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

A personal networking solution

This paper presents an overview of research being conducted on Personal Networking Solutions within the Mobile VCE Personal Distributed Environment Work Area. In particular it attempts to highlight areas of commonality with the MAGNET initiative. These areas include trust of foreign devices and service providers, dynamic real-time service negotiation to permit context-aware service delivery, an automated controller algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks, and routing protocols for ad hoc networking environments. Where possible references are provided to Mobile VCE publications to enable further reading

Device-Centric Monitoring for Mobile Device Management

The ubiquity of computing devices has led to an increased need to ensure not only that the applications deployed on them are correct with respect to their specifications, but also that the devices are used in an appropriate manner, especially in situations where the device is provided by a party other than the actual user. Much work which has been done on runtime verification for mobile devices and operating systems is mostly application-centric, resulting in global, device-centric properties (e.g. the user may not send more than 100 messages per day across all applications) being difficult or impossible to verify. In this paper we present a device-centric approach to runtime verify the device behaviour against a device policy with the different applications acting as independent components contributing to the overall behaviour of the device. We also present an implementation for Android devices, and evaluate it on a number of device-centric policies, reporting the empirical results obtained.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2016, arXiv:1603.0837

Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API

The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of location information on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive information, it also raises serious privacy concerns. We analyze the manner and extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides mechanisms to support privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the specification and its use in the wild, and recommend some modifications to the API as a result of our analysis

Run-time Support to Manage Architectural Variability Speci ed with CVL

The execution context in which pervasive systems or mobile computing run changes continuously. Hence, applications for these systems should be adapted at run-time according to the current context. In order to implement a context-aware dynamic reconfiguration service, most approaches usually require to model at design-time both the list of all possible configurations and the plans to switch among them. In this paper we present an alternative approach for the automatic run-time generation of application configurations and the reconfiguration plans. The generated configurations are optimal regarding di erent criteria, such as functionality or resource consumption (e.g. battery or memory). This is achieved by: (1) modelling architectural variability at design-time using Common Variability Language (CVL), and (2) using a genetic algorithm that finds at run-time nearly-optimal configurations using the information provided by the variability model. We also specify a case study and we use it to evaluate our approach, showing that it is efficient and suitable for devices with scarce resources.Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucia Tech y proyectos de investigación TIN2008-01942, P09-TIC-5231 and INTER-TRUST FP7-317731

An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications