Sensory semantic user interfaces (SenSUI)

Rapid evolution of the World Wide Web with its underlying sources of data, knowledge, services and applications continually attempts to support a variety of users, with different backgrounds, requirements and capabilities. In such an environment, it is highly unlikely that a single user interface will prevail and be able to fulfill the requirements of each user adequately. Adaptive user interfaces are able to adapt information and application functionalities to the user context. In contrast, pervasive computing and sensor networks open new opportunities for context aware platforms, one that is able to improve user interface adaptation reacting to environmental and user sensors. Semantic web technologies and ontologies are able to capture sensor data and provide contextual information about the user, their actions, required applications and environment. This paper investigates the viability of an approach where semantic web technologies are used to maximize the efficacy of interface adaptation through the use of available ontology

Wireless Communication Protocols for Distributed Computing Environments

The distributed computing is an approach relying on the presence of multiple devices that can interact among them in order to perform a pervasive and parallel computing. This chapter deals with the communication protocol aiming to be used in a distributed computing scenario; in particular the considered computing infrastructure is composed by elements (nodes) able to consider specific application requests for the implementation of a service in a distributed manner according to the pervasive grid computing principle (Priol & Vanneschi, 2008; Vanneschi & Veraldi, 2007). In the classical grid computing paradigm, the processing nodes are high performance computers or multicore workstations, usually organized in clusters and interconnected through broadband wired communication networks with small delay (e.g., fiber optic, DSL lines). The pervasive grid computing paradigm overcomes these limitations allowing the development of distributed applications that can perform parallel computations using heterogeneous devices interconnected by different types of communication technologies. In this way, we can resort to a computing environment composed by fixed ormobile devices (e.g., smartphones, PDAs, laptops) interconnected through broadband wireless or wired networks where the devices are able to take part to a grid computing process. Suitable techniques for the pervasive grid computing should be able to discover and organize heterogeneous resources, to allow scaling an application according to the computing power, and to guarantee specific QoS profiles (Darby III & Tzeng, 2010; Roy & Das, 2009). In particular, aim of this chapter is to present the most important challenges for the communication point of view when forming a distributed network for performing parallel and distributed computing. The focus will be mainly on the resource discovery and computation scheduling on wireless not infrastructured networks by considering their capabilities in terms of reliability and adaptation when facing with heterogeneous computing requests

Towards formal modelling and verification of pervasive computing systems

Smart systems equipped with emerging pervasive computing technologies enable people with limitations to live in their homes independently. However, lack of guarantees for correctness prevent such system to be widely used. Analysing the system with regard to correctness requirements is a challenging task due to the complexity of the system and its various unpredictable faults. In this work, we propose to use formal methods to analyse pervasive computing (PvC) systems. Firstly, a formal modelling framework is proposed to cover the main characteristics of such systems (e.g., context-awareness, concurrent communications, layered architectures). Secondly, we identify the safety requirements (e.g., free of deadlocks and conflicts) and specify them as safety and liveness properties. Furthermore, based on the modelling framework, we propose an approach of verifying reasoning rules which are used in the middleware for perceiving the environment and making adaptation decisions. Finally, we demonstrate our ideas using a case study of a smart healthcare system. Experimental results show the usefulness of our approach in exploring system behaviours and revealing system design flaws such as information inconsistency and conflicting reminder services.No Full Tex

A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments

The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments

Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach

Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform

System Support for Managing Invalid Bindings

Context-aware adaptation is a central aspect of pervasive computing applications, enabling them to adapt and perform tasks based on contextual information. One of the aspects of context-aware adaptation is reconfiguration in which bindings are created between application component and remote services in order to realize new behaviour in response to contextual information. Various research efforts provide reconfiguration support and allow the development of adaptive context-aware applications from high-level specifications, but don't consider failure conditions that might arise during execution of such applications, making bindings between application and remote services invalid. To this end, we propose and implement our design approach to reconfiguration to manage invalid bindings. The development and modification of adaptive context-aware applications is a complex task, and an issue of an invalidity of bindings further complicates development efforts. To reduce the development efforts, our approach provides an application-transparent solution where the issue of the invalidity of bindings is handled by our system, Policy-Based Contextual Reconfiguration and Adaptation (PCRA), not by an application developer. In this paper, we present and describe our approach to managing invalid bindings and compare it with other approaches to this problem. We also provide performance evaluation of our approach