by utilizing the underlying ontology and semantics for service lookup. Access control over context data is also considered by specifying dynamic policies at the system and service level.