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Using a serverless framework for implementing a cognitive tutor: experiences and issues

Published: 11 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We present a practical application of serverless technology to implement a key component of a personalized tutoring system. We employ OpenWhisk[2] to orchestrate a set of microservices tasked with different responsibilities in the larger system. The tutor, which is trained on a specific set of content, is embodied as a multimodal, stateful dialog system. This desired experience brings with it unique challenges, prime among them being real-time interaction and the inherently stateful nature. We discuss the drivers for selecting serverless technology, the specific design choices we made and the issues we have faced. This work is in progress, and we conclude with some notes on paths we plan to explore as we continue to evolve the system and exploit this exciting new computing paradigm to help us achieve our goals.

References

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2017. Amazon Lambda. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/. (2017).
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2017. Apache OpenWhisk. (2017). https://openwhisk.incubator.apache.org/
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2017. Google Cloud Functions. (2017). https://cloud.google.com/functions/
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2017. IBM Cloud Functions. (2017). https://console.bluemix.net/openwhisk/
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2017. The Twelve-Factor App. (2017). https://12factor.net
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Ioana Baldini, Paul C. Castro, Kerry Chang, Perry Cheng, Stephen J. Fink, Vatche Ishakian, Nick Mitchell, Vinod Muthusamy, Rodric M. Rabbah, Aleksander Slominski, and Philippe Suter. 2017. Serverless Computing: Current Trends and Open Problems. CoRR abs/1706.03178 (2017). http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03178
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Brendan Burns, Brian Grant, David Oppenheimer, Eric Brewer, and John Wilkes. 2016. Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes. ACM Queue 14 (2016), 70--93. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2898444
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David Gelernter. 1985. Generative Communication in Linda. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 7, 1 (Jan. 1985), 80--112.
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Fabrizio Montesi and Janine Weber. 2016. Circuit Breakers, Discovery, and API Gateways in Microservices. CoRR abs/1609.05830 (2016). arXiv:1609.05830 http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05830
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Roger Nkambou, Riichiro Mizoguchi, and Jacqueline Bourdeau. 2010. Advances in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (1st ed.). Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WoSC '17: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Serverless Computing
December 2017
40 pages
ISBN:9781450354349
DOI:10.1145/3154847
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 December 2017

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Author Tags

  1. microservice orchestration
  2. real-time interaction
  3. serverless computing

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  • Research-article

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Middleware '17
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Middleware '17: 18th International Middleware Conference
December 11 - 15, 2017
Nevada, Las Vegas

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  • (2021)Survey on serverless computingJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-021-00253-710:1Online publication date: 12-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Bridging Conceptual Models and Architectural Interchange for Adaptive Instructional SystemsAdaptive Instructional Systems10.1007/978-3-030-50788-6_3(34-44)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2020
  • (2019)CSPOTProceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing10.1145/3318216.3363314(236-249)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
  • (2019)A UML Profile for Multi-Cloud Service Configuration (UMLPMSC) in Event-driven Serverless ApplicationsProceedings of the 2019 8th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications10.1145/3316615.3316636(431-435)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2019
  • (2018)Tracing Function Dependencies across Clouds2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)10.1109/CLOUD.2018.00039(253-260)Online publication date: Jul-2018

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