Initial CONNECT Architecture

Interoperability remains a fundamental challenge when connecting heterogeneous systems which encounter and spontaneously communicate with one another in pervasive computing environments. This challenge is exasperated by the highly heterogeneous technologies employed by each of the interacting parties, i.e., in terms of hardware, operating system, middleware protocols, and application protocols. The key aim of the CONNECT project is to drop this heterogeneity barrier and achieve universal interoperability. Here we report on the development of the overall CONNECT architecture that will underpin this solution; in this respect, we present the following contributions: i) an elicitation of interoperability requirements from a set of pervasive computing scenarios, ii) a survey of existing solutions to interoperability, iii) an initial view of the CONNECT architecture, and iv) a series of experiments to provide initial validation of the architecture

Design-time formal verification for smart environments: an exploratory perspective

Smart environments (SmE) are richly integrated with multiple heterogeneous devices; they perform the operations in intelligent manner by considering the context and actions/behaviors of the users. Their major objective is to enable the environment to provide ease and comfort to the users. The reliance on these systems demands consistent behavior. The versatility of devices, user behavior and intricacy of communication complicate the modeling and verification of SmE's reliable behavior. Of the many available modeling and verification techniques, formal methods appear to be the most promising. Due to a large variety of implementation scenarios and support for conditional behavior/processing, the concept of SmE is applicable to diverse areas which calls for focused research. As a result, a number of modeling and verification techniques have been made available for designers. This paper explores and puts into perspective the modeling and verification techniques based on an extended literature survey. These techniques mainly focus on some specific aspects, with a few overlapping scenarios (such as user interaction, devices interaction and control, context awareness, etc.), which were of the interest to the researchers based on their specialized competencies. The techniques are categorized on the basis of various factors and formalisms considered for the modeling and verification and later analyzed. The results show that no surveyed technique maintains a holistic perspective; each technique is used for the modeling and verification of specific SmE aspects. The results further help the designers select appropriate modeling and verification techniques under given requirements and stress for more R&D effort into SmE modeling and verification researc

Design Time Methodology for the Formal Modeling and Verification of Smart Environments

Smart Environments (SmE) are intelligent and complex due to smart connectivity and interaction of heterogeneous devices achieved by complicated and sophisticated computing algorithms. Based on their domotic and industrial applications, SmE system may be critical in terms of correctness, reliability, safety, security and other such vital factors. To achieve error-free and requirement-compliant implementation of these systems, it is advisable to enforce a design process that may guarantee these factors by adopting formal models and formal verification techniques at design time. The e-Lite research group at Politecnico di Torino is developing solutions for SmE based on integration of commercially available home automation technologies with an intelligent ecosystem based on a central OSGi-based gateway, and distributed collaboration of intelligent applications, with the help of semantic web technologies and applications. The main goal of my research is to study new methodologies which are used for the modeling and verification of SmE. This goal includes the development of a formal methodology which ensures the reliable implementation of the requirements on SmE, by modeling and verifying each component (users, devices, control algorithms and environment/context) and the interaction among them, especially at various stages in design time, so that all the complexities and ambiguities can be reduced

Modal logics are coalgebraic

Applications of modal logics are abundant in computer science, and a large number of structurally different modal logics have been successfully employed in a diverse spectrum of application contexts. Coalgebraic semantics, on the other hand, provides a uniform and encompassing view on the large variety of specific logics used in particular domains. The coalgebraic approach is generic and compositional: tools and techniques simultaneously apply to a large class of application areas and can moreover be combined in a modular way. In particular, this facilitates a pick-and-choose approach to domain specific formalisms, applicable across the entire scope of application areas, leading to generic software tools that are easier to design, to implement, and to maintain. This paper substantiates the authors' firm belief that the systematic exploitation of the coalgebraic nature of modal logic will not only have impact on the field of modal logic itself but also lead to significant progress in a number of areas within computer science, such as knowledge representation and concurrency/mobility

An introduction to Graph Data Management

A graph database is a database where the data structures for the schema and/or instances are modeled as a (labeled)(directed) graph or generalizations of it, and where querying is expressed by graph-oriented operations and type constructors. In this article we present the basic notions of graph databases, give an historical overview of its main development, and study the main current systems that implement them

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Dynamic deployment of context-aware access control policies for constrained security devices

Securing the access to a server, guaranteeing a certain level of protection over an encrypted communication channel, executing particular counter measures when attacks are detected are examples of security requirements. Such requirements are identi ed based on organizational purposes and expectations in terms of resource access and availability and also on system vulnerabilities and threats. All these requirements belong to the so-called security policy. Deploying the policy means enforcing, i.e., con guring, those security components and mechanisms so that the system behavior be nally the one speci ed by the policy. The deployment issue becomes more di cult as the growing organizational requirements and expectations generally leave behind the integration of new security functionalities in the information system: the information system will not always embed the necessary security functionalities for the proper deployment of contextual security requirements. To overcome this issue, our solution is based on a central entity approach which takes in charge unmanaged contextual requirements and dynamically redeploys the policy when context changes are detected by this central entity. We also present an improvement over the OrBAC (Organization-Based Access Control) model. Up to now, a controller based on a contextual OrBAC policy is passive, in the sense that it assumes policy evaluation triggered by access requests. Therefore, it does not allow reasoning about policy state evolution when actions occur. The modi cations introduced by our work overcome this limitation and provide a proactive version of the model by integrating concepts from action speci cation languages

Intelligent Systems

This book is dedicated to intelligent systems of broad-spectrum application, such as personal and social biosafety or use of intelligent sensory micro-nanosystems such as "e-nose", "e-tongue" and "e-eye". In addition to that, effective acquiring information, knowledge management and improved knowledge transfer in any media, as well as modeling its information content using meta-and hyper heuristics and semantic reasoning all benefit from the systems covered in this book. Intelligent systems can also be applied in education and generating the intelligent distributed eLearning architecture, as well as in a large number of technical fields, such as industrial design, manufacturing and utilization, e.g., in precision agriculture, cartography, electric power distribution systems, intelligent building management systems, drilling operations etc. Furthermore, decision making using fuzzy logic models, computational recognition of comprehension uncertainty and the joint synthesis of goals and means of intelligent behavior biosystems, as well as diagnostic and human support in the healthcare environment have also been made easier

Dagstuhl News January - December 2007

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential