1,720,990 research outputs found
Engineering Contextual Information for Pervasive Multiagent Systems
No full textMultiagent systems for mobile and pervasive computing should
extensively exploit contextual information both to adapt to user needs and to
enable autonomic behavior. This raises the problem of how to represent,
organize, aggregate, and make available such data so as to have it become
meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design and development of
agents, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees of context awareness at
limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineering
challenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount of
heterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant
proposals in the area of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and
granular computing discussing their potentials and limitations. On these bases,
we propose the W4 model for contextual data and show how it can represent
an effective model to enable flexible general-purpose management of
contextual knowledge, to facilitate agents in achieving high degrees of
context-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of
complex multiagent systems
The Whereabouts Diary
No full textThe user profile is one of the main context-information in a wide range of pervasive computing applications. Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities could automatically create a diary of user’s whereabouts and use that information as a surrogate (or a complement) of the user profile. The places we go, in fact, reveal also something about us, for example, two persons can be matched as compatible given the fact they visit the same places. Web-retrieved information, and the temporal patterns with which different places are visited, can be used to automatically define meaningful semantic labels to the visited places. In our work we used geocoding and white-pages Web-services to extract information about a place, and Bayesian networks to classify places on the basis of the time in which they have been visited. In this paper we describe the general idea at the basis of the whereabouts diary, discuss our implementation, and present experimental results. Finally, several applications that can exploit the diary are illustrated
Engineering Contextual Knowledge for Autonomic Pervasive Services
No full textServices for mobile and pervasive computing should extensively exploit contextualinformation both to adapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. This raises theproblem of how to represent, organize, aggregate, and make available such data to servicesso as to have it become meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design anddevelopment of autonomic pervasive services, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees ofcontext awareness at limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineeringchallenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount ofheterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant proposals in thearea of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and granular computing discussingtheir potentials and limitations with regard to their adoption in the development of contextawarepervasive services. On these bases, we propose the W4 model for contextual data andshow how it can represent a simple yet effective model to enable flexible general-purposemanagement of contextual knowledge, to facilitate services in achieving high degrees ofcontext-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of complexpervasive services. A summarizing discussion and the identification of open researchdirections conclude the paper
Air quality monitoring for pervasive health
Full text linkTwo monitoring projects relate to this issue's theme, "Hostile Environments": "Landslide Monitoring in the Emilia Romagna Apennines" and "Air Quality Monitoring for Pervasive Health." In addition, "Task-Driven Framework for Pervasive Computing" reports on TaskOS, a project to develop task-driven recommendation systems for pervasive computing environments.Science Foundation IrelandPart of Environmental Monitoring and Task-Driven Computing
Rosi, Alberto Bicocchi, Nicola Castelli, Gabriella Corsini, Alessandro Mamei, Marco Zambonelli, Franco Berti, Matteo Angove, Philip O'Flynn, Brendan Hayes, Jer Diamond, Dermot O'Grady, Michael J. O'Hare, Gregory M.P. Vo, Chuong C. Torabi, Torab Loke, Seng W. Page(s): 48 - 50 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org - AV 12/05/2011/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=558669
Engineering Pervasive Service Ecosystems: The SAPERE approach
Full text linkEmerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases
A context-sensitive infrastructure for coordinating agents in ubiquitous environments
No full textThe combination of contextual information about the real world (e.g., collected by sensors) with information coming from the virtual world (e.g., the Web 2.0), may represent an enormous enrichment particularly for services organized and provided by agents in ubiquitous environments. To address the challenging need for coordination in such environments, and to provide the user a high-level of service quality, an engineered approach to exploit such information is required. Such an approach should generate added-value by offering means for combining diverse data sources, should allow delivering context-sensitive information and, hence, should promote context-dependent coordination of entities in ubiquitous environments. In this paper, we report the scenario-based analysis of key requirements for ubiquitous environments that we have used as the basis for the design of our proposal. Following, our proposal for the Ubiquitous Coordination Model (UbiCoMo) and its associated infrastructure is detailed. The UbiCoMo model covers an expressive data model based on four-field tuples to represent contextual information, data distribution and management concepts based on tuple spaces, and the integration of coordination patterns to resolve reoccurring coordination problems in ubiquitous scenarios. The UbiCoMo infrastructure integrates the fundamental mechanisms for agent-based coordination in ubiquitous environments, and is well-suited to provide the specific means required to offer high-level services and context-sensitive functionalities. A concrete ubiquitous application, the living diary, is assumed as a case study both to illustrate the requirements analysis and to exemplify the usage and the suitability of UbiCoMo
Context-Aware Coordination in the Sensors' Continuum
No full textPervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags will soon densely pupulate our everyday environments. These, together with the increasing diffusion of geospatial Web 2.0 tools such as GoogleEarth, will soon form the basis of a shared distributed information space capable of producing and storing data about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting such information space as a general-purpose coordination infrastructure to facilitate users in gathering information about the world, interact with it in a context-aware way, and coordinate with each other via the mediation of that infrastructure. However, the extremely distributed and heterogeneous nature of such infrastructure and the potentially incredible density of the information produced within (at the very extreme, a spatio-temporal continuum of information), introduces several issues related to the management of such infrastructure, i.e., the need for properly aggregating data to abstract from its actual density and to enable multilevel views, and the need for representing data in a simple, uniform, and easy to be managed way. In this paper, after having sketched our general vision for such future coordination infrastructure, we analyse and discuss the key research chalenges to data aggregation and data representation, and present our current research and experimental activity in these areas
Coordination in the Sensor’s Continuum
No full textThe imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies, together with the increasing access of participatory web tools, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information space for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services, for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, coordinating with it, and coordinating with each other via the mediation of an information space.In this paper we present our current research work in this direction, in particular with regard to self- organized data aggregation, data representation and access middleware infrastructure. Due to the unpredictable density of such information spaces, we will also outline the continuum abstraction
How to Develop Pervasive Social Applications with the SAPERE Middleware
Full text linkSAPERE ("Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems'') is a general framework to support the decentralized execution of self-organizing pervasive computing services. In this paper we present the rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE and detail the interaction model implemented by it, based on a limited set of "eco-laws'' allowing general-purpose distributed self-organizing schemes. Finally, we show how a social application can be easily implemented exploiting such an infrastructure and report on performances
Extracting High-Level Information from Location Data: the W4 Diary Example
No full textServices for mobile and pervasive computingshould extensively exploit contextual information both toadapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. Tofulfill this idea it is important to provide two key tools: amodel supporting context-data representation and manipulation,and a set of algorithms relying on the model toperform application tasks. Following these lines, we firstdescribe the W4 context model showing how it canrepresent a simple yet effective framework to enableflexible and general-purpose management of contextualinformation. In particular, we show the model suitability indescribing user-centric situations, e.g., describing situationsin terms of where a user is located and what he is doing.Then, we illustrate a set of algorithms to semanticallyenrich W4 represented data and to extract relevantinformation from it. In particular, starting from W4 data,such algorithms are able to identify the places that matter tothe user and to describe them semantically. Overall, weshow how the context-model and the algorithms allow tocreate an high-level, semantic and context-aware diarybasedservice. This service meaningfully collects andclassifies the user whereabouts and the places that the uservisite
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