Mobile support in CSCW applications and groupware development frameworks

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today. CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices

A component-oriented programming framework for developing embedded mobile robot software using PECOS model

A practical framework for component-based software engineering of embedded real-time systems, particularly for autonomous mobile robot embedded software development using PECOS component model is proposed The main features of this framework are: (1) use graphical representation for components definition and composition; (2) target C language for optimal code generation with small micro-controller; and (3) does not requires run-time support except for real-time kernel. Real-time implementation indicates that, the PECOS component model together with the proposed framework is suitable for resource constrained embedded systems

On sharing and synchronizing groupware calendars under android platform

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Sharing a calendar of tasks and events is a cornerstone in collaborative group work. Indeed, the individual work of the members of the group as well as the group work as a whole need the calendar to guide their activity and to meet the deadlines, milestones, deliverables of a project, etc. Additionally the members of the group should be able to work both offline and online, which arises when members of the group use smartphones and can eventually run out of Internet connection from time to time, or simply want to develop some activities locally. In the former case, they should have access to the calendar locally, while in the later case they should access the calendar online, shared by all members of the group. In both cases they should be able to see eventually the same information, namely the local calendars of the members should be synchronized with the group calendar. For the case of smartphones under Android system, one solution could be using the Google calendar, however, that is not easily tailorable to collaborative group work. In this paper we present an analysis, design and implementation of group work calendar that meets several requirements such as 1) sharing among all of members of the group, 2) synchronization among local calendars of members and global group calendar, 3) conflict resolution through a voting system, 4) awareness of changes in the entries (tasks, members, events, etc.) of the calendar and 5) all these requirements under proper privacy, confidentiality and security mechanisms. Moreover, we extend the sharing of calendars among different groups, a situation which often arises in enterprises when different groups need to be aware of other projects' development, or, when some members participate in more than one project at the same time.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mobile, collaborative augmented reality using cloudlets

The evolution in mobile applications to support advanced interactivity and demanding multimedia features is still ongoing. Novel application concepts (e.g. mobile Augmented Reality (AR)) are however hindered by the inherently limited resources available on mobile platforms (not withstanding the dramatic performance increases of mobile hardware). Offloading resource intensive application components to the cloud, also known as "cyber foraging", has proven to be a valuable solution in a variety of scenarios. However, also for collaborative scenarios, in which data together with its processing are shared between multiple users, this offloading concept is highly promising. In this paper, we investigate the challenges posed by offloading collaborative mobile applications. We present a middleware platform capable of autonomously deploying software components to minimize average CPU load, while guaranteeing smooth collaboration. As a use case, we present and evaluate a collaborative AR application, offering interaction between users, the physical environment as well as with the virtual objects superimposed on this physical environment

Mobile Agent based Market Basket Analysis on Cloud

This paper describes the design and development of a location-based mobile shopping application for bakery product shops. Whole application is deployed on cloud. The three-tier architecture consists of, front-end, middle-ware and back-end. The front-end level is a location-based mobile shopping application for android mobile devices, for purchasing bakery products of nearby places. Front-end level also displays association among the purchased products. The middle-ware level provides a web service to generate JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) output from the relational database. It exchanges information and data between mobile application and servers in cloud. The back-end level provides the Apache Tomcat Web server and MySQL database. The application also uses the Google Cloud Messaging for generating and sending notification of orders to shopkeeper.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Persistent Contextual Values as Inter-Process Layers

Mobile applications today often fail to be context aware when they also need to be customizable and efficient at run-time. Context-oriented programming allows programmers to develop applications that are more context aware. Its central construct, the so-called layer, however, is not customizable. We propose to use novel persistent contextual values for mobile development. Persistent contextual values automatically adapt their value to the context. Furthermore they provide access without overhead. Key-value configuration files contain the specification of contextual values and the persisted contextual values themselves. By modifying the configuration files, the contextual values can easily be customized for every context. From the specification, we generate code to simplify development. Our implementation, called Elektra, permits development in several languages including C++ and Java. In a benchmark we compare layer activations between threads and between applications. In a case study involving a web-server on a mobile embedded device the performance overhead is minimal, even with many context switches.Comment: 8 pages Mobile! 16, October 31, 2016, Amsterdam, Netherland

A Reusable Component for Communication and Data Synchronization in Mobile Distributed Interactive Applications

In Distributed Interactive Applications (DIA) such as multiplayer games, where many participants are involved in a same game session and communicate through a network, they may have an inconsistent view of the virtual world because of the communication delays across the network. This issue becomes even more challenging when communicating through a cellular network while executing the DIA client on a mobile terminal. Consistency maintenance algorithms may be used to obtain a uniform view of the virtual world. These algorithms are very complex and hard to program and therefore, the implementation and the future evolution of the application logic code become difficult. To solve this problem, we propose an approach where the consistency concerns are handled separately by a distributed component called a Synchronization Medium, which is responsible for the communication management as well as the consistency maintenance. We present the detailed architecture of the Synchronization Medium and the generic interfaces it offers to DIAs. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively. We first demonstrate that the Synchronization Medium is a reusable component through the development of two game applications, a car racing game and a space war game. A performance evaluation then shows that the overhead introduced by the Synchronization Medium remains acceptable.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems