Trust ticket deployment : a notion of a data owner's trust in cloud computing

While cloud computing (CC) is a scalable model of shared infrastructure and on-demand computing, it lacks a transparent trust and security mechanism. A data owner (DO) loses control over the data outsourced to a machine in the cloud controlled and operated by a cloud service provider (CSP). This machine is at a location unknown to a data owner. This loss of control over data is further intensified with the lack of managing users' access to the data from practical cloud computing perspectives. In this paper, we introduce a new mechanism of ensuring trust and security in Software as a Service (SaaS) CC. Trust Ticket, with the supporting protocols, is our mechanism that helps a data owner in establishing a link between a CSP and a registered user. In our mechanism, a user first gets registered with a DO before receiving a Trust Ticket and a secret key from that DO. Each Trust Ticket is unique and encrypted. On completing the registration of each user, the DO apprises the CSP of the Trust Ticket. Trust Ticket and secret key are respectively for the registered user's getting accepted to the CSP and having a view of the data owner's data upon a successful verification by the CSP. We have done our experiment in Java network programming by creating an emulated cloud computing framework under the VMware ESXi 4.1 hyper visor based platform. Using the framework, we have evaluated our algorithmic protocol for Trust Ticket. We have also compared our work with prior work. Overall performance of our work is better. We argue that our proposed algorithmic protocol for Trust Ticket deployment establishes a data owner's trust. This trust is established through a data owner's control over data and a registered user, because a registered user is linked with a CSP by a data owner through Trust Ticket.

Enhancing cloud computing environments using a cluster as a service

The emergence of cloud computing has caused a significant change in how IT infrastructures are provided to research and business organizations. Instead of paying for expensive hardware and incur excessive maintenance costs, it is now possible to rent the IT infrastructure of other organizations for a minimal fee. While the existence of cloud computing is new. The elements used to create clouds have been around for some time. Cloud computing systems have been made possible through the use of large-scale clusters, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, and virtualization. While the idea of offering resources via Web services is commonplace in cloud computing, little attention has been paid to the clients themselves specifically, human operators. Despite that clouds host a variety of resources which in turn are accessible to a variety of clients, support for human users is minimal.

Affect computing in film through sound energy dynamics

We develop an algorithm for the detection and classification of affective sound events underscored by specific patterns of sound energy dynamics. We relate the portrayal of these events to proposed high level affect or emotional coloring of the events. In this paper, four possible characteristic sound energy events are identified that convey well established meanings through their dynamics to portray and deliver certain affect, sentiment related to the horror film genre. Our algorithm is developed with the ultimate aim of automatically structuring sections of films that contain distinct shades of emotion related to horror themes for nonlinear media access and navigation. An average of 82% of the energy events, obtained from the analysis of the audio tracks of sections of four sample films corresponded correctly to the proposed affect. While the discrimination between certain sound energy event types was low, the algorithm correctly detected 71% of the occurrences of the sound energy events within audio tracks of the films analyzed, and thus forms a useful basis for determining affective scenes characteristic of horror in movies.