Survey of context provisioning middleware

In the scope of ubiquitous computing, one of the key issues is the awareness of context, which includes diverse aspects of the user's situation including his activities, physical surroundings, location, emotions and social relations, device and network characteristics and their interaction with each other. This contextual knowledge is typically acquired from physical, virtual or logical sensors. To overcome problems of heterogeneity and hide complexity, a significant number of middleware approaches have been proposed for systematic and coherent access to manifold context parameters. These frameworks deal particularly with context representation, context management and reasoning, i.e. deriving abstract knowledge from raw sensor data. This article surveys not only related work in these three categories but also the required evaluation principles. © 2009-2012 IEEE

Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

Flexible home care automation adapting to the personal and evolving needs and situations of the patient

Health monitoring and healthcare provisioning at home (i.e., outside the hospital) have received increasingly attention as a possible and partial solution for addressing the problems of an aging population. There are still many technological issues that need to be solved before home healthcare systems can be really cost-effective and efficient. However, in this paper we will highlight another category of issues which we call architectural challenges. Each patient is unique, and each patient has a unique lifestyle, living environment and course of life. Therefore it should be possible to personalize the services provided by home healthcare systems according to the needs and preferences of each individual patient, and it should be possible to make incremental adaptations at later points in time if this is necessary due to, for example, a changing health condition. The architectural challenges and solution directions related to this has been discussed in this paper

Self-Adaptive Communication for Collaborative Mobile Entities in ERCMS

International audienceAdaptation of communication is required for maintaining the connectivity and the quality of communication in group-wide collaborative activities. This becomes challenging to handle when considering mobile entities in a wireless environment, requiring responsiveness and availability of the communication system. We address these challenges in the context of the ROSACE project where mobile ground and flying robots have to collaborate with each other and with remote human and artificial actors to save and rescue in case of disasters such as forest fires. This paper aims to expose a communication component architecture allowing to manage a cooperative adaptation which is aware of the activity and resource context into pervasive environment. This allows to provide the appropriate adaptation of the activity in response to evolutions of the activity requirements and the changes in relation with the communication resource constraints. In this paper, we present a simulation of a ROSACE use case. The results show how ROSACE entities collaborate to maintain the connectivity and to enhance the quality of communications

Towards Self-evolving Context-aware Services

The introduction of new communication infrastructures such as Beyond 3rd Generation (B3G) and the widespread usage of small computing devices are rapidly changing the way we use and interact with technology to perform everyday tasks. Ubiquitous networking empowered by B3G networking makes it possible for mobile users to access networked software services across continuously changing heterogeneous infrastructures by resource-constrained devices. Heterogeneity and devices' limitedness, create serious problems for the development and dynamic deployment of mobile applications that are able to run properly on the execution context and consume services matching with the users' expectations. Furthermore, the everchanging B3G environment calls for applications that self-evolve according to context changes. Out of these problems, self-evolving adaptable applications are increasingly emerging in the software community. In this paper we describe how CHAMELEON, a declarative framework for tailoring adaptable applications, is being used for tackling adaptation and self-evolution within the IST PLASTIC project

Academic Panel: Can Self-Managed Systems be trusted?

Trust can be defined as to have confidence or faith in; a form of reliance or certainty based on past experience; to allow without fear; believe; hope: expect and wish; and extend credit to. The issue of trust in computing has always been a hot topic, especially notable with the proliferation of services over the Internet, which has brought the issue of trust and security right into the ordinary home. Autonomic computing brings its own complexity to this. With systems that self-manage, the internal decision making process is less transparent and the ‘intelligence’ possibly evolving and becoming less tractable. Such systems may be used from anything from environment monitoring to looking after Granny in the home and thus the issue of trust is imperative. To this end, we have organised this panel to examine some of the key aspects of trust. The first section discusses the issues of self-management when applied across organizational boundaries. The second section explores predictability in self-managed systems. The third part examines how trust is manifest in electronic service communities. The final discussion demonstrates how trust can be integrated into an autonomic system as the core intelligence with which to base adaptivity choices upon