GALLAG Strip: A Mobile, Programming With Demonstration Environment for Sensor-Based Context-Aware Application Programming

abstract: The Game As Life - Life As Game (GALLAG) project investigates how people might change their lives if they think of and/or experience their life as a game. The GALLAG system aims to help people reach their personal goals through the use of context-aware computing, and tailored games and applications. To accomplish this, the GALLAG system uses a combination of sensing technologies, remote audio/video feedback, mobile devices and an application programming interface (API) to empower users to create their own context-aware applications. However, the API requires programming through source code, a task that is too complicated and abstract for many users. This thesis presents GALLAG Strip, a novel approach to programming sensor-based context-aware applications that combines the Programming With Demonstration technique and a mobile device to enable users to experience their applications as they program them. GALLAG Strip lets users create sensor-based context-aware applications in an intuitive and appealing way without the need of computer programming skills; instead, they program their applications by physically demonstrating their envisioned interactions within a space using the same interface that they will later use to interact with the system, that is, using GALLAG-compatible sensors and mobile devices. GALLAG Strip was evaluated through a study with end users in a real world setting, measuring their ability to program simple and complex applications accurately and in a timely manner. The evaluation also comprises a benchmark with expert GALLAG system programmers in creating the same applications. Data and feedback collected from the study show that GALLAG Strip successfully allows users to create sensor-based context-aware applications easily and accurately without the need of prior programming skills currently required by the GALLAG system and enables them to create almost all of their envisioned applications.Dissertation/ThesisM.S. Computer Science 201

Bringing Context-Awareness to Applications in Ad Hoc Mobile Networks

Context-aware mobile applications require constant adapta-tion to their changing environments. Technological advancements have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, cellular phones, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information necessary for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires a middleware infrastructure for sensing, collect-ing, and providing context information to applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of providing such a middleware that allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract specifications of context in settings that exhibit high levels of mobility and transient interactions with opportunis-tically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions the middleware provides and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using our middleware. Finally, we provide examples demonstrating the flexibility of the infrastructure and its abil-ity to support differing tasks from a wide variety of application domains

A Software Engineering Perspective on Context-Awareness in Ad Hoc Mobile Environments

Context-aware mobile applications require constant adaptation to their changing environments. Technological advancements have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, cellular phones, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information necessary for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires an infrastructure for sensing, collecting, and providing context information to applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of providing such an infrastructure. It allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract specifications of context in settings that exhibit high levels of mobility and transient interactions with opportunistically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions we implemented and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using our middleware. Finally, we provide examples that demonstrate the flexibility of the infrastructure and its ability to support a variety of applications

Context-oriented functional programming

The modern computing landscape, featuring heterogeneous interconnected mobile devices, poses new challenges and opportunities for application development. Mobility and heterogeneity of devices imply that applications need to adapt depending on their execution context. Contexts such as the device that an application is running on, or the power profile, may require widespread program-wide adaptation. Dealing with this adaptation can lead to the introduction of subtle bugs, and subsequent runtime errors, such as null pointer exceptions when context has not been initialized. Current approaches to encoding context-aware behaviour are either very flexible but unsafe, or safe but too restrictive. In this thesis we present a new approach to context-aware application development based on functional programming, which attempts to be both flexible and safe. In order to do so, we present an embedded domain specific language in Haskell, where we explore the design space of context-dependent values within a functional programming language. In particular, we explore how to use Haskell's type system to automatically derive the context dependencies needed by a computation at the type level, and use this to ensure that required context is always available. We then develop context-dependent types to ensure safety in the presence of program-wide variation. By using different return types for different modes of operation of the program when appropriate, we can ensure isolation between them through type checking. We extend our domain specific language to support context-dependent types, whilst retaining type soundness, as well as sound and (we conjecture) complete type inference. We present a core calculus for these features and a high-level language that extends the calculus with practical programming features. Evaluation is performed by examining a context-aware application requiring exactly the kind of adaptation that is unsafe to implement in current approaches. We show that our language compares favourably to the state of the art in terms of both safety and code clarity.Open Acces

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

The 3DMA Middleware for Mobile Applications

Mobile devices have received much research interest in re- cent years. Mobility raises new issues such as more dynamic context, limited computing resources, and frequent disconnections. To handle these issues, we propose a middleware, called 3DMA, which introduces three requirements, 1) distribution, 2) decoupling and 3) decomposition. 3DMA uses a space based middleware approach combined with a set of workers which are able to act on the users behalf either to reduce load on the mobile device, or to support disconnected behavior. In order to demonstrate aspects of the middleware architecture we consider the development of a commonly used mobile application

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201