The 2017 General Election will likely be remembered as the campaign where the once dominant forms of TV and print journalism were challenged by digital platforms. This chapter analyses this development while also acknowledging that social media networks do not operate in isolation from their more traditional counterparts and content is often shared between them. That said, digital networks did provide Labour Party supporters with significant opportunities to challenge and rebut claims made by the Conservative-dominated press during this campaign. A significant amount of this material focused on the merits (or not) of the two major rival parties and most especially their leaders. In comparison, other politicians received considerably less attention than in 2015. The 2017 media campaign was not expected to showcase the kinds of innovation or generate the many surprises it subsequently provided. Its unexpected calling meant there was minimal time for campaign planning. In media terms, the rival platforms were often portrayed as though they were operating in parallel universes. So-called traditional media, especially newspapers, were seeking to appeal to older core voters and seen as relentlessly negative, anti-Jeremy Corbyn and pro-Conservative. By contrast, social media was viewed as a vibrant sphere dominated by young, left-leaning voices with a heavily pro-Corbyn agenda. In the aftermath, it could be argued that 2017 marked a watershed moment, one where social media finally proved its electoral worth and the power of the press was significantly challenged. Intriguingly, the media election was not, however, solely characterized by innovation given it too would hark back to an era of two-party politics. Thus the campaign proved to be a highly presidential affair dominated by both of the main parties and their leaders. These factors will be in turn considered in assessments of the role and nature of traditional, as well as social, media in this election.

The previous campaign of 2010 produced electoral firsts in media terms (the televised leaders' debates), drama and unpredictability (‘Cleggmania’) and memorable moments (Gordon Brown's ‘bigoted woman’ comments) all of which disrupted the parties' planned scripts. Arguably, the 2015 election seems to have been its very antithesis. The plodding six-week campaign has been widely been portrayed as dull, stage-managed, narrowly focused and lacking in surprise moments, but with a dramatic ending on election night, as the broadcasters announced the shock exit poll. The disbelieving former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown declared ‘he would eat his hat’ if his party suffered the losses predicted by the forecast; in fact the result was even worse. Ashdown like so many of his fellow commentators, whether of the traditional offline or online media varieties, was stunned by the apparent failure of the opinion polls to foresee the Conservative victory. What followed was the political equivalent of ‘exit velocity’ in the aftermath of a plodding election, with frenetic, intensive debate over the future of the UK sparking the kind of passion lacking in the preceding campaign. The 2015 campaign as reported in the media was predicated on the assumption that the outcome would be another hung Parliament and, possibly, coalition government. This was constantly reinforced by a stream of experts and opinion-formers fixated on what might happen after the election rather what had just happened in the previous Parliament. This augmented the potential power-broking role of emerging ‘challengers’ such as UKIP, the SNP and Greens at the marked expense of the Liberal Democrats, clear beneficiaries of the added exposure they had received in 2010. Yet if the campaign differed in terms of its focus on these growing political parties it was also reminiscent of the previous one with its similar emphasis on polls and other aspects …

We propose an execution model for web apps that eschews the current need for static partitioning of web apps into client-side JavaScript and server-side "data center" code, but rather enables dynamic partitioning by allowing the client and server to share code and migrate computation between each other. Our model abstracts and represents shared code and data as a graph of fixed-sized chunks; our runtime then manages and migrates the graph rather than managing the code and its dependencies directly. We demonstrate our model through PhotoBoss, a suite of web apps for editing high-resolution photos.

Cloud systems differ fundamentally in how they offer and charge for resources. While some systems provide a generic programming abstraction at coarse granularity, e.g., a virtual machine rented by the hour, others offer specialized abstractions with fine-grained accounting on a per-request basis. In this paper, we explore Tasklets, an abstraction for instances of short-duration, generic computations that migrate from a host requiring computation to hosts that are willing to provide computation. Tasklets enable fine-grained accounting of resource usage, enabling us to build infrastructure that supports trading computing resources according to various economic models. This computation model is especially attractive in settings where mobile devices can utilize resources in the cloud to mitigate local resource constraints.

On the desktop, users are accustomed to having visible handles to objects that they want to organize, share, or manipulate. Web applications today feature many classes of such objects, like flight itineraries, products for sale, people, recipes, and businesses, but there are no interoperable handles for high-level semantic objects that users can grab. This paper proposes Clui, a platform for exploring a new data type, called a Webit, that provides uniform handles to rich objects. Clui uses plugins to 1) create Webits on existing pages by extracting semantic data from those pages, and 2) augmenting existing sites with drag and drop targets that accept and interpret Webits. Users drag and drop Webits between sites to transfer data, auto-fill search forms, map associated locations, or share Webits with others. Clui enables experimentation with handles to semantic objects and the standards that underlie them.

Modern computing substrates like cloud computing clusters, massively multi-core processors, and general-purpose GPUs offer a wealth of computing power with the caveat that programmers must carefully structure their programs to fit within various hardware and communication limits in order to get high performance. Unfortunately, modern abstractions expressly hide machine structure from the program and program structure from the machine, hindering automatic optimization. We introduce an alternative computing abstraction--a linked graph of finite-sized memory chunks--that explicitly exposes the size and structure of programs to the operating system. The chunk graph enables the operating system to use size and structure to optimize how programs are mapped onto complex machine structure.

Even as users rely more on the web for their computing needs, they continue to depend on a desktop-like area for quick access to in-use resources. The traditional desktop is file-centric and prone to clutter, making it suboptimal for use in a web-dominated world. This paper introduces Cloudtop, a browser plugin that offers a lightweight workplace for temporary items, optimized around the idea that its contents originate from and will ultimately return to the web. Cloudtop improves upon the desktop by 1) implementing a simple, time-based notebook metaphor for managing clutter, 2) capturing and bundling extensible metadata for web resources, and 3) providing a platform for greater interface uniformity across sites.

Even as users rely more on the web for their computing needs, they continue to depend on a desktop-like area for quick access to in-use resources. The traditional desktop is file-centric and prone to clutter, making it suboptimal for use in a web-dominated world. This paper introduces Cloudtop, a browser plugin that offers a lightweight workplace for temporary items, optimized around the idea that its contents originate from and will ultimately return to the web. Cloudtop improves upon the desktop by 1) implementing a simple, time-based notebook metaphor for managing clutter, 2) capturing and bundling extensible metadata for web resources, and 3) providing a platform for greater interface uniformity across sites.

We present ChunkStream, a system for efficient streaming and interactive editing of online video. Rather than using a specialized protocol and stream format, ChunkStream makes use of a generic mechanism employing chunks. Chunks are fixed-size arrays that contain a mixture of scalar data and references to other chunks. Chunks allow programmers to expose large, but fine-grained, data structures over the network. ChunkStream represents video clips using simple data types like linked lists and search trees, allowing a client to retrieve and work with only the portions of the clips that it needs. ChunkStream supports resource-adaptive playback and ''live'' streaming of real-time video as well as fast, frame-accurate seeking; bandwidth-efficient high-speed playback; and compilation of editing decisions from a set of clips. Benchmarks indicate that ChunkStream uses less bandwidth than HTTP Live Streaming while providing better support for editing primitives.

We propose a model for reliable remote storage founded on contract law. Consumers submit their bits to storage providers in exchange for a chit. A chit is a cryptographically secure, verifiable contract between a consumer and the storage provider. A user can use the chit to request the bits from the provider. In return, the provider must be able to supply the chit's bits to the user according to the terms of the chit. If the storage provider cannot supply the bits, then the provider must pay a penalty. Chits make explicit the penalty for losing data, allowing users to value their data and providers to quantify the financial risk they have undertaken by storing a set of chits. We envision chit-based storage being used as a reliable mechanism for users in pervasive environments.

We present a middleware platform for assembling pervasive applications that demand fault-tolerance and adaptivity in distributed, dynamic environments.Unlike typical adaptive middleware approaches, in which sophisticated component model semantics are embedded into an existing, underlying platform (e.g., CORBA, COM, EJB), we propose a platform that imposes minimal constraints for greater flexibility.Such a tradeoff is advantageous when the platform is targeted by automatic code generators that inherently enforce correctness by construction.Applications are written as simple, single-threaded programs that assemble and monitor a set of distributed components.The approach decomposes applications into two distinct layers: (1) a distributed network of interconnected modules performing computations, and (2) constructor logic that assembles that network via a simple block-diagram construction API.The constructor logic subsequently monitors the configured system via a stream of high-level events, such as notifications of resource availability or failures, and consequently provides a convenient, centralized location for reconfiguration and debugging.The component network is optimized for performance, while the construction API is optimized for ease of assembly.

We describe an approach to automate certain high-level implementation decisions in a pervasive application, allowing them to be postponed until runtime. Our system enables a model in which an application programmer can specify the behavior of an adaptive application as a set of open-ended decision points. We formalize decision points as Goals, each of which may be satisfied by a set of scripts called Techniques. The set of Techniques vying to satisfy any Goal is additive and may be extended at runtime without needing to modify or remove any existing Techniques. Our system provides a framework in which Techniques may compete and interoperate at runtime in order to maintain an adaptive application. Technique development may be distributed and incremental, providing a path for the decentralized evolution of applications. Benchmarks show that our system imposes reasonable overhead during application startup and adaptation.

The rapid increase in the number and variety of consumer-level electronic devices without the corresponding development of device management technology has lead to a configuration nightmare. We propose to use goal-oriented programming over a substrate of network-portable objects to help reduce the amount of configuration users must do in order to have their applications use their devices efficiently. We detail an architecture and describe a prototype system using existing pervasive computing technology that plays music on the most appropriate devices without requiring user interaction and configuration

The adaptivity demands of ubiquitous computing motivate applications structured around implementation choices that are (a) made at runtime, reflecting available resources; (b) reevaluated and potentially changed during application operation, accommodating failures and resource discovery; and (c) locally extensible beyond choices anticipated (and fixed) by central application code. To this end, we explore a new organization for adaptive applications involving the formalization of Goals as representations of abstract services and a universe of Techniques which compete to provide them. In our model the selection of Techniques to satisfy each Goal is performed by an application-generic runtime process which continues so long as the Goal remains active, allowing applications to adapt to runtime changes in available resources. The set of available Techniques is potentially open, distributed, and incrementally extensible, providing paths for the decentralized evolution of applications.