eptmse

SICS announces three master's projects ("examensarbete")

The EPTMSE project announces three openings for master's projects ("examensarbete") at SICS in Kista (see relevant links at bottom).

The project abstract describes the EPTMSE project as follows: "The purpose of the project "Enabling and Promoting Trust in Micro Service Environments" (EPTMSE) is to study, design, and implement methods and technology for ensuring a trustworthy experience between users and services in micro service environments. Micro services are created and distributed by small to medium sized producers (sometimes even individual users can provide services) and which aim to complement a user's personal service sphere. The micro services environment forms the basic foundation of the users future service cloud, in which the electronic service is the basic unit and the individual user's needs are catered for by a plethora of such services instead of a few more traditional and monolithic applications. With a great number of possible producers and distribution channels for services in this scenario (e.g. wireless position based distribution) the ability for service consumers to employ the usual methods to ascertain a perceived level of trust (for example brand name recognition) decreases. Therefore, in micro service environments, the need for explicit systems that enable and promote trust increases. The EPTMSE project will build these trust systems and the project is a collaboration between SICS, Appear Networks, and TeliaSonera. EPTMSE is funded by Vinnova."

The project has progressed through its first year of prototype design, background research, and prototype development, and is now starting the second phase, the mechanism design and implementation phase. The purpose of this phase is to design and implement innovative and appropriate trust mechanisms for micro service environments. In the third and final phase of the project, these mechanisms will be evaluated.

The three master's students will work together as a team towards the common goal of the project and each will also have his or her individual focus.

Upcoming Events

We are currently working on a new release of the Service Sharing Framework that will introduce some new features including an experimental trustworthiness-indicator. An announcement will be posted here within a few weeks when the release is available for download.

We are also working on a survey of trust related litterature which will be completed in november 2004. The survey will cover multiple research fields and is intended to function as a basis for later work in the project i.e. trust mechanism development. The survey will also be downloadable from this site.

First SSF distribution

An early version of the Service Sharing Framework (SSF) is now available for download. It is primarily intended for project internal use and illustrates basic facilities of the framework. The distribution contains a few examples of services including an MP3 player. To install the distribution first download the current version of the sView User Server from the sView community site then make your ServiceManager window look like this. To use services simply double click them and they will be downloaded and started.