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Part 2: Fault Tolerance and Big Data; International audience; To process big data, applications have been utilizing data processing libraries over the last years, which are however not optimized to work together for efficient processing. Intermediate Representations (IR) have been introduced for unifying essential functions into an abstract interface that supports cross-optimization between applications. Still, the efficiency of an IR depends on the architecture and the tools required for compilation and execution. In this paper, we present a first glance at a framework that provides an IR by creating containers with executable code from structures of data analytics functions, described in an input grammar. These containers process data in query lists and they can be executed either standalone or integrated with other big data analytics applications without the need to compile the entire framework.

Part 4: Modelling: Structures and Implementations; International audience; The Contract Automata Tool is an open-source tool for the specification, composition and synthesis of coordination of service contracts, including functionalities to deal with modalities and configurations. We discuss an implementation of the abstract parametric synthesis algorithm firstly introduced in our COORDINATION 2019 paper, comprehending most permissive controller, orchestration and choreography synthesis. The tool’s source code has been redesigned and refactored in Java 8, and we show the resulting gain in computational efficiency.

Part 1: Full Papers ; Part of the book sub series: Programming and Software Engineering (LNPSE); International audience; For the past 50 years, temporal constraints have been a key driver in the development of critical systems, as ensuring their safety requires their behaviour to meet stringent temporal requirements. A well established and promising approach to express and verify such temporal constraints is to rely on formal modelling languages. One such language is CCSL, first introduced as part of the MARTE UML profile, which allows the developer, through entities called clocks, to abstract any system into events on which constraints can be expressed, and then assessed using TimeSquare, a tool which implements its operational semantics. By nature, CCSL handles horizontal separation (component based design at one step in the system development) of concerns through the notion of clocks, but does not yet take into account the other major separation of concerns used in modern system development: vertical separation, also called refinement in the literature (relations between the various steps of the system development). This paper proposes an approach to extend CCSL with a notion of refinement in order to handle temporal models relying on both vertical and horizontal parts. Our proposal relies on the notion of multi-layered time to provide two new CCSL relations expressing two different yet complementary notions of refinement. Their integration with the other CCSL constructs is discussed and their use is illustrated while the relevance and future impacts of this extended version of CCSL is detailed.

Part 2: Communications: Types and Implemenations; International audience; Global types are at the core of communication based programming. They allow a high level specification of protocols involving many participants and enforce good safety and liveness properties, such as absence of deadlock, locked participants and orphan messages. In this paper, we describe an implementation of a novel formalism of global types for sessions with asynchronous communications in co-logic programming, where we use coinduction to properly handle the coinductive syntax of global types and processes. We also define a simple query language to write sessions and global types, providing primitives for type checking.

A k-anonymous broadcast can be implemented using a small group of dining cryptographers to first share the message, followed by a flooding phase started by group members. Members have little incentive to forward the message in a timely manner, as forwarding incurs costs, or they may even profit from keeping the message. In worst case, this leaves the true originator as the only sender, rendering the dining-cryptographers phase useless and compromising their privacy. We present a novel approach using a modified dining-cryptographers protocol to distributed shares of an (n,k)-Shamir's secret sharing scheme. Finally, all group members broadcast their received share through the network, allowing any recipient of k shares to reconstruct the message, enforcing anonymity. If less than k group members broadcast their shares, the message cannot be decoded thus preventing privacy breaches for the originator. Our system provides (n-|attackers|)-anonymity for up to k-1 attackers and has little performance impact on dissemination. We show these results in a security analysis and performance evaluation based on a proof-of-concept prototype. Throughput rates between 10 and 100 kB/s are enough for many real applications with high privacy requirements, e.g., financial blockchain system., 16 pages, 5 figures

Part 4: Modelling: Structures and Implementations; International audience; Coordination scenarios have high demands on concurrency and interaction. However, these are typical sources for flaws in both design and implementation. A modeling approach enables reasoning about distributed algorithms and finding deficiencies right from the beginning. The Peer Model has been introduced as a modeling tool for distribution, concurrency and blackboard-based collaboration and coordination, relying on known foundations like tuple spaces, Petri Nets and Actor Model. A runtime system exists that serves Java developers for prototyping, but still a feasible tool-chain was missing, like for most academic systems.This paper presents a practical new tool-chain for the Peer Model consisting of a graphical modelling tool, building on a drawing program that exports XML. A translator parses the XML and translates it into a newly developed domain specific language that is the basis for code generation. One target is a new, formal automaton-based runtime written in the Go programming language. It allows systematic simulation runs of user models. The demo shows a peer competition scenario, where several players play a game, a global state holds the players’ scores, and in addition each peer maintains a decentralized state. Before taking a move in the game, a peer asserts its current local state to be the same like the global one. If this is the case, it carries out its action and distributes the information about it to all other players for further verification. The scenario captures core coordination mechanisms found in blockchain systems.

Part 3: Distributed Algorithms; International audience; Federated learning is a novel research area of AI technology that focus on distributed training and privacy preservation. Current federated optimization algorithms face serious challenge in the aspects of speed and accuracy, especially in non-i.i.d scenario. In this work, we propose UCBFed, a federated optimization algorithm that uses the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method to heuristically select participating clients in each round’s optimization process. We evaluate our algorithm in multiple federated distributed datasets. Comparing to most widely-used FedAvg and FedOpt, the UCBFed we proposed is superior in both the final accuracy and communication efficiency.

International audience; Session types are becoming popular and have been integrated in several mainstream programming languages. Nevertheless, while many programming languages consider asynchronous fifo channel communication, the notion of subtyping used in session type implementations is the one defined by Gay and Hole for synchronous communication. This might be because there are several notions of asynchronous session subtyping, these notions are usually undecidable, and only recently sound (but not complete) algorithmic characterizations for these subtypings have been proposed. But the fact that the definition of asynchronous session subtyping and the theory behind related algorithms are not easily accessible to non-experts may also prevent further integration. The aim of this paper, and of the tool presented therein, is to make the growing body of knowledge about asynchronous session subtyping more accessible, thus promoting its integration in practical applications of session types.

Docker images are used to distribute and deploy cloud-native applications in containerised form. A container engine runs them with separated privileges according to namespaces. Recent studies have investigated security vulnerabilities and runtime characteristics of Docker images. In contrast, little is known about the extent of hardware-dependent features in them such as processor-specific trusted execution environments, graphics acceleration or extension boards. This problem can be generalised to missing knowledge about the extent of any hardware-bound instructions within the images that may require elevated privileges. We first conduct a systematic one-year evolution analysis of a sample of Docker images concerning their use of hardware-specific features. To improve the state of technology, we contribute novel tools to manage such images. Our heuristic hardware dependency detector and a hardware-aware Docker executor give early warnings upon missing dependencies instead of leading to silent or untimely failures. Our dataset and tools are released to the research community., 21st International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems

International audience; Book Front Matter of LNCS 12717

International audience; Book Front Matter of LNCS 12718

Part 5: Short Contributions; International audience; Highly configurable systems (HCSs), such as software product lines, have complex configuration spaces. Combinatorial Testing and Random Testing are the main approaches to testing of HCSs. In this paper, we empirically compare their strengths with respect to scalability and diversity of sampled configurations (i.e., tests). We choose Icpl and QuickSampler to respectively represent Combinatorial Testing and Random Testing. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the t-way coverage criterion of generated test suites for HCS benchmarks.

Part 4: Testing Methods and Automation; International audience; This paper demonstrates the applicability of state-of-the-art proof assistant tools to establish completeness properties of a test strategy and the correctness of its associated test generation algorithms, as well as to generate trustworthy executable code for these algorithms. To this end, a variation of an established test strategy is considered, which generates adaptive test cases based on a reference model represented as a possibly nondeterministic finite state machine (FSM). These test cases are sufficient to check whether the reduction conformance relation holds between the reference model and an implementation whose behaviour can also be represented by an FSM. Both the mechanical verification of this test strategy and the generation of a provably correct implementation are performed using the well-known Isabelle/HOL proof assistant.

Part 3: Testing Methods and Applications; International audience; There is a large need for effective and efficient testing processes and tools for mobile applications, due to their continuous evolution and to the sensitivity of their users to failures. Industries and researchers focus their effort to the realization of effective fully automatic testing techniques for mobile applications. Many of the proposed testing techniques lack in efficiency because their algorithms cannot be executed in parallel. In particular, Active Learning testing techniques usually relay on sequential algorithms.In this paper we propose a Active Learning technique for the fully automatic exploration and testing of Android applications, that parallelizes and improves a general algorithm proposed in the literature. The novel parallel algorithm has been implemented in the context of a prototype tool exploiting a component-based architecture, and has been experimentally evaluated on 3 open source Android applications by varying different deployment configurations.The measured results have shown the feasibility of the proposed technique and an average saving in testing time between 33% (deploying two testing resources) and about 80% (deploying 12 testing resources).

Part 2: Security Testing; International audience; The number of security incidents involving mobile devices has risen in the past years. This means that organizations must seriously consider such devices within their threat landscape and prepare their cybersecurity operators to prevent, identify, and manage security issues involving them. Nowadays, cyber ranges represent the most effective and versatile systems for training skills in the cybersecurity domain as they provide hands-on experiences in large, sophisticated infrastructures. Nevertheless, cyber ranges are capable of emulating components and interactions of the Information and Operational Technology domains, but they lack the support of mobile devices with the same effectiveness and realism. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of the architecture and the training environments of an existing cyber range, which properly integrates mobile security components. The effectiveness of such an integration is due to a thorough review of the mobile threat landscape and the functional components of a cyber range.

Part 2: Security Testing; International audience; Denial of Service (DoS) attacks represent an ever evolving landscape, which ranges from bruteforce flooding approaches to more sophisticated low-bandwidth slow techniques. DoS has become a major threat to the availability of modern web servers because of the large number of attack tools across the Internet. In spite of the increasing number of security modules that can be usefully deployed in production servers, there is not a one-fits-all defense solution against DoS.This paper proposes a measurement-based analysis of a well-established defense module for the Apache web server. The module is tested against both flooding and slow DoS attacks in order to quantify its capability at assuring correct service to legitimate clients. Results indicate that the module can mitigate flooding DoS attacks while causing some performance loss of the server; however, it is ineffective against slow attacks. The findings of our analysis are useful to support the deployment of proper defense mechanisms.

Part 2: Security Testing; International audience; The tremendous and fast growth of malware circulating in the wild urges the community of malware analysts to rapidly and effectively share knowledge about the arising threats. Among the other solutions, Yara is establishing as a de facto standard for describing and exchanging Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). Unfortunately, the community of malware analysts did not agree on a set of guidelines for writing Yara rules: a plethora of very different styles for formalizing IOCs can be observed, indeed. Our thesis is that different styles of Yara rule writing could affect the quality of IOCs. With this paper we provide: (i) the definition of two dimensions of Yara rules quality, namely Robustness and Looseness; (ii) a taxonomy for describing the kinds of IOCs that can be formalized with the Yara grammar, and (iii) a suite of metrics for measuring the quality of an IOC. Finally, we carried out a study on 32,311 Yara rules for examining the different existing styles and to investigate the relationship between the writing styles and the quality of IOCs.

Part 3: Testing Methods and Applications; International audience; In this paper, we present a new design and proof of concept of a smart Near Field Communication (NFC) sniffer, including special trigger features for high-precision measurements during NFC interoperability testing. Even though interoperability testing is not mandatory for successful NFC-device certification, the fast increasing amount of electronic consumer devices providing NFC functionality strongly increases the need for interoperability testing. Nowadays, used automated interoperability test systems require time-consuming and expensive manual debug sessions in case of a communication error, to compensate missing test data for analyzing the failure root cause. To highly decrease costs and time required to perform these manual measurements, we developed a proof of concept of a sniffer tool providing intelligent trigger functionalities. It supports the test engineer during manual debug session and can be integrated into a fully automated interoperability test and analysis system. Hence, we drive the development of automated interoperability test systems and want to encourage standardization bodies to include interoperability testing to the certification procedure.

Part 3: Testing Methods and Applications; International audience; Service providers use cloud to reduce the cost of their services and speed up their time to market. There is a huge gap between the environment where the services are developed and first tested, and the environment where they operate. Live testing is defined as testing a service in its production environment without causing any intolerable disruption to its usage. It is considered as one of the solutions to overcome the impact of the difference between the development environment and the production environment on the reliability of the test results. Test interferences are a major challenge for live testing as they may lead to the system mishandling the production traffic. Existing solutions to alleviate the risk of interferences have limited applicability. In this paper we propose a set of test methods, applicable in different situations, for live testing to improve the reliability of test results without causing any intolerable disturbance to the cloud services. To reduce the complexity of these test methods we define the concept of boundary environments and a set of coverage criteria to aim at during live testing.

Part 1: Model-Based Testing; International audience; Active automata learning gains increasing interest since it gives an insight into the behavior of a black-box system. A crucial drawback of the frequently used learning algorithms based on Angluin’s $$L^*$$L∗ is that they become impractical if systems with a large input/output alphabet are learned. Previous work suggested to circumvent this problem by abstracting the input alphabet and the observed outputs. However, abstraction could introduce non-deterministic behavior. Already existing active automata learning algorithms for observable non-deterministic systems learn larger models if outputs are only observable after certain input/output sequences. In this paper, we introduce an abstraction scheme that merges akin states. Hence, we learn a more generic behavioral model of a black-box system. Furthermore, we evaluate our algorithm in a practical case study. In this case study, we learn the behavior of five different Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (mqtt) brokers interacting with multiple clients.

