57 research outputs found
Sharing intelligent services between homes
No full textThe user’s environment is increasingly enriched with computing devices that offer services that aid users in their daily activities. Current use of these services is either public (i.e. unrestricted), or requires explicit registration. In the first case, user control and security are sacrificed whilst in the second ease of use and flexibility is limited. In this paper, we extend the perspective of user-centric computing in offering guests a simple and transparent way to access their home services from a visited intelligent environment. We provide the users with a Personal Access Device (PAD) that facilitates creation of trust between the user’s own home and a visited intelligent environment. This enables seamless access to home services from the visited environment.Henk Eertink, Remco Poortinga, Tom Broens, Stephan Tobies, Andrew Tokmakoff, Aart van Haltere
Analysing campus traffic using the meter-MIB
Get PDFThe University of Twente, which is the only campus university in the Netherlands, connects all students living on the campus via 100 Mbit/s switched Ethernet links to the campus network. This student network not only interconnects all students among themselves, but also provides, via a 300 Mbit/s link, access to other parts of the university network as well as the external Internet. Since the 300 Mbit/s link is a potential bottleneck, the university has defined a policy to limit the total amount of traffic a single student is allowed to exchange to 50 Gigabyte per week. To check if students do not exceed this limit, a number of interface MIB variables within the student’s access switches are monitored on a periodic base. Although monitoring these MIB variables is good enough to detect which students exchange more than 50 Gigabyte weekly, the approach fails to reliably determine which students are the top users of the potential bottleneck, which is the 300 Mbit/s link. The questionhas therefore been raised whether it would be feasible to directly measure all traffic on that link to precisely determine which student is using which portion of the link’s capacity and for what purpose (downloading information from the teaching departments, browsing the Internet etc.). Although NeTraMet, which is an implementation of the IETF’s meter MIB, would in theory be useable for such measurements, it was not clear whether it would be fast enough to analyse each packet on a 300 Mbit/s full-duplex link. This paper therefore discusses theexperiments that have been performed to find the limits of Netramet, and investigate whether the tool would be useful to solve real management problems. In our experiments Netramet was running on a standard PC
Interoperating Context Discovery Mechanisms
Get PDFContext-Aware applications adapt their behaviour to the current situation of the user. This information, for instance user location and user availability, is called context information. Context is delivered by distributed context sources that need to be discovered before they can be used to retrieve context. Currently, multiple context discovery mechanisms exist, exhibiting heterogeneous capabilities (e.g. communication mechanisms, and data formats), which can be available to context-aware applications at arbitrary moments during the ap-plication’s lifespan. In this paper, we discuss a middleware mechanism that en-ables a (mobile) context-aware application to interoperate transparently with different context discovery mechanisms available at run-time. The goal of the proposed mechanism is to hide the heterogeneity and availability of context discovery mechanisms for context-aware applications, thereby facilitating their development
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The supervisor and/or the author did not authorize public publication of the thesis.
Cross-Cultural Meta-Analyses
Get PDFIn the enormous collection of cross-cultural data that have been published during the last few decades it is difficult to perceive patterns. There is a clear need for systematizing the vast amount of cross-cultural studies and for developing models that explain cross-cultural differences in psychology. Two methods of cross-cultural meta-analysis can be distinguished. First, the instrument-based method of comparing data for one instrument across countries is suitable for instruments which have been administered in many countries. Second, a domain-based meta-analysis used a thematic domain from which culture-comparative studies are sampled instead of one specific instrument or method
A Service-Oriented Middleware for Context-Aware Applications
No full textContext awareness has emerged as an important element in distributed computing. It offers mechanisms that allow applications to be aware of their environment and enable these applications to adjust their behavior to the current context. Considering the dynamic nature of context, the data flow of relevant contextual information can be significant. In order to keep track of this information flow, a flexible service mechanism should be available for the client applications. In this document we present a service-oriented middleware for context-aware applications. This middleware provides support to leverage the development of context-aware applications by providing a scripting-like approach for context-aware application development; allowing the subscription of rules containing context-based events and conditions and a notification to be sent when the specified context holds. Moreover, a domain-specific language has been developed to express these context-based rules
Context Management and Semantic Modelling for Ambient Intelligence
Get PDFAmbient Intelligence aims at pushing forward a user centric vision of Pervasive Computing, where the environment better serves our need. This paper describes our current work on modelling and managing context information for smart environments
An open context information management infrastructure the IST-Amigo project
No full textS.398-403The Context Management Service (CMS) is an open infrastructure for managing context information developed in the Amigo project. The Amigo project is an IST Integrated Project which focuses on ambient intelligence for the networked home. Topics in the Amigo project include, but are not limited to, ambient intelligence, interoperability between different home related protocols and standards, and context management. One of the outputs of the Amigo project is in the form of (mostly open source) middleware for these particular topics, as well as demonstrator software to show the value of the middleware. The role of the CMS is to acquire information coming from various sources, such as physical sensors, user activities, and applications in process or internet applications and to subsequently combine or abstract these pieces of information into "context information" to be provided to context aware services. This article introduces the basic principles underlying the CMS design and implementation and illustrates its application to implementing an ambient intelligence enabled home environment, supporting users in handling daily routine tasks such as the morning waking up. The most salient features of the CMS include: - Its compliance to the web service architecture both for interfacing to context consuming applications and for integrating its sub components. - The modeling of context information using a high level language with much expressiveness. - State of the art context sources such as a context history manager and an audio based positioning system
Cultural diversity and work-group performance: Detecting the rules
Get PDFWith greater levels of international cooperation, work-groups are increasingly composed of members from different cultures. These groups often suffer from communication problems; however, research suggests that they also benefit from their members cultural diversity and generate higher ranges of problem perspectives. This thesis investigates two questions: first, when do diverse groups generate a higher range of perspectives; second, which skill do group members need to benefit from cultural diversity? In order to investigate the conditions for diversity benefits, student groups of high national diversity were compared with student groups of low national diversity while working together creating a new game. Empirical findings suggest, first, cultural diversity inhibits idea generation in the initial stage; second, cultural diversity affects communication much less then expected, and, third, the absence of communication difficulties is no sufficient condition for achieving the diversity benefits. The author concludes that without training, group members have difficulty detecting cultural differences that could lead to greater idea variation. Hence, the second part of the thesis proposes a training method for the skill to detect cultural differences. An evaluation study of the training method comparing trained with un-trained students supports the effectiveness of the training method
Social Motives and Their Development in Cultural Context
Get PDFThis paper deals with differences in social motives between cultures and with respect to their development. First, social motives are described as complex functional systems. Then aggressiveness and achievement motivation are dealt with as examples. Assumptions about biological factors are discussed and cultural differences are reported. Based on cross-cultural research, variations in early mother-child relations and in cultural norms and values are discussed as main sources of individual and cultural differences
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