Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Performance of management solutions and cooperation approaches for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

A wide range of daily-life applications supported by vehicular networks attracted the interest, not only from the research community, but also from governments and the automotive industry. For example, they can be used to enable services that assist drivers on the roads (e.g., road safety, traffic monitoring), to spread commercial and entertainment contents (e.g., publicity), or to enable communications on remote or rural regions where it is not possible to have a common network infrastructure. Nonetheless, the unique properties of vehicular networks raise several challenges that greatly impact the deployment of these networks. Most of the challenges faced by vehicular networks arise from the highly dynamic network topology, which leads to short and sporadic contact opportunities, disruption, variable node density, and intermittent connectivity. This situation makes data dissemination an interesting research topic within the vehicular networking area, which is addressed by this study. The work described along this thesis is motivated by the need to propose new solutions to deal with data dissemination problems in vehicular networking focusing on vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs). To guarantee the success of data dissemination in vehicular networks scenarios it is important to ensure that network nodes cooperate with each other. However, it is not possible to ensure a fully cooperative scenario. This situation makes vehicular networks suitable to the presence of selfish and misbehavior nodes, which may result in a significant decrease of the overall network performance. Thus, cooperative nodes may suffer from the overwhelming load of services from other nodes, which comprises their performance. Trying to solve some of these problems, this thesis presents several proposals and studies on the impact of cooperation, monitoring, and management strategies on the network performance of the VDTN architecture. The main goal of these proposals is to enhance the network performance. In particular, cooperation and management approaches are exploited to improve and optimize the use of network resources. It is demonstrated the performance gains attainable in a VDTN through both types of approaches, not only in terms of bundle delivery probability, but also in terms of wasted resources. The results and achievements observed on this research work are intended to contribute to the advance of the state-of-the-art on methods and strategies for overcome the challenges that arise from the unique characteristics and conceptual design of vehicular networks.O vasto número de aplicações e cenários suportados pelas redes veiculares faz com que estas atraiam o interesse não só da comunidade científica, mas também dos governos e da indústria automóvel. A título de exemplo, estas podem ser usadas para a implementação de serviços e aplicações que podem ajudar os condutores dos veículos a tomar decisões nas estradas, para a disseminação de conteúdos publicitários, ou ainda, para permitir que existam comunicações em zonas rurais ou remotas onde não é possível ter uma infraestrutura de rede convencional. Contudo, as propriedades únicas das redes veiculares fazem com que seja necessário ultrapassar um conjunto de desafios que têm grande impacto na sua aplicabilidade. A maioria dos desafios que as redes veiculares enfrentam advêm da grande mobilidade dos veículos e da topologia de rede que está em constante mutação. Esta situação faz com que este tipo de rede seja suscetível de disrupção, que as oportunidades de contacto sejam escassas e de curta duração, e que a ligação seja intermitente. Fruto destas adversidades, a disseminação dos dados torna-se um tópico de investigação bastante promissor na área das redes veiculares e por esta mesma razão é abordada neste trabalho de investigação. O trabalho descrito nesta tese é motivado pela necessidade de propor novas abordagens para lidar com os problemas inerentes à disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares. Para garantir o sucesso da disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares é importante que este tipo de redes garanta a cooperação entre os nós da rede. Contudo, neste tipo de ambientes não é possível garantir um cenário totalmente cooperativo. Este cenário faz com que as redes veiculares sejam suscetíveis à presença de nós não cooperativos que comprometem seriamente o desempenho global da rede. Por outro lado, os nós cooperativos podem ver o seu desempenho comprometido por causa da sobrecarga de serviços que poderão suportar. Para tentar resolver alguns destes problemas, esta tese apresenta várias propostas e estudos sobre o impacto de estratégias de cooperação, monitorização e gestão de rede no desempenho das redes veiculares com ligações intermitentes (Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks - VDTNs). O objetivo das propostas apresentadas nesta tese é melhorar o desempenho global da rede. Em particular, as estratégias de cooperação e gestão de rede são exploradas para melhorar e optimizar o uso dos recursos da rede. Ficou demonstrado que o uso deste tipo de estratégias e metodologias contribui para um aumento significativo do desempenho da rede, não só em termos de agregados de pacotes (“bundles”) entregues, mas também na diminuição do volume de recursos desperdiçados. Os resultados observados neste trabalho procuram contribuir para o avanço do estado da arte em métodos e estratégias que visam ultrapassar alguns dos desafios que advêm das propriedades e desenho conceptual das redes veiculares

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications

Group Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensing Devices

Understanding behavior of groups in real time can help prevent tragedy in crowd emergencies. Wearable devices allow sensing of human behavior, but the infrastructure required to communicate data is often the first casualty in emergency situations. Peer-to-peer (P2P) methods for recognizing group behavior are necessary, but the behavior of the group cannot be observed at any single location. The contribution is the methods required for recognition of group behavior using only wearable devices

Accès contextuel à l'information dans un environnement mobile : approche basée sur l'utilisation d'un profil situationnel de l'utilisateur et d'un profil de localisation des requêtes

Le but fondamental de la recherche d'information (RI) contextuelle consiste à combiner des sources d'évidences issues du contexte de la requête, du contexte de l'utilisateur et de son environnement dans une même infrastructure afin de mieux caractériser les besoins en information de l'utilisateur et d'améliorer les résultats de recherche. Notre contribution porte sur la conception d'un système de RI contextuel dans un cadre mobile. Plus spécifiquement, notre contribution se décline en trois principaux points : la modélisation et construction de profil situationnel de l'utilisateur, la caractérisation de la sensibilité de la requête à la localisation de l'utilisateur, ainsi que la définition d'un cadre de combinaison de ces éléments contextuels pour calculer un score de pertinence multidimensionnelle des documents. Nous nous sommes intéressés en premier lieu à exploiter le profil situationnel de l'utilisateur dans un processus d'accès personnalisé à l'information. Le profil situationnel est composé de centres d'intérêts de l'utilisateur appris pour chaque situation de recherche. Une situation de recherche est caractérisée par une représentation sémantique de la localisation et de temps de l'utilisateur lors de sa recherche. Les centres d'intérêts sont construits en exploitant les documents jugés pertinents par l'utilisateur et une ontologie générale. Nous avons proposé d'utiliser l'approche par raisonnement à partir de cas pour sélectionner le centre d'intérêt à exploiter pour la personnalisation sur la base de la comparaison de la similarité des situations de recherche. Le centre d'intérêt sélectionné est utilisé dans le ré-ordonnancement des résultats de recherche des requêtes appartenant à une situation de recherche similaire. Nous exploitons ensuite le contexte de la requête dans un mécanisme de prédiction de la sensibilité de la requête à la localisation de l'utilisateur. Notre approche de prédiction de la sensibilité de la requête à la localisation se base sur la construction d'un modèle de langue de localisation de la requête. Ce modèle nous a servi comme source d'évidence pour calculer des caractéristiques pour la classification des requêtes selon leur sensibilité à la localisation. Nous avons également intégré notre approche de détection de la sensibilité de la la requête à la localisation dans un processus d'adaptation des résultats de recherche selon le type de la requête. En vue d'intégrer ces deux types d'adaptation dans un SRI contextuel, nous nous sommes proposés d'appliquer un modèle d'agrégation prioritaire pour la combinaison de pertinence multidimensionnelle pour la RI mobile. Ce modèle de pertinence multidimensionnelle présente la particularité d'exploiter deux opérateurs d'agrégation prioritaire permettant d'adapter les résultats de recherche selon les préférences de l'utilisateur exprimées sur les critères de pertinence. Vu qu'il n'existe pas de cadre d'évaluation standard d'accès contextuel à l'information, plus particulièrement adapté au contexte mobile, nous avons proposé des cadres d'évaluation orientés-contexte basés sur des approches par "simulation de contexte" et "par étude journalière". Nous avons exploité ces cadres d'évaluation pour valider notre contribution dans le domaine. En particulier, nous avons évalué expérimentalement notre approche de personnalisation en utilisant notre profil situationnel en comparaison à un SRI standard, et avons montré que notre approche est à l'origine d'un gain de performance significatif. Nous avons validé notre approche de détection de la sensibilité de la requête à la localisation de l'utilisateur sur une collection de requêtes annotées manuellement issue du \textit{log} de recherche d'AOL, en testant plusieurs classificateurs du domaine et par comparaison à une approche de l'état de l'art, et nous avons montré son efficacité à améliorer la performance de la recherche par comparaison à un SRI standard. Nous avons également comparé notre cadre de combinaison de pertinence à une approche de combinaison linéaire standard et montré son efficacité.Contextual information retrieval aims at combining knowledge about the query context and the user context in the same framework in order to better meet the user information needs. We propose a contextual search approach integrating a query location intent prediction method and a situational user profile modelling approach in order to improve the retrieval effectiveness for mobile search. We propose an approach to personalize search results for mobile users by exploiting both cognitive and spatio temporal context of the user. We propose to model the user on three semantic dimensions : time, location and interests. A case based reasoning approach is adopted to select the appropriate user profile for re-ranking the search results. In order to identify the user intent global, local explicit and local implicit, we exploit the top N search results returned by a general Web search engine to build a location query profile using language models. Two measures namely location Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Kurtosis defined on this profile, allow us to effectively classify the three types of queries. We also propose a multidimensional ranking model based on the standard relevance dimension of topic and the contextual dimensions of interests and location to personalise search results for o mobile user. The peculiarity of our multidimensional ranking lies in a "prioritized combination" of the considered criteria, using the "prioritized scoring" and "prioritized and" operators, which allow flexible personalization of search results according to users' preferences. As there is no standard evaluation protocol for evaluating contextual access retrieval, we have proposed context-oriented evaluation protocols ranging from simulation frameworks to user studies. We have exploited these protocols to evaluate our contributions in the domain and have shown the effectiveness of our approaches

