Richard Lomotey | Pennsylvania State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Richard Lomotey

2013 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2013

ABSTRACT Today, most enterprises are embracing the cloud computing paradigm to provide reliable a... more ABSTRACT Today, most enterprises are embracing the cloud computing paradigm to provide reliable access to business data for mobile consumers. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is one platform that is fault tolerant and highly scalable within the cloud provisioning landscape. However, the Amazon S3 facility relies on the submission of multiple identification credentials from the data consumer for the purposes of authentication and authorization. This authentication process introduces high communication latency which makes it uninteresting for mobile consumption of enterprise data in a highly distributed environment. This paper presents a middleware-centric framework called MiLAMob that simplifies the authentication process in real time. The middleware employs the OAuth 2.0 technique (E.g. Facebook, Google+, and Personal Login) to identify the end-user and uses security tokens to handle the tedious authentication with Amazon S3 on behalf of the user/requester. The approach adopted by this paper proves that mobile consumers can efficiently access enterprise data hosted on Amazon S3 in a single request call with less processing effort. Also, the introduction of the middleware enforces additional data protection because the security credentials and the Amazon S3 abstractions are hidden from the mobile application domain and the end users.

International Journal of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Jun 23, 2014

The MobiCrop app, which is a distributed mobile application has been proposed to aid crop farmers... more The MobiCrop app, which is a distributed mobile application has been proposed to aid crop farmers with timely decision making on the applicability of pesticides (i.e., which pesticide to apply, when, where, and how to apply them). Due to the vast amount of pesticide and crop data, the application is designed following the three-tier architecture technique which comprises the mobile devices, a cloud-hosted middleware, and cloud-based database. The idea is to enable the mobile device to retrieve the needed pesticide data from the back-end and when necessary, part of the data can be stored on the mobile through caching for offline accessibility. However, constantly updating the mobile cache through data polling is costly for the wireless bandwidth and energy usage on the mobile. Also, it is difficult to update the stale cache data when there is no wireless connectivity. Hence, this work explores three architectural designs of the MobiCrop app which are the: 1) the standalone (network independent), 2) distributed architecture through data offloading, and 3) distributed architecture through data partitioning.

Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, 2014

ABSTRACT With the advancement in mobile technology, there are lots of prospect for the health dom... more ABSTRACT With the advancement in mobile technology, there are lots of prospect for the health domain. Specifically, the accessibility of the electronic health record (EHR) can be extended to the mobile node to promote remote healthcare delivery; this is known as mobile Health or mHealth. However, supporting real-time access and services synchronization in highly distributed mobile environments can be challenging due to the fact that mobile devices rely on wireless communication mediums to exchange data. These mediums can be unstable due to bandwidth fluctuations and the mobility of the healthcare professionals. In this work, we examine how to provide real-time accessibility of the medical record in the mobile environment by overcoming the network-level limitations. Thus, we propose distributed cloud-hosted middleware platform that enables the mobile devices to receive updates. Since the middleware are distributed, a methodology called the “best-proximity” accessibility is enforced so that the healthcare professionals are able to connect to the middleware that offers the most optimal request–response time. The evaluation of the framework, called Med App, shows that: (1) medical data dissemination and accessibility can be achieved in a low-latency fashion, (2) data state can be managed efficiently through a policy-based consistency model, and (3) the resources of the mobile device can be efficiently utilized through services composition on the middleware.

Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, 2013

Healthcare practitioners are becoming the bigger consumer base for mHealth apps. The facilitation... more Healthcare practitioners are becoming the bigger consumer base for mHealth apps. The facilitation of healthcare practitioners to deliver quality healthcare using mobile technology in collaboration with other ICT tools is known as mHealth. Though the App Store is witnessing the deployment of so many health apps, most of the apps do not fit into the medical workflow of most health facilities. This is because, the health domain is a typical enterprise information system that is highly distributed with multiple services being composed for decision making. In this paper, we highlight some of the pressing concerns in a distributed mobile environment that hampers the efficient consumption of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) such as bandwidth fluctuations and intermittent connectivity losses. Then, generic mHealth architecture is proposed that aimed at tacking some of the problems based on the adoption of Web Services.

Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining - ASONAM '13, 2013

Mobile devices are becoming the integral access point of accessing the Electronic Health Records ... more Mobile devices are becoming the integral access point of accessing the Electronic Health Records (EHR). This creates the need to enforce some level of reliability in terms of services accessibility time. However, supporting real-time access and services synchronization in highly distributed mobile environments can be challenging due to the fact that mobile devices rely on wireless communication mediums which can be unstable due to the mobility of the healthcare professionals. As an ongoing joint research with the City Hospital in Saskatoon, Canada, we focus on providing real-time accessibility of the medical record in the mobile environment. We propose a cloud-hosted middleware which performs macro activities such as medical services composition, data hoarding, and medical data events management. The evaluation of the framework, called Med App, shows that medical data dissemination can be achieved in a low-latency fashion.

