January 2011 Theme: Services Computing

Services computing cuts across various disciplines to cover the science and technology of bridging the gap between business services and IT services. The underlying technology suite includes Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, business consulting methodology and utilities, and business process modeling, transformation, and integration. In terms of scope, services computing covers the whole lifecycle of the services innovation process, which includes

• business componentization,
• services modeling, creation, realization, annotation, deployment, discovery, composition, delivery, monitoring, optimization, and management, and
• service-to-service collaboration.

The goal of services computing is to enable IT services and computing technology to create, operate, and manage business services more efficiently and effectively.

In this month's theme, I would like to share with you some example papers from IEEE Transactions on Services Computing and conferences sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC).

In "Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services," (login required for full text) Dominique Guinard and his coauthors apply the SOA concept to couple functionality of embedded real-world devices. Their infrastructure lets users dynamically query, select, and use real-world services.

In "Secure Virtual Machine Execution under an Untrusted OS," (login required for full text) Chunxiao Li, Anand Raghunathan, and Niraj K. Jha attack one critical virtualization problem in cloud computing. They propose a virtualization architecture to provide a secure execution environment on a virtualized computing platform under the assumption of an untrusted management operating system.

In "Benchmarking Vulnerability Detection Tools for Web Services," (login required for full text) Nuno Antunes and Marco Vieira propose a benchmarking approach to assess and compare the effectiveness of tools for detecting vulnerabilities in web services.

In "A Heuristic Algorithm for Trust-Oriented Service Provider Selection in Complex Social Networks," (login required for full text) Guanfeng Liu and colleagues tackle the issue of finding trustworthy service providers through social networks. They propose a heuristic algorithm to find the optimal social trust path in a social network structure modeled as a Multi-Constrained Optimal Path (MCOP) selection problem.

In "A Reference Model for Master of Science Program in Services Computing," (login required for full text) my coauthors and I present a reference model of a master's program in services computing, to serve as curriculum guidelines for academic institutions and accreditation agencies. The program recommends a set of core and elective courses.

I also take this opportunity to share with you some Related Resources below to information about major activities sponsored by TC-SVC and other resources. I hope that you enjoy this theme and find this information useful.

Guest Editor

Liang-Jie (LJ) Zhang is currently a senior vice president, chief scientist, and director of research at Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited. He's also the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

Related Resources

Resources and Publications

Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC)

IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC)

Hot Topics in Cloud Computing: Guest Editor's Introduction, IT Professional, September/October 2010

2011 Conferences

The 9th IEEE European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2011)