Search engines that learn from their users

More than half the world's population uses web search engines, resulting in over half a billion queries every single day. For many people, web search engines such as Baidu, Bing, Google, and Yandex are among the first resources they go to when a question arises. Moreover, for many search engines have become the most trusted route to information, more so even than traditional media such as newspapers, news websites or news channels on television. What web search engines present people with greatly influences what they believe to be true and consequently it influences their thoughts, opinions, decisions, and the actions they take. With this in mind two things are important, from an information retrieval research perspective. First, it is important to understand how well search engines (rankers) perform and secondly this knowledge should be used to improve them. This thesis is about these two topics: evaluation of search engines and learning search engines. In the first part of this thesis we investigate how user interactions with search engines can be used to evaluate search engines. In particular, we introduce a new online evaluation paradigm called multileaving that extends upon interleaving. With multileaving, many rankers can be compared at once by combining document lists from these rankers into a single result list and attributing user interactions with this list to the rankers. Then we investigate the relation between A/B testing and interleaved comparison methods. Both studies lead to much higher sensitivity of the evaluation methods, meaning that fewer user interactions are required to arrive at reliable conclusions. This has the important implication that fewer users need to be exposed to the results from possibly inferior search engines. In the second part of this thesis we turn to online learning to rank. We learn from the evaluation methods introduced and extended upon in the first part. We learn the parameters of base rankers based on user interactions. Then we use the multileaving methods as feedback in our learning method, leading to much faster convergence than existing methods. Again, the important implication is that fewer users need to be exposed to possibly inferior search engines as they adapt more quickly to changes in user preferences. The last part of this thesis is of a different nature than the earlier two parts. As opposed to the earlier chapters, we no longer study algorithms. Progress in information retrieval research has always been driven by a combination of algorithms, shared resources, and evaluation. In the last part we focus on the latter two. We introduce a new shared resource and a new evaluation paradigm. Firstly, we propose Lerot. Lerot is an online evaluation framework that allows us to simulate users interacting with a search engine. Our implementation has been released as open source software and is currently being used by researchers around the world. Secondly we introduce OpenSearch, a new evaluation paradigm involving real users of real search engines. We describe an implementation of this paradigm that has already been widely adopted by the research community through challenges at CLEF and TREC.</jats:p