The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

A personal distributed environment for future mobile systems

A Personal Distributed Environment (PDE) embraces a user-centric view of communications that take place against a backdrop of multiple user devices, each with its distinct capabilities, in physically separate locations. This paper provides an overview of a Personal Distributed Environment and some of the research issues related to the implementation of the PDE concept that are being considered in the current Mobile VCE work programme

Adding Policy-based Control to Mobile Hosts Switching between Streaming Proxies

We add a simple policy-based control component to mobile hosts that enables them to control the continuous reception of live multimedia content (e.g. a TV broadcast) while they switch between different distributors of that content. Policy-based control provides a flexible means to automate the switching behavior of mobile hosts. The policies react to changes in the mobile host's environment (e.g. when a hotspot network appears) and determine when and how to invoke an earlier developed application-level protocol to discover the capabilities (e.g. supported encodings) of the content distributors and to execute the switches. The design of the control component is based on the IETF policy model, but extended and applied at the application-level instead of at the network-level. We implemented the system and deployed it in a small-scale test bed

Fog-enabled Edge Learning for Cognitive Content-Centric Networking in 5G

By caching content at network edges close to the users, the content-centric networking (CCN) has been considered to enforce efficient content retrieval and distribution in the fifth generation (5G) networks. Due to the volume, velocity, and variety of data generated by various 5G users, an urgent and strategic issue is how to elevate the cognitive ability of the CCN to realize context-awareness, timely response, and traffic offloading for 5G applications. In this article, we envision that the fundamental work of designing a cognitive CCN (C-CCN) for the upcoming 5G is exploiting the fog computing to associatively learn and control the states of edge devices (such as phones, vehicles, and base stations) and in-network resources (computing, networking, and caching). Moreover, we propose a fog-enabled edge learning (FEL) framework for C-CCN in 5G, which can aggregate the idle computing resources of the neighbouring edge devices into virtual fogs to afford the heavy delay-sensitive learning tasks. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to jointly processing sensed environmental data, dealing with the massive content statistics, and enforcing the mobility control at network edges, the FEL makes it possible for mobile users to cognitively share their data over the C-CCN in 5G. To validate the feasibility of proposed framework, we design two FEL-advanced cognitive services for C-CCN in 5G: 1) personalized network acceleration, 2) enhanced mobility management. Simultaneously, we present the simulations to show the FEL's efficiency on serving for the mobile users' delay-sensitive content retrieval and distribution in 5G.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magzine, under review, Feb. 09, 201

Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts

INTRODUCTION There is a growing body of accepted author manuscripts (AAMs) in national, professional, and institutional repositories. This study seeks to explore librarian attitudes about AAMs and in what contexts they should be recommended. Particular attention is paid to differences between the attitudes of librarians whose primary job responsibilities are within the field of scholarly communications as opposed to the rest of the profession. METHODS An Internet survey was sent to nine different professional listservs, asking for voluntary anonymous participation. RESULTS This study finds that AAMs are considered an acceptable source by many librarians, with scholarly communications librarians more willing to recommend AAMs in higher-stakes contexts such as health care and dissertation research. DISCUSSION Librarian AAM attitudes are discussed, with suggestions for future research and implications for librarians