2014 IEEE 8th International Symposium on Service Oriented System Engineering, 2014

ABSTRACT Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) has become indispensable because it affords stakeholders t... more ABSTRACT Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) has become indispensable because it affords stakeholders to discover knowledge in Big Data. Previously, data stored in data warehouses follow some schema and standardization which leads to efficient data mining. However, the Big Data epoch has witnessed the rise of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, a trend that motivated enterprises to employ the NoSQL data storages to accommodate the high-dimensional data. Unfortunately, the existing data mining techniques which are designed for schema-oriented storages are non-applicable to the unstructured data style. Thus, the AaaS though still in its infancy, is gaining widespread attention for its ability to provide novel ways and opportunities to mine the heterogeneous data. In this paper, we discuss our AaaS tool that performs terms and topics extraction and organization from unstructured data sources such as NoSQL databases, textual contents (e.g., websites), and structured sources (e.g. SQL). The tool is built on methodologies such as tagging, filtering, association maps, and adaptable dictionary. The evaluation of the tool shows high accuracy in the mining process.

2013 12th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, 2013

Today, the enterprise landscape faces voluminous amount of data. The information gathered from th... more Today, the enterprise landscape faces voluminous amount of data. The information gathered from these data sources are useful for improving on product and services delivery. However, it is challenging to perform knowledge discovery in database (KDD) activities on these data sources because of its unstructured nature. Previous studies have proposed the hierarchical clustering methodology since it enhances human readability and provides clear dependency structure through topics, term and document organization. But, the methodology can be resource intensive and time consuming. In order to improve on the terms extraction process, we propose a tool called RSenter that searches through interconnected Hyperlinks and NoSQL database (specifically, CouchDB). We evaluate the tool based on search algorithms such as parallelization, random walk (or linear search), pessimistic search, and optimistic search. The tool shows high accuracy and optimality in view of the search time.

2013 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, 2013

ABSTRACT The recent advancement in mobile technology has established smartphones and tablet devic... more ABSTRACT The recent advancement in mobile technology has established smartphones and tablet devices as the consumer device nodes to access the Electronic Health Records (EHR). Mobile devices further aid the healthcare professionals to access the EHR on the go and outside a centralized health facility. However, the over reliance on wireless communication mediums (e.g., Wi-FI, and 3.5G/4G) by mobile devices hampers the reliable flow of disseminating the EHR. For instance, there is no guarantee that the medical data from the main Health Information System (HIS) can be consumed on the mobile device of a healthcare professional when there is no connectivity. While a secure caching technique of the medical data on the mobile can be a solution to facilitate offline accessibility, the same technique can lead to challenges of data conflict. Specifically, when the cached data is updated in an offline mode and that information has to be synchronized with the HIS. We investigate efficient means of disseminating the EHR in unreliable networks. Our mobile architectural design consists of mobile nodes, a cloud-hosted middleware and the HIS. The proposal of the middleware is to enforce provenance, services composition, and reliable synchronization of the medical data for faster dissemination. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approaches show high performance boost in terms of latency optimization and reliability.

2014 IEEE International Congress on Big Data, 2014

Unstructured data mining has become topical recently due to the availability of high-dimensional ... more Unstructured data mining has become topical recently due to the availability of high-dimensional and voluminous digital content (known as "Big Data") across the enterprise spectrum. The Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) have been employed over the past decades for content storage and management, but, the ever-growing heterogeneity in today's data calls for a new storage approach. Thus, the NoSQL database has emerged as the preferred storage facility nowadays since the facility supports unstructured data storage. This creates the need to explore efficient data mining techniques from such NoSQL systems since the available tools and frameworks which are designed for RDBMS are often not directly applicable. In this paper, we focused on topics and terms mining, based on clustering, in document-based NoSQL. This is achieved by adapting the architectural design of an analytics-as-a-service framework and the proposal of the Viterbi algorithm to enhance the accuracy of the terms classification in the system. The results from the pilot testing of our work show higher accuracy in comparison to some previously proposed techniques such as the parallel search.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering, 2014

Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) has become indispensable because it affords stakeholders to discove... more Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) has become indispensable because it affords stakeholders to discover knowledge in Big Data. Previously, data stored in data warehouses follow some schema and standardization which leads to efficient data mining. However, the "Big Data" epoch has witnessed the rise of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, a trend that motivated enterprises to employ the NoSQL data storages to accommodate the high-dimensional data. In this paper, we introduce an AaaS tool that aims at accomplishing terms and topics extraction and organization from unstructured data sources such as NoSQL databases and textual contents (e.g., websites). The primary accomplishment in this paper is the detail justification of the architectural design of our proposed framework. This includes the proposed algorithms (e.g., concurrency search, linear search, etc.) and the performance of macro tasks such as filtering, tagging, and so on.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, 2014

The modern data economy, which has been described as "Big Data", has changed the status... more The modern data economy, which has been described as "Big Data", has changed the status quo on digital content creation and storage. While data storage has followed the schema-dictated approach for decades, the recent nature of digital content, which is widely unstructured, creates the need to adopt different storage techniques. Thus, the NoSQL database systems have been proposed to accommodate most of the content being generated today. One of such NoSQL databases that have received significant enterprise adoption is the document-append style storage. The emerging concern and challenge however is that, research and tools that can aid data mining processes from such NoSQL databases is generally lacking. Even though document-append style storages allow data accessibility as Web services and over URL/I, building a corresponding data mining tool deviates from the underlying techniques governing web crawlers. Also, existing data mining tools that have been designed for schema-based storages (e.g., RDBMS) are misfits. Hence, our goal in this work is to design a unique data analytics tool that enables knowledge discovery through information retrieval from document-append style storage. The tool is algorithmically built on the inference-based Apriori, which aids us to achieve optimization of the search duration. Preliminary test results of the proposed tool also show high accuracy in comparison to other approaches that were previously proposed.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, 2014

2014 IEEE World Congress on Services, 2014

2013 IEEE 16th International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2013

ABSTRACT One of the major challenges of the "Big Data" epoch is unstructured da... more ABSTRACT One of the major challenges of the "Big Data" epoch is unstructured data mining. The problem arises due to the storage of high-dimensional data that has no standard schema. While knowledge discovery in database (KDD) algorithms were designed for data extraction, the algorithms best fit for structured data storages. Moreover, today, at the data storage level, NoSQL databases have been deployed in response to accommodate the unstructured data. However, the over-reliance on multiple APIs by NoSQL storages hampers efficient data extraction from different NoSQL storages. Also, there are limited numbers of tools available that can perform KDD tasks on NoSQL data stores. In this work, we explore the trend in unstructured data mining and detail the future direction and challenges. Then, focusing on topics and terms extraction from NoSQL databases, we propose a tool called TouchR2, which algorithmically relies on bloom filtering and parallelization. Using the CouchDB data storage as the test case, the evaluation of TouchR2 shows high accuracy for terms extraction and organization within a much optimized duration.

2013 8th International Conference on System of Systems Engineering, 2013

ABSTRACT The major challenge that the big data era brings to the services computing landscape is ... more ABSTRACT The major challenge that the big data era brings to the services computing landscape is debris of unstructured data. The high-dimensional data is in heterogeneous formats, schemaless, and requires multiple storage APIs is some cases. This situation has made it almost impractical to apply existing data mining techniques which are designed for schema-based data sources in a knowledge discovery in database (KDD) process. In this paper, a tool called TouchR is proposed which algorithmically relies on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to extract terms from data silos; specifically, distributed NoSQL databases- which we model as network graph. Our use case graph consists of storage nodes such as CouchDB, Neo4J, DynamoDB etc. The evaluation of TouchR shows high accuracy for terms extraction and organization.

2013 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, 2013

ABSTRACT The employment of mobile devices as the data consumption node in the medical domain (kno... more ABSTRACT The employment of mobile devices as the data consumption node in the medical domain (known as mHealth) is gaining widespread adoption since mobile devices facilitate remote and ubiquitous access to medical data. Today, it is a common phenomenon to see medical practitioners who own multiple mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets and expect to experience application consistency across the multiple devices. However, this expectation is hampered by the fact that mobile devices rely on wireless communication mediums which can experience sporadic disconnections. What is even challenging is the presence of the CAP theorem which states that considering the following three properties of a distributed system: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, only two of the properties can be achieved simultaneously. In an ongoing research collaboration with the Geriatrics Ward at the City Hospital, Saskatoon, Canada, we deployed a reliable mHealth architecture that enables healthcare practitioners to use their n-mobile devices to access medical records. We proposed a brokerage platform that synchronizes the medical data on the multiple devices with careful consideration to the CAP theorem. Our proposed mHealth architecture is evaluated and the result in the real-world shows high support for scalability, real-time medical data propagation, and high capacity offline storage.

