10,045 research outputs found
SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators
Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users'
productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology
is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To
lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand
and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud
applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This
work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core
research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator
devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges
include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social
dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When
these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the
attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be
increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department
of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit
Conversational Sensing
Recent developments in sensing technologies, mobile devices and context-aware
user interfaces have made it possible to represent information fusion and
situational awareness as a conversational process among actors - human and
machine agents - at or near the tactical edges of a network. Motivated by use
cases in the domain of security, policing and emergency response, this paper
presents an approach to information collection, fusion and sense-making based
on the use of natural language (NL) and controlled natural language (CNL) to
support richer forms of human-machine interaction. The approach uses a
conversational protocol to facilitate a flow of collaborative messages from NL
to CNL and back again in support of interactions such as: turning eyewitness
reports from human observers into actionable information (from both trained and
untrained sources); fusing information from humans and physical sensors (with
associated quality metadata); and assisting human analysts to make the best use
of available sensing assets in an area of interest (governed by management and
security policies). CNL is used as a common formal knowledge representation for
both machine and human agents to support reasoning, semantic information fusion
and generation of rationale for inferences, in ways that remain transparent to
human users. Examples are provided of various alternative styles for user
feedback, including NL, CNL and graphical feedback. A pilot experiment with
human subjects shows that a prototype conversational agent is able to gather
usable CNL information from untrained human subjects
Design of Ad Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks Formed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Advanced Mechanical Automation
Ad hoc wireless mesh networks formed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
equipped with wireless transceivers (access points (APs)) are increasingly
being touted as being able to provide a flexible "on-the-fly" communications
infrastructure that can collect and transmit sensor data from sensors in
remote, wilderness, or disaster-hit areas. Recent advances in the mechanical
automation of UAVs have resulted in separable APs and replaceable batteries
that can be carried by UAVs and placed at arbitrary locations in the field.
These advanced mechanized UAV mesh networks pose interesting questions in terms
of the design of the network architecture and the optimal UAV scheduling
algorithms. This paper studies a range of network architectures that depend on
the mechanized automation (AP separation and battery replacement) capabilities
of UAVs and proposes heuristic UAV scheduling algorithms for each network
architecture, which are benchmarked against optimal designs.Comment: 12 page
A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications
Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are
two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid
building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have
proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing
an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address
this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows
applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The
CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies
the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application
in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require
values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the
running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution
time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any
modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is
automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of
the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process
with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation
of our framework
Managing nonuniformities and uncertainties in vehicle-oriented sensor data over next generation networks
Detailed and accurate vehicle-oriented sensor data is considered fundamental for efficient vehicle-to-everything V2X communication applications, especially in the upcoming highly heterogeneous, brisk and agile 5G networking era. Information retrieval, transfer and manipulation in real-time offers a small margin for erratic behavior, regardless of its root cause. This paper presents a method for managing nonuniformities and uncertainties found on datasets, based on an elaborate Matrix Completion technique, with superior performance in three distinct cases of vehicle-related sensor data, collected under real driving conditions. Our approach appears capable of handling sensing and communication irregularities, minimizing at the same time the storage and transmission requirements of Multi-access Edge Computing applications
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