1,721,034 research outputs found
A mobile sensing and visualization platform for environmental data
Get PDFThe ubiquity of mobile technology has opened the door to the new era of mobile sensing. Through this new paradigm, physical phenomena can be observed in a distributed way, crowd-sourcing the data measurement tasks to smartphones and/or other popular smart wearables. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can hence be employed to gather data and generate new information and services, benefiting our society.
As a proof-of-concept, we have developed a mobile sensing platform able to pervasively collect environmental data. To improve the quality of collected data we have also created an application for pedestrian navigation that works both on smartphones (also using Augmented Reality) and on smartwatches, thus ensuring an appropriate exposition of the mobile device (and its sensors) when collecting data. Furthermore, our navigation app is able to provide
users with personalized pedestrian routes that take into account environmental parameters and not only the route length. Finally, we have also devised a web service able to provide graphical visualization and historical evolution of sensed data
Towards a Resource-aware Middleware Support for Distributed Game Engine Design
No full textRecently, we are witnessing an increasing interest in a paradigm shift in the way video games are designed and implemented. Starting from an era where a single developer was in charge of the whole creative process, we have moved now toward extremely large groups with a multi-layered organisation. Moreover, today’s game engines suffer from a number of architectural constraints, and will not likely be able to meet the flexibility and scalability required by game developers of the next generation. This increasing complexity, the tremendous growth of projects size, and the rapidly evolving AR/VR trend, call for the adoption of agile development and cost-effective management approaches leveraging on distributed computing environments and primitives. In this work, we present the concept of a distributed game engine architecture, which relies on a resource-aware middleware solution providing run-time quality support to components spanning edge-cloud environments
DIFFUSE: A DIstributed and decentralized platForm enabling Function composition in Serverless Environments
Get PDFServerless computing is an emerging proposition in the cloud offering landscape that promotes a higher level of abstraction, further decoupling software operations from the underlying hardware. Often recognized as an economically driven computational approach, the serverless model relies on the execution of short-lived stateless functions, enabling a fine-grained accounting and control of resources. In this context, function composition represents an appealing feature, allowing the composition of two or more functions to create tailored processing pipelines, incentivizing modularity and reusability of functions, while paving the way to application-specific run-time optimizations. This work presents DIFFUSE: a DIstributed and decentralized platForm enabling Function composition in Serverless Environments. DIFFUSE embodies an innovative infrastructural support, enabling the efficient and transparent composition of functions by relying on pluggable middleware support, serving as a conveyor of messages among the platform components. Broadening the deployment spectrum of our proposal, we assess different middleware solutions, each presenting distinct delivery profiles, evidencing the tradeoffs that emerge
KuberneTSN: a Deterministic Overlay Network for Time-Sensitive Containerized Environments
Get PDFThe emerging paradigm of resource disaggregation enables the deployment of
cloud-like services across a pool of physical and virtualized resources,
interconnected using a network fabric. This design embodies several benefits in
terms of resource efficiency and cost-effectiveness, service elasticity and
adaptability, etc. Application domains benefiting from such a trend include
cyber-physical systems (CPS), tactile internet, 5G networks and beyond, or
mixed reality applications, all generally embodying heterogeneous Quality of
Service (QoS) requirements. In this context, a key enabling factor to fully
support those mixed-criticality scenarios will be the network and the
system-level support for time-sensitive communication. Although a lot of work
has been conducted on devising efficient orchestration and CPU scheduling
strategies, the networking aspects of performance-critical components remain
largely unstudied. Bridging this gap, we propose KuberneTSN, an original
solution built on the Kubernetes platform, providing support for time-sensitive
traffic to unmodified application binaries. We define an architecture for an
accelerated and deterministic overlay network, which includes kernel-bypassing
networking features as well as a novel userspace packet scheduler compliant
with the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard. The solution is implemented
as tsn-cni, a Kubernetes network plugin that can coexist alongside popular
alternatives. To assess the validity of the approach, we conduct an
experimental analysis on a real distributed testbed, demonstrating that
KuberneTSN enables applications to easily meet deterministic deadlines,
provides the same guarantees of bare-metal deployments, and outperforms overlay
networks built using the Flannel plugin.Comment: 6 page
Understanding home inactivity for human behavior anomaly detection
No full textThe importance of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems as a new paradigm to provide assistance to independent older adults at home is constantly growing. In this context, one of the most demanded feature is the possibility to promptly alert caregivers if an anomaly -e.g., a fall or a domestic accident - occurs. However, it is particularly difficult to monitor situations where the subject performs activities that do not involve motion (e.g., "sleeping", "watching TV"). In such cases, there is the need to understand whether the behavior of the person at home has a normal flow or if, for example, it is due to an illness that the monitoring system might not distinguish from other activities. In this work, we deepened the concept of home inactivity and we report a statistical survey study to identify the most relevant variables (observable set) that should be considered while designing an efficient AAL system
Object detection and spatial coordinates extraction using a monocular camera for a wheelchair mounted robotic arm
No full textIn the last decades, smart power wheelchairs have being used by people with motor skill impairment in order to improve their autonomy, independence and quality of life. The most recent power wheelchairs feature many technological devices, such as laser scanners to provide automatic obstacle detection or robotic arms to perform simple operations like pick and place. However, if a motor skill impaired user was able to control a very complex robotic arm, paradoxically he would not need it. For that reason, in this paper we present an autonomous control system based on Computer Vision algorithms which allows the user to interact with buttons or elevator panels via a robotic arm in a simple and easy way. Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm has been used to detect and track buttons. Objects detected by SIFT are mapped in a tridimensional reference system collected with Parallel and Tracking Mapping (PTAM) algorithm. Real word coordinates are obtained using a Maximum-Likelihood estimator, fusing the PTAM coordinates with distance information provided by a proximity sensor. The visual servoing algorithm has been developed in Robotic Operative System (ROS) Environment, in which the previous algorithms are implemented as different nodes. Performances have been analyzed in a test scenario, obtaining good results on the real position of the selected objects
AirCache: A Crowd-Based Solution for Geoanchored Floating Data
No full textThe Internet edge has evolved from a simple consumer of information and data to eager producer feeding sensed data at a societal scale. The crowdsensing paradigm is a representative example which has the potential to revolutionize the way we acquire and consume data. Indeed, especially in the era of smartphones, the geographical and temporal scopus of data is often local. For instance, users' queries are more and more frequently about a nearby object, event, person, location, and so forth. These queries could certainly be processed and answered locally, without the need for contacting a remote server through the Internet. In this scenario, the data is alimented (sensed) by the users and, as a consequence, data lifetime is limited by human organizational factors (e.g., mobility). From this basis, data survivability in the Area of Interest (AoI) is crucial and, if not guaranteed, could undermine system deployment. Addressing this scenario, we discuss and contribute with a novel protocol named AirCache, whose aim is to guarantee data availability in the AoI while at the same time reducing the data access costs at the network edges. We assess our proposal through a simulation analysis showing that our approach effectively fulfills its design objectives
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
- …
