Summary The increasing volume of data being produced, curated, and made available by research infrastructures in the environmental science domain require services that are able to optimize the delivery and staging of data for researchers and other users of scientific data. Specialized data services for managing data life cycle, for creating and delivering data products, and for customized data processing and analysis all play a crucial role in how these research infrastructures serve their communities, and many of these activities are time‐critical—needing to be carried out frequently within specific time windows. We describe our experiences identifying the time‐critical requirements of environmental scientists making use of computational research support environments. We present a microservice‐based infrastructure optimization suite, the Dynamic Real‐Time Infrastructure Planner, used for constructing virtual infrastructures for research applications on demand. We provide a case study whereby our suite is used to optimize runtime service quality for a data subscription service provided by the Euro‐Argo using EGI Federated Cloud and EUDAT's B2SAFE services, and to consider how such a case study relates to other application scenarios.

Genome-wide association studies have enabled identification of thousands of loci for hundreds of traits. Yet, for most human traits a substantial part of the estimated heritability is unexplained. This and recent advances in technology to produce high-dimensional data cost-effectively have led to method development beyond standard common variant analysis, including single-phenotype rare variant and multi-phenotype common variant analysis, with the latter increasing power for locus discovery and providing suggestions of pleiotropic effects. However, there are currently no optimal methods and tools for the combined analysis of rare variants and multiple phenotypes. We propose a user-friendly software tool MARV for Multi-phenotype Analysis of Rare Variants. The tool is based on a method that collapses rare variants within a genomic region and models the proportion of minor alleles in the rare variants on a linear combination of multiple phenotypes. MARV provides analyses of all phenotype combinations within one run and calculates the Bayesian Information Criterion to facilitate model selection. The running time increases with the size of the genetic data while the number of phenotypes to analyse has little effect both on running time and required memory. We illustrate the use of MARV with analysis of triglycerides (TG), fasting insulin (FI) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) in 4,721 individuals from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. The analysis suggests novel multi-phenotype effects for these metabolic traits at APOA5 and ZNF259, and at ZNF259 provides stronger support for association (P TG+FI = 1.8 × 10−9) than observed in single phenotype rare variant analyses (P TG = 6.5 × 10−8 and P FI = 0.27). MARV is a computationally efficient, flexible and user-friendly software tool allowing rapid identification of rare variant effects on multiple phenotypes, thus paving the way for novel discoveries and insights into biology of complex traits.

Haptic feedback based on the sense of touch and movement is a promising area of human-computer interaction in the car context. Most user studies on haptic feedback in the car have been controlled experiments of specific types of haptic stimuli. For the study presented in this paper, twelve participants tried novel haptic feedback prototypes and evaluated communication scenarios in the physical car context. Our aim was to understand user experiences and usage potential of haptic feedback in the car. The qualitative results show that haptic feedback may offer support for safety and social communication, but can be hard to interpret. We propose design considerations for in-car haptics such as simplicity, subtleness and directionality.

The spreading of mobile devices to all areas of everyday life impacts many contexts of use, including cars. Even though driving itself has remained relatively unchanged, there are now a wide variety of new in-car tasks, which people perform with both integrated infotainment systems and their mobile devices. To gain insights into this new task context and how it could be improved, we conducted a qualitative, contextual study in which we observed real-life car journeys with eight participants. The focus was on user interaction with touchscreen mobile devices, due to their wide range of functions and services. The findings show that the car is an extension of other contexts and it contains a rich set of infotainment tasks, including use of social media. Drivers emphasized gesture interaction and the use of non-visual modalities, for replacing visual information and notifying of changes in the driving context. Based on the findings, we present design implications for future in-car infotainment systems.

The sense of touch has been shown to convey emotive information and nuances in face-to-face interpersonal communication, but its applications in mobile communication technologies are still limited. One of the challenges for such new communication medium is the interpretation of tactile messages. This paper presents a study with an early prototype of a mobile tactile device. Twenty novice participants interpreted four messages consisting of a four-channel vibrotactile stimulus, complemented with three cumulative textual cues regarding 1) the communication setting, 2) sender, and 3) situation. The subjective interpretations were assessed with four semantic differential scales, and the reasoning behind the interpretations was inquired by interviewing. The findings show that the intensity and, to some degree, the friendliness of the message could be identified from the tactile-only message. However, to correctly interpret the degree of formality or emotionality in the message, also contextual cues were needed.

Identity federation is a key requirement for today's distributed services. This technology allows managed sharing of users' identity information between identity providers (IDP), and subsequently, the use of federated identities to access service providers (SP). Single sign-on (SSO) is a core feature provided by these systems. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling framework for session call control. It is becoming a widely accepted layer for applications and services, especially in the telecommunications and multimedia domain. In this paper, we explore solutions to incorporate SSO process into the SIP framework in order to simplify the services and resources access. Our design leverages the liberty alliance specifications and extends the existing SIP standards to support SSO functionality. We also present a prototype implementation at the end of this paper.

The haptic modality -- the sense of touch -- is utilized very limitedly in current human-computer interaction. Especially in mobile communication, the haptic modality could provide a means for richer multimodal and emotional communication between users over distance. Haptic user interface prototypes have been developed but their user experience has not been studied extensively. We conducted seven focus group sessions to study users' expectations for user experience of haptic interaction, specifically focusing on mobile communication. The paper presents the user experience factors that were regarded by potential users as salient in haptic interaction: subjective quality of the haptic stimuli, privacy, intimacy and spontaneity. Also the possibilities, restrictions and suitability of the haptic mobile communication are discussed. Most appropriate use cases for haptic communication were found to be conveying emotions and binary information. As the main conclusion, we present design guidelines for haptic mobile communication that were drawn up based on the findings.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a SIP proxy that enables inbound session initiation in the presence of network address translators. Furthermore, the implementation is used to evaluate a recently proposed IETF Internet-Draft. As a result, two problems were identified. This paper proposes a solution for these problems.