Ubiquitous intelligent object : modeling and applications

2007-2008 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Benefits & drawbacks of different means of interaction for placing objects above a video footage

Public Display Systems (PDS) increasingly have a greater presence in our cities. These systems provide information and advertising specifically tailored to audiences in spaces such as airports, train stations, and shopping centers. A large number of public displays are also being deployed for entertainment reasons. Sometimes designing and prototyping PDS come to be a laborious, complex and a costly task. This dissertation focuses on the design and evaluation of PDS at early development phases with the aim of facilitating low-effort, rapid design and the evaluation of interactive PDS. This study focuses on the IPED Toolkit. This tool proposes the design, prototype, and evaluation of public display systems, replicating real-world scenes in the lab. This research aims at identifying benefits and drawbacks on the use of different means to place overlays/virtual displays above a panoramic video footage, recorded at real-world locations. The means of interaction studied in this work are on the one hand the keyboard and mouse, and on the other hand the tablet with two different techniques of use. To carry out this study, an android application has been developed whose function is to allow users to interact with the IPED Toolkit using the tablet. Additionally, the toolkit has been modified and adapted to tablets by using different web technologies. Finally the users study makes a comparison about the different means of interaction

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home

Semantic interoperability in ad-hoc computing environments

This thesis introduces a novel approach in which multiple heterogeneous devices collaborate to provide useful applications in an ad-hoc network. This thesis proposes a smart home as a particular ubiquitous computing scenario considering all the requirements given by the literature for succeed in this kind of systems. To that end, we envision a horizontally integrated smart home built up from independent components that provide services. These components are described with enough syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge to accomplish spontaneous collaboration. The objective of these collaboration is domestic use, that is, the provision of valuable services for home residents capable of supporting users in their daily activities. Moreover, for the system to be attractive for potential customers, it should offer high levels of trust and reliability, all of them not at an excessive price. To achieve this goal, this thesis proposes to study the synergies available when an ontological description of home device functionality is paired with a formal method. We propose an ad-hoc home network in which components are home devices modelled as processes represented as semantic services by means of the Web Service Ontology (OWL-S). In addition, such services are specified, verified and implemented by means of the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), a process algebra for describing concurrent systems. The utilisation of an ontology brings the desired levels of knowledge for a system to compose services in a ad-hoc environment. Services are composed by a goal based system in order to satisfy user needs. Such system is capable of understaning, both service representations and user context information. Furthermore, the inclusion of a formal method contributes with additional semantics to check that such compositions will be correctly implemented and executed, achieving the levels of reliability and costs reduction (costs derived form the design, development and implementation of the system) needed for a smart home to succeed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Investigating communicating sequential processes for Java to support ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous Computing promises to enrich our everyday lives by enabling the environment to be enhanced via computational elements. These elements are designed to augment and support our lives, thus allowing us to perform our tasks and goals. The main facet of Ubiquitous Computing is that computational devices are embedded in the environment, and interact with users and themselves to provide novel and unique applications. Ubiquitous Computing requires an underlying architecture that helps to promote and control the dynamic properties and structures that the applications require. In this thesis, the Networking package of Communicating Sequential Processes for Java (JCSP) is examined to analyse its suitability as the underlying architecture for Ubiquitous Computing. The reason to use JCSP Networking as a case study is that one of the proposed models for Ubiquitous Computing, the ?-Calculus, has the potential to have its abstractions implemented within JCSP Networking. This thesis examines some of the underlying properties of JCSP Networking and examines them within the context of Ubiquitous Computing. There is also an examination into the possibility of implementing the mobility constructs of the ?-Calculus and similar mobility models within JCSP Networking. It has been found that some of the inherent properties of Java and JCSP Networking do cause limitations, and hence a generalisation of the architecture has been made that should provide greater suitability of the ideas behind JCSP Networking to support Ubiquitous Computing. The generalisation has resulted in the creation of a verified communication protocol that can be applied to any Communicating Process Architecture

Developing ubiquitous computing applications

In this paper the development of ubiquitous computing applications is investigated, from initial micro-controller based prototypes to application specific FPGA based systems. The aim of this work is to add additional capabilities to everyday objects, allowing them to sense their environment and interact with the people and objects within it, to enhance their existing functionality. To achieve this we have developed a micro-controller based, ubiquitous computing development kit (UcDK), allowing researchers to rapidly construct and evaluate different ubiquitous computing applications. In addition to this, we are developing component technologies for future pervasive computing environments. This has lead to the construction of an application specific processor and other IP cores to meet these needs