The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Personalizable Service Discovery in Pervasive Systems

Today, telecom providers are facing changing challenges. To stay ahead in the competition and provide market leading offerings, carriers need to enable a global ecosystem of third party independent application developers to deliver converged services. This is the aim of leveraging a open standardsbased service delivery platform. To identify and to cope with those challenges is the main target of the EU funded project IST DAIDALOS II. And a central point to satisfy the changing user needs is the provision of a well working, user friendly and personalized service discovery. This paper describes our work in the project on a middleware in a framework for pervasive service usage. We have designed an architecture for it, that enables full transparency to the user, grants high compatibility and extendability by a modular and pluggable conception and allows for interoperability with most known service discovery protocols. Our Multi-Protocol Service Discovery and the Four Phases Service Filtering concept enabling personalization should allow for the best possible results in service discovery

Context for Ubiquitous Data Management

In response to the advance of ubiquitous computing technologies, we believe that for computer systems to be ubiquitous, they must be context-aware. In this paper, we address the impact of context-awareness on ubiquitous data management. To do this, we overview different characteristics of context in order to develop a clear understanding of context, as well as its implications and requirements for context-aware data management. References to recent research activities and applicable techniques are also provided

Learning Behaviour for Service Personalisation and Adaptation

Context-aware applications within pervasive environments are increasingly being developed as services and deployed in the cloud. As such these services are increasingly required to be adaptive to individual users to meet their specific needs or to reflect the changes of their behavior. To address this emerging challenge this paper introduces a service-oriented personalisation framework for service personalisation with special emphasis being placed on behavior learning for user model and service function adaptation. The paper describes the system architecture and the underlying methods and technologies including modelling and reasoning, behavior analysis and a personalisation mechanism. The approach has been implemented in a service-oriented prototype system, and evaluated in a typical scenario of providing personalised travel assistance for the elderly using the help-on-demand services deployed on smartphone

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

A Mediation Framework for Mobile Web Service Provisioning

Web Services and mobile data services are the newest trends in information systems engineering in wired and wireless domains, respectively. Web Services have a broad range of service distributions while mobile phones have large and expanding user base. To address the confluence of Web Services and pervasive mobile devices and communication environments, a basic mobile Web Service provider was developed for smart phones. The performance of this Mobile Host was also analyzed in detail. Further analysis of the Mobile Host to provide proper QoS and to check Mobile Host's feasibility in the P2P networks, identified the necessity of a mediation framework. The paper describes the research conducted with the Mobile Host, identifies the tasks of the mediation framework and then discusses the feasible realization details of such a mobile Web Services mediation framework.Comment: Proceedings of 2006 Middleware for Web Services (MWS 2006) Workshop @ 10th International IEEE EDOC Conference "The Enterprise Computing Conference", October 16, 2006, pp. 14-17. IEEE Computer Societ

FamTV : an architecture for presence-aware personalized television

Since the advent of the digital era, the traditional TV scenario has rapidly evolved towards an ecosystem comprised of a myriad of services, applications, channels, and contents. As a direct consequence, the amount of available information and configuration options targeted at today's end consumers have become unmanageable. Thus, personalization and usability emerge as indispensable elements to improve our content-overloaded digital homes. With these requirements in mind, we present a way to combine content adaptation paradigms together with presence detection in order to allow a seamless and personalized entertainment experience when watching TV.This work has been partially supported by the Community of Madrid (CAM), Spain under the contract number S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow