Presenting the networked home: a content analysis of promotion material of Ambient Intelligence applications

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) for the home uses information and communication technologies to make users’ everyday life more comfortable. AmI is still in its developmental phase and is headed towards the first stages of diffusion. \ud Characteristics of AmI design can be observed, among others, in the promotion material of initial producers. A literature study revealed that AmI originally envisioned a central role for the user, convenience that AmI offers them and that attention should be paid to critical policy issues such as privacy and a potential loss of freedom. A content analysis of current promotion material of several high-tech companies revealed that these original ideas are not all reflected in the material. Attributes which were used most in the promotion material were ‘connectedness’, ‘control’, ‘easiness’ and ‘personalization’. An analysis of the pictures in the promotion material showed that almost half of the pictures contained no humans but appliances. These results only partly correspond to the original vision on AmI, since the emphasis is now on technology. The results represent a serious problem, since both users, as well as critical policy issues are underexposed in the current promotion material

Situational-Context: A Unified View of Everything Involved at a Particular Situation

As the interest in the Web of Things increases, specially for the general population, the barriers to entry for the use of these technologies should decrease. Current applications can be developed to adapt their behaviour to predefined conditions and users preferences, facilitating their use. In the future,Web of Things software should be able to automatically adjust its behaviour to non-predefined preferences or context of its users. In this vision paper we define the Situational-Context as the combination of the virtual profiles of the entities (things or people) that concur at a particular place and time. The computation of the Situational-Context allow us to predict the expected system behaviour and the required interaction between devices to meet the entities’ goals, achieving a better adjustment of the system to variable contexts.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Behavioural pattern identification and prediction in intelligent environments

In this paper, the application of soft computing techniques in prediction of an occupant's behaviour in an inhabited intelligent environment is addressed. In this research, daily activities of elderly people who live in their own homes suffering from dementia are studied. Occupancy sensors are used to extract the movement patterns of the occupant. The occupancy data is then converted into temporal sequences of activities which are eventually used to predict the occupant behaviour. To build the prediction model, different dynamic recurrent neural networks are investigated. Recurrent neural networks have shown a great ability in finding the temporal relationships of input patterns. The experimental results show that non-linear autoregressive network with exogenous inputs model correctly extracts the long term prediction patterns of the occupant and outperformed the Elman network. The results presented here are validated using data generated from a simulator and real environments

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Visual analysis of sensor logs in smart spaces: Activities vs. situations

Models of human habits in smart spaces can be expressed by using a multitude of representations whose readability influences the possibility of being validated by human experts. Our research is focused on developing a visual analysis pipeline (service) that allows, starting from the sensor log of a smart space, to graphically visualize human habits. The basic assumption is to apply techniques borrowed from the area of business process automation and mining on a version of the sensor log preprocessed in order to translate raw sensor measurements into human actions. The proposed pipeline is employed to automatically extract models to be reused for ambient intelligence. In this paper, we present an user evaluation aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach, by comparing it wrt. a relevant state-of-the-art visual tool, namely SITUVIS