Part 5: Short Contributions; International audience; Deriving tests with guaranteed fault coverage by FSM-based test methods is rather complex for systems with a large number of states. At the same time, formal verification methods allow to effectively process large transition systems; in particular, SMT solvers are widely used to solve analysis problems for finite transition systems. In this paper, we describe the known necessary and sufficient conditions of completeness of test suites derived by FSM-based test methods via the first-order logic formulas and use an SMT solver in order to check them. In addition, we suggest a new sufficient condition for test suite completeness and check the corresponding first-order logic formula via the SMT solver. The results of computer experiments with randomly generated finite state machines confirm the correctness and efficiency of a proposed approach.

Part 2: Cloud and Systems; International audience; Virtual machine introspection (VMI) is the process of external monitoring of virtual machines. Previous work has demonstrated that VMI can contribute to the security of cloud environments and distributed systems, as it enables, for example, stealthy intrusion detection. One of the biggest challenges for applying VMI in production environments is the performance overhead that certain tracing operations impose on the monitored virtual machine. In this paper, we show how this performance overhead can be significantly minimized by incorporating minor extensions for VMI operations into the hypervisor. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we demonstrate that the pre-processing of VMI events in the Xen hypervisor reduces the monitoring overhead for the use case of VMI-based process-bound monitoring by a factor of 18.

Part 1: Full Papers; International audience; Clock-dependent probabilistic timed automata extend classical timed automata with discrete probabilistic choice, where the probabilities are allowed to depend on the exact values of the clocks. Previous work has shown that the quantitative reachability problem for clock-dependent probabilistic timed automata with at least three clocks is undecidable. In this paper, we consider the subclass of clock-dependent probabilistic timed automata that have one clock, that have clock dependencies described by affine functions, and that satisfy an initialisation condition requiring that, at some point between taking edges with non-trivial clock dependencies, the clock must have an integer value. We present an approach for solving in polynomial time quantitative and qualitative reachability problems of such one-clock initialised clock-dependent probabilistic timed automata. Our results are obtained by a transformation to interval Markov decision processes.

Part 1: Full Papers; International audience; Generating code from networks of timed automata is a well-researched topic with many proposed approaches, which have in common that they not only generate code for the processes in the network, but necessarily generate additional code for a global scheduler which implements the timed automata semantics. For distributed systems without shared memory, this additional component is, in general, undesired.In this work, we present a new approach to the generation of correct code (without global scheduler) for distributed systems without shared memory yet with (almost) synchronous clocks if the source model does not depend on a global scheduler. We characterise a set of implementable timed automata models and provide a translation to a timed while language. We show that each computation of the generated program has a network computation path with the same observable behaviour.

Non-volatile memory (NVM), aka persistent memory, is a new paradigm for memory that preserves its contents even after power loss. The expected ubiquity of NVM has stimulated interest in the design of novel concepts ensuring correctness of concurrent programming abstractions in the face of persistency. So far, this has lead to the design of a number of persistent concurrent data structures, built to satisfy an associated notion of correctness: durable linearizability. In this paper, we transfer the principle of durable concurrent correctness to the area of software transactional memory (STM). Software transactional memory algorithms allow for concurrent access to shared state. Like linearizability for concurrent data structures, opacity is the established notion of correctness for STMs. First, we provide a novel definition of durable opacity extending opacity to handle crashes and recovery in the context of NVM. Second, we develop a durably opaque version of an existing STM algorithm, namely the Transactional Mutex Lock (TML). Third, we design a proof technique for durable opacity based on refinement between TML and an operational characterisation of durable opacity by adapting the TMS2 specification. Finally, we apply this proof technique to show that the durable version of TML is indeed durably opaque. The correctness proof is mechanized within Isabelle., Comment: This is the full version of the paper that is to appear in FORTE 2020 (https://www.discotec.org/2020/forte)

Part 2: Coordination Languages; International audience; Coordination is a well established computing paradigm with a plethora of languages, abstractions and approaches. Yet, we are not aware of any adoption of the principle of coordination in the broad domain of cyber-physical systems, where non-functional properties, such as execution/response time, energy consumption and security are as crucial as functional correctness.We propose a coordination approach, including a functional coordination language and its associated tool flow, that considers time, energy and security as first-class citizens in application design and development. We primarily target cyber-physical systems running on off-the-shelf heterogeneous multi-core platforms. We illustrate our approach by means of a real-world use case, an unmanned aerial vehicle for autonomous reconnaissance mission, which we develop in close collaboration with industry.

Part 1: Full Papers; International audience; Causal consistent reversibility blends causality and reversibility. For a concurrent system, it says that an action can be undone provided this has no consequences, thereby making it possible to bring the system back to a past consistent state. Time reversibility is considered instead in the performance evaluation field. A continuous-time Markov chain is time reversible if its behavior remains the same when the direction of time is reversed. We try to bridge these two theories by showing the conditions under which both causal consistent reversibility and time reversibility can be achieved in the setting of a stochastic process algebra.

Part 3: Fault-Tolerance and Reproducibility; International audience; Reproducing experimental results is nowadays seen as one of the greatest impairments for the progress of science in general and distributed systems in particular. This stems from the increasing complexity of the systems under study and the inherent complexity of capturing and controlling all variables that can potentially affect experimental results. We argue that this can only be addressed with a systematic approach to all the stages and aspects of the evaluation process, such as the environment in which the experiment is run, the configuration and software versions used, and the network characteristics among others. In this tutorial paper, we focus on the networking aspect, and discuss our ongoing research efforts and tools to contribute to a more systematic and reproducible evaluation of large scale distributed systems.

Part 1: Privacy and Security; International audience; Cloud Computing services for data analytics are increasingly being sought by companies to extract value from large quantities of information. However, processing data from individuals and companies in third-party infrastructures raises several privacy concerns. To this end, different secure analytics techniques and systems have recently emerged. These initial proposals leverage specific cryptographic primitives lacking generality and thus having their application restricted to particular application scenarios. In this work, we contribute to this thriving body of knowledge by combining two complementary approaches to process sensitive data.We present SafeSpark, a secure data analytics framework that enables the combination of different cryptographic processing techniques with hardware-based protected environments for privacy-preserving data storage and processing. SafeSpark is modular and extensible therefore adapting to data analytics applications with different performance, security and functionality requirements.We have implemented a SafeSpark’s prototype based on Spark SQL and Intel SGX hardware. It has been evaluated with the TPC-DS Benchmark under three scenarios using different cryptographic primitives and secure hardware configurations. These scenarios provide a particular set of security guarantees and yield distinct performance impact, with overheads ranging from as low as 10% to an acceptable 300% when compared to an insecure vanilla deployment of Apache Spark.

Part 9: Verification and Analysis; International audience; Medical systems are composed of medical devices and apps which are developed independently by different vendors. A set of communication patterns, based on asynchronous message-passing, has been proposed to loosely integrate medical devices and apps. These patterns guarantee the point-to-point quality of communication service (QoS) by local inspection of messages at its constituent components. These local mechanisms inspect the property of messages to enforce a set of parametrized local QoS properties. Adjusting these parameters to achieve the required point-to-point QoS is non-trivial and depends on the involved components and the underlying network. We use Timed Rebeca, an actor-based formal modeling language, to model such systems and asses their QoS properties by model checking. We model the components of communication patterns as distinct actors. A composite medical system using several instances of patterns is subject to state-space explosion. We propose a reduction technique preserving QoS properties. We prove that our technique is sound and show the applicability of our approach in reducing the state space by modeling a clinical scenario made of several instances of patterns.

Part 2: Tutorials; International audience; This is a tutorial paper on [St]Mungo, a toolchain based on multiparty session types and their connection to typestates for safe distributed programming in Java language.The StMungo (“Scribble-to-Mungo”) tool is a bridge between multiparty session types and typestates. StMungo translates a communication protocol, namely a sequence of sends and receives of messages, given as a multiparty session type in the Scribble language, into a typestate specification and a Java API skeleton. The generated API skeleton is then further extended with the necessary logic, and finally typechecked by Mungo. The Mungo tool extends Java with (optional) typestate specifications. A typestate is a state machine specifying a Java object protocol, namely the permitted sequence of method calls of that object. Mungo statically typechecks that method calls follow the object’s protocol, as defined by its typestate specification. Finally, if no errors are reported, the code is compiled with javac and run as standard Java code.In this tutorial paper we give an overview of the stages of the [St]Mungo toolchain, starting from Scribble communication protocols, translating to Java classes with typestates, and finally to typechecking method calls with Mungo. We illustrate the [St]Mungo toolchain via a real-world case study, the HTTP client-server request-response protocol over TCP. During the tutorial session, we will apply [St]Mungo to a range of examples having increasing complexity, with HTTP being one of them.

Part 6: Large-Scale Decentralised Systems; International audience; Emerging application scenarios, such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, call for coordination approaches addressing openness, self-adaptation, heterogeneity, and deployment agnosticism. Field-based coordination is one such approach, promoting the idea of programming system coordination declaratively from a global perspective, in terms of functional manipulation and evolution in “space and time” of distributed data structures, called fields. More specifically, regarding time, in field-based coordination it is assumed that local activities in each device, called computational rounds, are regulated by a fixed clock, typically, a fair and unsynchronized distributed scheduler. In this work, we challenge this assumption, and propose an alternative approach where the round execution scheduling is naturally programmed along with the usual coordination specification, namely, in terms of a field of causal relations dictating what is the notion of causality (why and when a round has to be locally scheduled) and how it should change across time and space. This abstraction over the traditional view on global time allows us to express what we call “time-fluid” coordination, where causality can be finely tuned to select the event triggers to react to, up to to achieve improved balance between performance (system reactivity) and cost (usage of computational resources). We propose an implementation in the aggregate computing framework, and evaluate via simulation on a case study.

Part 9: Verification and Analysis; International audience; Runtime Monitors observe the execution of a system with the aim of reaching a verdict about it. One property that is expected of monitors is consistent verdict detections; this property was characterised in prior work via a symbolic analysis called symbolic controllability. This paper explores whether the proposed symbolic analysis lends itself well to the construction of a tool that checks monitors for this deterministic behaviour. We implement a prototype that automates this symbolic analysis, and establish complexity upper bounds for the algorithm used. We also consider a number of optimisations for the implemented prototype, and assess the potential gains against benchmark monitors.

Part 9: Verification and Analysis; International audience; Among dozens of decentralized computing platforms, Ethereum attracts widespread attention for its native support of smart contracts by means of a virtual machine called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Programs can be developed in various front-end languages. For example, Solidity can be deployed to the blockchain in the form of compiled EVM opcodes. However, such flexibility leads to critical safety challenges. In this paper, we formally define the behavior of EVM in Why3, a platform for deductive program verification, which facilitates the verification of different properties. The extracted implementation in OCaml can be directly integrated into the production environment and tested against the standard test suite. The combination of proofs and testing in our framework serves as a powerful analysis basis for EVM and smart contracts.

Part 4: Communications: Types and Implementations; International audience; Multiparty Session Types (MPST) is a typing discipline for distributed protocols, which ensures communication safety and deadlock-freedom for more than two participants. This paper reports on our research project, implementing multiparty session types in Rust. Current Rust implementations of session types are limited to binary (two-party communications). We extend an existing library for binary session types to MPST. We have implemented a simplified Amazon Prime Video Streaming protocol using our library for both shared and distributed communication transports.

Part 4: Business Processes; International audience; Enterprise Architecture (EA) has had an interesting and often controversial history since its inception in the late 80’s by pioneers such as John Zachman. Zachman proposed the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (ZFEA), a descriptive, holistic representation of an enterprise for the purposes of providing insights and understanding. Some scholars claim that EA is an imperative to ensure successful business structures or business-IT alignment, or more recently with Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), to manage required organizational transformation. However, EA initiatives within companies are often costly and the expected return on investment is not realized. In fact, Gartner recently indicated in their 2018 Enterprise Architecture Hype Cycle that EA is slowly emerging from the trough of disillusionment after nearly a decade. In this paper we argue that the role and value of EA is often misunderstood, and that EA, specifically the ZFEA for the purpose of this paper, could be considered as a theory given the view of theory within Information Systems (IS). The purpose of IS theories is to analyse, predict, explain and/or prescribe and it could be argued that EA often conform to these purposes. Using the taxonomy of theories as well as the structural components of theory within IS as proposed by Gregor, we motivate that the ZFEA could be regarded as an explanatory theory. Positioning ZFEA as IS explanatory theory provides insight into the role and purpose of the ZFEA (and by extension EA), and could assist researchers and practitioners with mediating the challenges experienced when instituting EA and EAM initiatives within organizations.

Part 5: Big Data and Machine Learning; International audience; Big data analytics tools have many functions that are common or similar to one another. This is a problem for many organisations that are either interested or have deployed some of the tools. The problem arises because there is no mechanism on how to determine appropriateness of the tools within context in an environment. Some of the implications of the problem are that it is difficult to assess appropriateness of the tools in an environment, which sometimes result to duplication; and the value of the tools. The aim of this project was to propose a solution through a model that can be used to evaluate big data analytics tools for organisations’ benefits. The qualitative method, case study approach and semi-structured interview technique were applied in the study. From the analysis, the role of criteria, business and IT alignment, governance, and skill-sets were revealed as critical factors. Based on the factors, a model was developed, which can be used as a building block through which evaluation of big data analytics tools in an organisation is carried out.

Part 6: ICT and Education; International audience; During the years there has been an increasing number of one-to-one programs around the world. In such programs all students are equipped with portable devices, such as laptops, tablets, smartphones for learning purposes. Even if these initiatives are increasing, our knowledge of the impact of such digital transformation of education is still little studied. Based on data from a three years longitudinal study on a large-scale implementation of Chromebooks in a municipality, this paper highlights teachers’ experiences. Key findings suggest that this initiative has been successful when it comes to the administrative and technical implementation of the Chromebooks, but there is still a way to go to transform pedagogical practices to enhance student-active learning supported by the Chromebooks.

Part 2: Fourth Industrial Revolution; International audience; There is a growing emphasis on digitalization in research and business practice. The rapid progress in digital technologies compel firms to innovate and transform their businesses. One way to improve the capacity to innovate and transform is to cooperate with others. However, there is a general lack of research on how co-creation among businesses can facilitate digitalization. This qualitative study explores how co-creation among businesses can stimulate and facilitate digitalization.We have investigated co-creation activities involving companies in business clusters. This paper reports from a study of three business clusters in Norway. We conducted an inductive qualitative study comprising semi-structured interviews as the primary empirical data source. 12 interviews were carried out with informants from three clusters. We found that the co-creation arenas and activities in the business clusters stimulate and facilitate digitalization among the cluster companies. We also addressed the most significant drivers and barriers to co-creation to get a deeper understanding of the co-creation phenomenon.

Part 6: ICT and Education; International audience; Digital course designs such as the Flipped Classroom (FC) are increasingly enriching university education. However, before implementing such an FC, teachers face the challenge of creating content in the form of materials and activities and finding a suitable development method. This is very time-consuming, which is why circumstances such as lack of time and personnel can make implementation difficult. In other areas, agile approaches have already proven to be effective in enabling flexible and efficient development. We use this opportunity to overcome different barriers in the context of FC development by creating an agile model for FC development. To achieve this, we first examined the previous research on agile development approaches concerning the implementation of an FC by a systematic literature review, concluding that no appropriate model exists yet. Building upon this, we designed an AgileFC Development Model, which can be used by teachers to create their FC. This model is very generally designed so that it can be easily adopted. On the other hand, it can be adjusted to a particular situation without effort. We also illustrate the application of the model using a small case study.

Part 2: Fourth Industrial Revolution; International audience; The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a new concept that has the potential to add value to any industrial organisation that wants to embark on the implementation thereof. Due to this newness of IoT in industrial operations, an increase in cost and maturity in terms of data handling, together with only a few implementations. There was a gap in available practical IIoT frameworks that could aid interested parties in the understanding of the constructs of IIoT and the practical implications of implementation. Within this study, we propose an Industrial Internet of Things framework intended to aid academic, technical and management persons in understanding the different considerations of the Industrial Internet of Things. This framework could also apply as a basis for implementation considerations.

Part 6: ICT and Education; International audience; Extant Information Systems (IS) curriculum research has focused on the nature of undergraduate IS programmes, particularly in the US and UK, eliciting calls for studies on graduate IS programmes and in regions beyond the US and UK. This study, consequently, looks at the nature of graduate IS programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using a direct survey method, IS courses information were collected from the websites of top universities in SSA based on a 2019 webometric world ranking of universities. The course offerings from these universities are mapped to the competencies specified in the Global competency model for graduate IS programmes (MSIS 2016). The findings generally indicate, among others, non-adherence of graduate IS programmes in SSA to the MSIS 2016. The reasons for the non-adherence to the MSIS 2016 curriculum model is recommended for future research.

Part 6: ICT and Gender Equality and Development; International audience; Inequalities exist and persist in society in different forms and are often areas of prime concern for governments and policy makers around the globe. One such inequality that plagues societies is the rural-urban divide. Several social entrepreneurs are attempting to leverage technology to bridge this divide. In our research-in-progress paper, we describe the case of an Indian company, which is leveraging technology to create knowledge-based jobs for the rural Indian population. The approach adopted by the company in initiating and sustaining such an effort was an inside-out approach in contrast to the usual approach of focusing only on the internal resources within the company. Specifically, our research aims at abstracting the process mechanisms that enabled such an initiative. The unearthed mechanisms would inform future research on the modalities for orchestrating such an initiative. The findings would also help practitioners, especially social entrepreneurs, to think of innovative business models that would create value not only for the company but also for society as a whole. The delineated learnings would also help enthused social entrepreneurs to transplant such initiatives to other regions of the world.

Part 6: ICT and Education; International audience; The usage of digital media to provide learning content is becoming increasingly popular. One form of e-learning is the Flipped Classroom (FC). FC courses, however, are still heavily dependent on the commitment of individual teachers. Repeatable descriptions of approaches or institutionalized support are rare. The high amount of work involved discourages many teachers from using FCs. Strategic course development should therefore be conducted collaboratively by several stakeholders. Change management approaches offer a solution to deal with the integration of strategies for change and consider all stakeholder groups. This paper aims to combine an FC process model and a change management approach to include all stakeholders. Based on a literature review, we develop an integrative approach and summarize the necessary aspects of change. Our results show that for the successful integration and development of FC courses, we need new roles that support the process and assure the stakeholder’s acceptance.

Part 5: Big Data and Machine Learning; International audience; The continual growth of big data necessitates efficient ways of analysing these large datasets. Data visualisation and visual analytics has been identified as a key tool in big data analysis because they draw on the human visual and cognitive capabilities to analyse data quickly, intuitively and interactively. However, current visualisation tools and visual analytical systems fall short of providing a seamless user experience and several improvements could be made to current commercially available visualisation tools. By conducting a systematic literature review, requirements of visualisation tools were identified and categorised into six groups: dimensionality reduction, data reduction, scalability and readability, interactivity, fast retrieval of results, and user assistance. The most common themes found in the literature were dimensionality reduction and interactive data exploration.

Part 3: eBusiness; International audience; It has been shown that serious games are useful in the military, healthcare, and education sectors. Meanwhile corporate interest in serious gaming in business has rapidly grown internationally. However the level of awareness and adoption of serious gaming among South African corporates in business is still unclear.This interpretive study explores South African corporate awareness of serious gaming in business and the barriers to its adoption. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data from managers in Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies. Eight participants were interviewed across four different industries. Data analysis was guided by the general inductive approach.The absence of serious gaming adopters among the participants, and the general lack of awareness of serious gaming in business were identified as the most salient features. The analysis suggests that corporates currently use technologies related to serious games (e-learning, collaborative tools, and simulation tools), and that there is a demand for the greater promotion and use of serious gaming.While the findings provide new insights into the level of serious gaming awareness, caution should be exercised when attempting to generalize these findings due to the small sample and the scarcity of prior research.

Part 2: Fourth Industrial Revolution; International audience; This paper explores an overly optimistic and tenacious claim in the literature that robotic process automation (RPA) will only free knowledge workers from mundane tasks and introduce more interesting work. We explore this claim and other consequences for knowledge workers using data from a sequential quantitative-qualitative, mixed-method study in Norway. 88 RPA users from different sectors and industries where first surveyed to identify differences in utilization and effects from RPA. Then, differences were explored in 24 in-depth interviews in the public and private sectors, including financial industry, manufacturing, and oil and gas. Results indicate that RPA is used to either layoff or not reemploy knowledge workers, but also to empower knowledge workers with more interesting tasks. Private sector was different from public sector in that private, financial companies have experienced the strongest reduction in the need for employment. RPA often lead to layoffs indirectly, and to reduced need for consultants, especially in financial companies. In contrast, public companies use RPA more for innovations in their service production from increased quality in data registration, handling of invoices, and data migration between systems. We conclude that RPA is maturing as a management tool motivated by cost reductions from reduced employment, and we suggest propositions for further research.

Part 4: Business Processes; International audience; Obtaining and maintaining a competitive advantage is vital for profit-driven organizations. Business Process Management (BPM) and the governance thereof offer such organizations a framework of management practices within which to achieve this goal. The objectives of this study were to identify and describe the BPM governance challenges that constrain BPM in large South African corporates as BPM in South Africa had not previously received any comprehensive BPM governance focus. Additionally, the BPM and BPM governance bodies of knowledge lack literature on studies focused on BPM governance challenges. Qualitative research methods were utilized to collect useful and descriptive data through secondary document collection and interviews in a single case study. The study confirmed eight of the literature-identified governance challenge themes that constrain BPM and contributed eleven new BPM governance challenge themes to the BPM and BPM governance body of research.

Part 2: Fourth Industrial Revolution; International audience; The so-called fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 (I4.0), with its potentially disruptive technologies, is changing the way we socialise, live and work and provides opportunities for organisations to innovate and disrupt. Although organisations are acknowledging the emergence of I4.0 and realise the importance of being ready for its impact, better understanding is required of the potential of I4.0 and its holistic impact on organisations. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify all I4.0-related organisational aspects, such as an I4.0-relevant strategy, digital business model innovation, technology investment optimisation, workforce management complexity, digital eco-systems, technology-centric convergence, virtual model and physical environment linkage, value chain digitalisation and product portfolio innovation. Furthermore, we presented these I4.0 organisational aspects identified in a conceptual model based on the components of organisational strategic alignment. By using such a conceptual model, organisations can ensure that both optimisation and new opportunities enabled by I4.0 are leveraged and that a relevant, strategically aligned approach to I4.0 may be considered.

Part 1: Block Chain; International audience; Patient-centred care allows patients to have complete autonomy in managing their health information and encourages patients to be proactive. Unfortunately, most patients do not have access to their complete health information as they are stored across the various institutions that they have visited over their lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation into developing a mobile system for patient-centered healthcare using blockchain technology. A design science research approach was used to design, develop and evaluate a prototype that implemented a three-tier architecture using blockchain. Formative evaluations of the prototype revealed that the system could successfully support patient-managed healthcare. The implications of this project would be changing the way patients and healthcare practitioners interact with each other by improving the quality of clinical encounters by allowing patients access to their health information, sharing the information with healthcare practitioners and both parties collaborating in the development of a treatment plan.