2013 IEEE International Congress on Big Data, 2013

There is enormous volume of user generated content (data) today in open source repositories, onli... more There is enormous volume of user generated content (data) today in open source repositories, online social networks, and so on that enterprises can feed on to enhance product and services delivery. Apart from the open source data, enterprises are also generating a lot of data in-house since modern business requirements are shifting from paper-base to digital records. The major setback however is that, the data is unstructured in the sense that it is in heterogeneous formats (different file types including multimedia files), it is schema less, and it is scattered on multiple sources. This condition makes knowledge discovery (a.k.a. data mining) very challenging. Previous studies have proposed the hierarchical clustering methodology since it enhances human readability and provides clear dependency structure through topics, term and document organization. But, the methodology can be resource intensive and time consuming. Our work investigates the methodology and proposes a tool called RSenter that searches based on parallelization, random walk (or linear search), pessimistic search, and optimistic search in order to generate the hierarchical structure in real time within a search space. Currently, RSenter can search through NoSQL databases and HTML documents and traverse through all the links that are connected to that HTML to the nth depth, extracting the entire user specified elements (topics and terms). Further, the tool can search through an entire repository and organize the files in a hierarchical structure regardless of the file formats.

2013 IEEE Ninth World Congress on Services, 2013

ABSTRACT The mobile terrain is rapidly establishing itself as the reliable node for accessing clo... more ABSTRACT The mobile terrain is rapidly establishing itself as the reliable node for accessing cloud hosted data. Today, commodity cloud providers especially from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud expose their service APIs which facilitates the "app-ification" of enterprise workflows on mobile devices. However, these IaaS providers require the customer (i.e., the data consumer) to submit multiple security credentials which are computation intensive for the purposes of authentication and authorization. As a result, the authentication process introduces undesired delays in a mobile network when consuming enterprise data due to the increasing computational demand and the voluminous HTTP header that is transported across the wireless bandwidth.This paper introduces an application called MiLAMob that is a middleware-layer that handles the authentication process on behalf of the consumer devices in real time and with minimal HTTP traffic. The middleware currently supports mobile consumption of data on IaaS clouds such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, and MEGA. Further, the middleware employs the OAuth 2.0 technique (E.g. Facebook, Google+, and Personal Login) to identify the mobile end-user and uses security tokens to handle the tedious authentication with the IaaS cloud. Also, the deployment of the middleware enforces additional data protection because the security credentials and the IaaS abstractions are shielded from the mobile application domain and the end users.

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '13, 2013

ABSTRACT The collaboration between mobile devices and other ICT tools for healthcare delivery is ... more ABSTRACT The collaboration between mobile devices and other ICT tools for healthcare delivery is known as mHealth. In this paper, we propose a mHealth architecture that aids clinicians to access the Electronic Health Records (EHR) on their mobile devices. Since this is a mission critical system, there is the need to deal with challenges such as network loss and mobile device context management. Hence, following the Web services standard (i.e., REST and SOAP), we introduced mechanisms such as policy-based computational offloading between the mobile and the Health Information System (HIS). As a result, whenever the transactional workload on the mobile device increases, part of the transaction is offloaded to a cloud-hosted middleware. A policy is defined to determine which medical business processes require localization and only the transactional aspects that need no localization are offloaded. The approach aids the clinicians to have access to critical data and enforces business continuity even when there is intermittent connectivity loss.

Procedia Computer Science, 2012

The unceasing growth and divergence of the mobile landscape has led to the use of smartphone and ... more The unceasing growth and divergence of the mobile landscape has led to the use of smartphone and tablet devices in consuming Web services in enterprises. However, in heterogeneous Web services, the shift from the mobile client consumer approach to the mobile service hosting approach has received little attention; with no attention given to RESTful mobile services hosting. With the advancement of storage and processing capabilities of these devices; coupled with the high availability of the Web, this paper focuses on the use of the mobile devices as hosts of Web services in an E-health domain. To achieve this goal, the challenges of latency and Web resources state change synchronization has to be addressed to ensure data reliability; since service accessibility is facilitated by the mobile devices which communicate via unstable wireless networks. In this paper, a cloud-centric middleware technique is employed to enable access to the mobile hosts. The paper presents mobile hosting of lightweight Web services which is deployed in a real world system, and proposes a middleware platform for the update management of Web resources state changes in unreliable wireless networks. Our current implemented project, called SOPHRA, which is a joint E-health project with the Geriatrics Ward at the City Hospital in Saskatoon, supports mobile communication over Wi-Fi using HTTP.