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Fethi Rabhi

Publications and source records attributed to Fethi Rabhi.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

Architecting Agentic Communities using Design Patterns

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLM) and subsequent Agentic AI technologies requires systematic architectural guidance for building sophisticated, production-grade systems. This paper presents an approach for architecting such systems using design patterns derived from enterprise distributed systems standards, formal methods, and industry practice. We classify these patterns into three tiers: LLM Agents (task-specific automation), Agentic AI (adaptive goal-seekers), and Agentic Communities (organizational frameworks where AI agents and human participants coordinate through formal roles, protocols, and governance structures). We focus on Agentic Communities - coordination frameworks encompassing LLM Agents, Agentic AI entities, and humans - most relevant for enterprise and industrial applications. Drawing on established coordination principles from distributed systems, we ground these patterns in a formal framework that specifies collaboration agreements where AI agents and humans fill roles within governed ecosystems. This approach provides both practical guidance and formal verification capabilities, enabling expression of organizational, legal, and ethical rules through accountability mechanisms that ensure operational and verifiable governance of inter-agent communication, negotiation, and intent modeling. We validate this framework through a clinical trial matching case study. Our goal is to provide actionable guidance to practitioners while maintaining the formal rigor essential for enterprise deployment in dynamic, multi-agent ecosystems.

cs.AI

OntoMetric: An Ontology-Driven LLM-Assisted Framework for Automated ESG Metric Knowledge Graph Generation

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metric knowledge is inherently structured, connecting industries, reporting frameworks, metric categories, metrics, and calculation models through compositional dependencies, yet in practice this structure remains embedded implicitly in regulatory documents such as SASB, TCFD, and IFRS S2 and rarely exists as an explicit, governed, or machine-actionable artefact. Existing ESG ontologies define formal schemas but do not address scalable population and governance from authoritative regulatory sources, while unconstrained large language model (LLM) extraction frequently produces semantically incorrect entities, hallucinated relationships, and structurally invalid graphs. OntoMetric is an ontology-guided framework for the automated construction and governance of ESG metric knowledge graphs from regulatory documents that operationalises the ESG Metric Knowledge Graph (ESGMKG) ontology as a first-class constraint embedded directly into the extraction and population process. The framework integrates structure-aware segmentation, ontology-constrained LLM extraction enriched with semantic fields and deterministic identifiers, and two-phase validation combining semantic type verification with rule-based schema checking, while preserving segment-level and page-level provenance to ensure traceability to regulatory source text. Evaluation on five ESG regulatory standards shows that ontology-guided extraction achieves 65-90 percent semantic accuracy and over 80 percent schema compliance, compared with 3-10 percent for unconstrained baseline extraction, and yields stable cost efficiency with a cost per validated entity of 0.01-0.02 USD and a 48 times efficiency improvement over baseline.

cs.AI

New Money: A Systematic Review of Synthetic Data Generation for Finance

Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising approach to address the challenges of using sensitive financial data in machine learning applications. By leveraging generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it is possible to create artificial datasets that preserve the statistical properties of real financial records while mitigating privacy risks and regulatory constraints. Despite the rapid growth of this field, a comprehensive synthesis of the current research landscape has been lacking. This systematic review consolidates and analyses 72 studies published since 2018 that focus on synthetic financial data generation. We categorise the types of financial information synthesised, the generative methods employed, and the evaluation strategies used to assess data utility and privacy. The findings indicate that GAN-based approaches dominate the literature, particularly for generating time-series market data and tabular credit data. While several innovative techniques demonstrate potential for improved realism and privacy preservation, there remains a notable lack of rigorous evaluation of privacy safeguards across studies. By providing an integrated overview of generative techniques, applications, and evaluation methods, this review highlights critical research gaps and offers guidance for future work aimed at developing robust, privacy-preserving synthetic data solutions for the financial domain.

cs.LG

SecDOAR: A Software Reference Architecture for Security Data Orchestration, Analysis and Reporting

A Software Reference Architecture (SRA) is a useful tool for standardising existing architectures in a specific domain and facilitating concrete architecture design, development and evaluation by instantiating SRA and using SRA as a benchmark for the development of new systems. In this paper, we have presented an SRA for Security Data Orchestration, Analysis and Reporting (SecDOAR) to provide standardisation of security data platforms that can facilitate the integration of security orchestration, analysis and reporting tools for security data. The SecDOAR SRA has been designed by leveraging existing scientific literature and security data standards. We have documented SecDOAR SRA in terms of design methodology, meta-models to relate to different concepts in the security data architecture, and details on different elements and components of the SRA. We have evaluated SecDOAR SRA for its effectiveness and completeness by comparing it with existing commercial solutions. We have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed SecDOAR SRA by instantiating it as a prototype platform to support security orchestration, analysis and reporting for a selected set of tools. The proposed SecDOAR SRA consists of meta-models for security data, security events and security data management processes as well as security metrics and corresponding measurement schemes, a security data integration model, and a description of SecDOAR SRA components. The proposed SecDOAR SRA can be used by researchers and practitioners as a structured approach for designing and implementing cybersecurity monitoring, analysis and reporting systems in various domains.

cs.CR

SLEGO: A Collaborative Data Analytics System with LLM Recommender for Diverse Users

This paper presents the SLEGO (Software-Lego) system, a collaborative analytics platform that bridges the gap between experienced developers and novice users using a cloud-based platform with modular, reusable microservices. These microservices enable developers to share their analytical tools and workflows, while a simple graphical user interface (GUI) allows novice users to build comprehensive analytics pipelines without programming skills. Supported by a knowledge base and a Large Language Model (LLM) powered recommendation system, SLEGO enhances the selection and integration of microservices, increasing the efficiency of analytics pipeline construction. Case studies in finance and machine learning illustrate how SLEGO promotes the sharing and assembly of modular microservices, significantly improving resource reusability and team collaboration. The results highlight SLEGO's role in democratizing data analytics by integrating modular design, knowledge bases, and recommendation systems, fostering a more inclusive and efficient analytical environment.

cs.SE

Cloud Migration Methodologies Preliminary Findings

Research around cloud computing has largely been dedicated to ad-dressing technical aspects associated with utilizing cloud services, surveying critical success factors for the cloud adoption, and opinions about its impact on IT functions. Nevertheless, the aspect of process models for the cloud migration has been slow in pace. Several methodologies have been proposed by both aca-demia and industry for moving legacy applications to the cloud. This paper pre-sents a criteria-based appraisal of such existing methodologies. The results of the analysis highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies and can be used by cloud service consumers for comparing and selecting the most appropriate ones that fit specific migration scenarios. The paper also suggests research opportunities to improve the status quo. Keywords Cloud Migration; Legacy Applications; Cloud Migration Method-ology, Evaluation Framework

cs.SE

Challenges in migrating legacy software systems to the cloud an empirical study

Moving existing legacy systems to cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. There is evidence that the lack of understanding and preparedness of cloud computing migration underpin many migration failures in achieving organisations goals. The main goal of this article is to identify the most important challenging activities for moving legacy systems to cloud platforms from a perspective of reengineering process. Through a combination of a bottom-up and a top-down analysis, a set of common activities is derived from the extant cloud computing literature. These are expressed as a model and are validated using a population of 104 shortlisted and randomly selected domain experts from different industry sectors. We used a Web-based survey questionnaire to collect data and analysed them using SPSS Sample T-Test. The results of this study highlight the most important and critical challenges that should be addressed by various roles within a legacy to cloud migration endeavour. The study provides an overall understanding of this process including common occurring activities, concerns and recommendations. In addition, the findings of this study constitute a practical guide to conduct this transition. This guide is platform agnostic and independent from any specific migration scenario, cloud platform, or an application domain. Keywords. Cloud Computing, Legacy Systems, Cloud Migration, Cloud Migration Process

cs.SE

KASR: A Reliable and Practical Approach to Attack Surface Reduction of Commodity OS Kernels

