In this work, a flexible and extensive digital platform for Smart Homes is presented, exploiting the most advanced technologies of the Internet of Things, such as Radio Frequency Identification, wearable electronics, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the main novelty of the paper is the system-level description of the platform flexibility allowing the interoperability of different smart devices. This research was developed within the framework of the operative project HABITAT (Home Assistance Based on the Internet of Things for the Autonomy of Everybody), aiming at developing smart devices to support elderly people both in their own houses and in retirement homes, and embedding them in everyday life objects, thus reducing the expenses for healthcare due to the lower need for personal assistance, and providing a better life quality to the elderly users.

The cloud computing model has seen tremendous commercial success through its materialization via two prominent models to date, namely public and private cloud. Recently, a third model combining the former two service models as on-/off-premise resources has been receiving significant market traction: hybrid cloud. While state of art techniques that address workload performance prediction and efficient workload execution over hybrid cloud setups exist, how to address data-intensive workloads - including Big Data Analytics - in similar environments is nascent. This paper addresses this gap by taking on the challenge of bursting over hybrid clouds for the benefit of accelerating iterative MapReduce applications. We first specify the challenges associated with data locality and data movement in such setups. Subsequently, we propose a novel technique to address the locality issue, without requiring changes to the MapReduce framework or the underlying storage layer. In addition, we contribute with a performance prediction methodology that combines modeling with micro-benchmarks to estimate completion time for iterative MapReduce applications, which enables users to estimate cost-to-solution before committing extra resources from public clouds. We show through experimentation in a dual-Openstack hybrid cloud setup that our solutions manage to bring substantial improvement at predictable cost-control for two real-life iterative MapReduce applications: large-scale machine learning and text analysis.

As the need to understand and formalise business processes into a model has grown over the last years, the process discovery research field has gained more and more importance, developing two different classes of approaches to model representation: procedural and declarative. Orthogonally to this classification, the vast majority of works envisage the discovery task as a one-class supervised learning process guided by the traces that are recorded into an input log. In this work instead, we focus on declarative processes and embrace the less-popular view of process discovery as a binary supervised learning task, where the input log reports both examples of the normal system execution, and traces representing a “stranger” behaviour according to the domain semantics. We therefore deepen how the valuable information brought by both these two sets can be extracted and formalised into a model that is “optimal” according to user-defined goals. Our approach, namely NegDis , is evaluated w.r.t. other relevant works in this field, and shows promising results regarding both the performance and the quality of the obtained solution.