Commodity OS kernels have broad attack surfaces due to the large code base and the numerous features such as device drivers. For a real-world use case (e.g., an Apache Server), many kernel services are unused and only a small amount of kernel code is used. Within the used code, a certain part is invoked only at runtime while the rest are executed at startup and/or shutdown phases in the kernel's lifetime run. In this paper, we propose a reliable and practical system, named KASR, which transparently reduces attack surfaces of commodity OS kernels at runtime without requiring their source code. The KASR system, residing in a trusted hypervisor, achieves the attack surface reduction through a two-step approach: (1) reliably depriving unused code of executable permissions, and (2) transparently segmenting used code and selectively activating them. We implement a prototype of KASR on Xen-4.8.2 hypervisor and evaluate its security effectiveness on Linux kernel-4.4.0-87-generic. Our evaluation shows that KASR reduces the kernel attack surface by 64% and trims off 40% of CVE vulnerabilities. Besides, KASR successfully detects and blocks all 6 real-world kernel rootkits. We measure its performance overhead with three benchmark tools (i.e., SPECINT, httperf and bonnie++). The experimental results indicate that KASR imposes less than 1% performance overhead (compared to an unmodified Xen hypervisor) on all the benchmarks.

cs.CR

Credit risk prediction in an imbalanced social lending environment

Credit risk prediction is an effective way of evaluating whether a potential borrower will repay a loan, particularly in peer-to-peer lending where class imbalance problems are prevalent. However, few credit risk prediction models for social lending consider imbalanced data and, further, the best resampling technique to use with imbalanced data is still controversial. In an attempt to address these problems, this paper presents an empirical comparison of various combinations of classifiers and resampling techniques within a novel risk assessment methodology that incorporates imbalanced data. The credit predictions from each combination are evaluated with a G-mean measure to avoid bias towards the majority class, which has not been considered in similar studies. The results reveal that combining random forest and random under-sampling may be an effective strategy for calculating the credit risk associated with loan applicants in social lending markets.

cs.LG

SOA Governance - Road into Maturity

There is a general consensus that SOA benefits could be reached but it is unclear how to achieve this. Research shows that the problems with SOA governance in practice are among the major reasons of SOA failures. Based on a literature review, this study first proposes a list of SOA aspects to be considered when implementing SOA governance. By adopting an interpretive research methodology based on interviews, this research paper makes two contributions: it addresses the practical matters that are major concerns for organisations to achieve a higher maturity level with their SOA, and it reveals the importance of the key SOA aspects in building strong governance and consequently reaching a higher maturity level. The expected result should deliver a theoretical contribution to SOA maturity in relation to SOA governance; it could provide organisations with new awareness in assessing their level of maturity and provide recommendations.

cs.CY

Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Real-Time Application QoS Monitoring and Benchmarking As-a-Service Framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business critical applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on single or multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). This paper proposes, develops and validates CLAMBS:Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking as-a-Service for efficient QoS monitoring and benchmarking of cloud applications hosted on multi-clouds environments. The major highlight of CLAMBS is its capability of monitoring and benchmarking individual application components such as databases and web servers, distributed across cloud layers, spread among multiple cloud providers. We validate CLAMBS using prototype implementation and extensive experimentation and show that CLAMBS efficiently monitors and benchmarks application components on multi-cloud platforms including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

cs.DC

Enhancing Automated Decision Support across Medical and Oral Health Domains with Semantic Web Technologies

Research has shown that the general health and oral health of an individual are closely related. Accordingly, current practice of isolating the information base of medical and oral health domains can be dangerous and detrimental to the health of the individual. However, technical issues such as heterogeneous data collection and storage formats, limited sharing of patient information and lack of decision support over the shared information are the principal reasons for the current state of affairs. To address these issues, the following research investigates the development and application of a cross-domain ontology and rules to build an evidence-based and reusable knowledge base consisting of the inter-dependent conditions from the two domains. Through example implementation of the knowledge base in Protege, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reasoning over and providing decision support for cross-domain patient information.

cs.AI

An Overview of the Commercial Cloud Monitoring Tools: Research Dimensions, Design Issues, and State-of-the-Art

Cloud monitoring activity involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized resources (e.g., VM, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, the applications running on them and data hosted on them. Applications and resources configuration in cloud computing environment is quite challenging considering a large number of heterogeneous cloud resources. Further, considering the fact that at each point of time, there will be a different and specific cloud service which may be massively required. Hence, cloud monitoring tools can assist a cloud providers or application developers in: (i) keeping their resources and applications operating at peak efficiency; (ii) detecting variations in resource and application performance; (iii) accounting the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations of certain QoS parameters; and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud resources due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes. In this paper, we identify and discuss the major research dimensions and design issues related to engineering cloud monitoring tools. We further discuss how aforementioned research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research as well as by commercial monitoring tools.

cs.DC