Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

The Digital Agricultural Revolution: a Bibliometric Analysis Literature Review

The application of digital technologies in agriculture can improve traditional practices to adapt to climate change, reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions, and promote a sustainable intensification for food security. Some authors argued that we are experiencing a Digital Agricultural Revolution (DAR) that will boost sustainable farming. This study aims to find evidence of the ongoing DAR process and clarify its roots, what it means, and where it is heading. We investigated the scientific literature with bibliometric analysis tools to produce an objective and reproducible literature review. We retrieved 4995 articles by querying the Web of Science database in the timespan 2012-2019, and we analyzed the obtained dataset to answer three specific research questions: i) what is the spectrum of the DAR-related terminology?; ii) what are the key articles and the most influential journals, institutions, and countries?; iii) what are the main research streams and the emerging topics? By grouping the authors' keywords reported on publications, we identified five main research streams: Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), Site-Specific Management (SSM), Remote Sensing (RS), Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). To provide a broad overview of each of these topics, we analyzed relevant review articles, and we present here the main achievements and the ongoing challenges. Finally, we showed the trending topics of the last three years (2017, 2018, 2019)

Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising is emerging as a promising advertising strategy, which leverages prescriptive analytics, location-based distribution, and feedback-driven marketing to engage consumers with timely and targeted advertisements. In the current mobile advertising system, a third-party ad broker collects and manages advertisements for merchants who would like to promote their business to mobile users. Based on its large-scale database of user profiles, the ad broker can help the merchants to better reach out to customers with related interests and charges the merchants for ad dissemination services. Recently, mobile advertising technology has dominated the digital advertising industry and has become the main source of income for IT giants. However, there are many security and privacy challenges that may hinder the continuous success of the mobile advertising industry. First, there is a lack of advertising transparency in the current mobile advertising system. For example, mobile users are concerned about the reliability and trustworthiness of the ad dissemination process and advertising review system. Without proper countermeasures, mobile users can install ad-blocking software to filter out irrelevant or even misleading advertisements, which may lower the advertising investments from merchants. Second, as more strict privacy regulations (e.g. European General Data Privacy Regulations) take effect, it is critical to protect mobile users’ personal profiles from illegal sharing and exposure in the mobile advertising system. In this thesis, three security and privacy challenges for the mobile advertising system are identified and addressed with the designs, implementations, and evaluations of a blockchain-based architecture. First, we study the anonymous review system for the mobile advertising industry. When receiving advertisements from a specific merchant (e.g. a nearby restaurant), mobile users are more likely to browse the previous reviews about the merchant for quality-of-service assessments. However, current review systems are known for the lack of system transparency and are subject to many attacks, such as double reviews and deletions of negative reviews. We exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology, to design a blockchain-based review system for mobile advertising, where review accumulations are transparent and verifiable to the public. To preserve user review privacy, we further design an anonymous review token generation scheme, where users are encouraged to leave reviews anonymously while still ensuring the review authenticity. We also explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based system on an Ethereum testing network and the experimental results demonstrate the application feasibility of the proposed anonymous review system. Second, we investigate the transparency issues for the targeted ad dissemination process. Specifically, we focus on a specific mobile advertising application: vehicular local advertising, where vehicular users send spatial-keyword queries to ad brokers to receive location-aware advertisements. To build a transparent advertising system, the ad brokers are required to provide mobile users with explanations on the ad dissemination process, e.g., why a specific ad is disseminated to a mobile user. However, such transparency explanations are often found incomplete and sometimes even misleading, which may lower the user trust on the advertising system if without proper countermeasures. Therefore, we design an advertising smart contract to efficiently realize a publicly verifiable spatial-keyword query scheme. Instead of directly implementing the spatial-keyword query scheme on the smart contract with prohibitive storage and computation cost, we exploit the on/off-chain computation models to trade the expensive on-chain cost for cheap off-chain cost. With two design strategies: digest-and-verify and divide-then-assemble, the on-chain cost for a single spatial keyword query is reduced to constant regardless of the scale of the spatial-keyword database. Extensive experiments are conducted to provide both on-chain and off-chain benchmarks with a verifiable computation framework. Third, we explore another critical requirement of the mobile advertising system: public accountability enforcement against advertising misconducts, if (1) mobile users receive irrelevant ads, or (2) advertising policies of merchants are not correctly computed in the ad dissemination process. This requires the design of a composite Succinct Non-interactive ARGument (SNARG) system, that can be tailored for different advertising transparency requirements and is efficient for the blockchain implementations. Moreover, pursuing public accountability should also achieve a strict privacy guarantee for the user profile. We also propose an accountability contract which can receive explanation requirements from both mobile users and merchants. To promote prompt on-chain responses, we design an incentive mechanism based on the pre-deposits of involved parties, i.e., ad brokers, mobile users, and merchants. If any advertising misconduct is identified, public accountability can be enforced by confiscating the pre-deposits of the misbehaving party. Comprehensive experiments and analyses are conducted to demonstrate the versatile functionalities and feasibility of the accountability contract. In summary, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated a blockchain-based architecture for security and privacy preservations in the mobile advertising. The designed architecture can not only enhance the transparency and accountability for the mobile advertising system, but has also achieved notably on-chain efficiency and privacy for real-world implementations. The results from the thesis may shed light on the future research and practice of a blockchain-based architecture for the privacy regulation compliance in the mobile advertising

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Patterns of mobility in a smart city

Transportation data in smart cities is becoming increasingly available. This data allows building meaningful, intelligent solutions for city residents and city management authorities, the so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our research focused on Lisbon mobility data, provided by Lisbon municipality. The main research objective was to address mobility problems, interdependence, and cascading effects solutions for the city of Lisbon. We developed a data-driven approach based on historical data with a strong focus on visualization methods and dashboard creation. Also, we applied a method based on time series to do prediction based on the traffic congestion data provided. A CRISP-DM approach was applied, integrating different data sources, using Python. Hence, understand traffic patterns, and help the city authorities in the decision-making process, namely more preparedness, adaptability, responsiveness to events.Os dados de transporte, no âmbito das cidades inteligentes, estão cada vez mais disponíveis. Estes dados permitem a construção de soluções inteligentes com impacto significativo na vida dos residentes e nos mecanismos das autoridades de gestão da cidade, os chamados Sistemas de Transporte Inteligentes. A nossa investigação incidiu sobre os dados de mobilidade urbana da cidade de Lisboa, disponibilizados pelo município. O principal objetivo da pesquisa foi abordar os problemas de mobilidade, interdependência e soluções de efeitos em cascata para a cidade de Lisboa. Para alcançar este objetivo foi desenvolvida uma metodologia baseada nos dados históricos do transito no centro urbano da cidade e principais acessos, com uma forte componente de visualização. Foi também aplicado um método baseado em series temporais para fazer a previsão das ocorrências de transito na cidade de Lisboa. Foi aplicada uma abordagem CRISP-DM, integrando diferentes fontes de dados, utilizando Python. Esta tese tem como objetivo identificar padrões de mobilidade urbana com análise e visualização de dados, de forma a auxiliar as autoridades municipais no processo de tomada de decisão, nomeadamente estar mais preparada, adaptada e responsiva

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

AI-enabled privacy-preservation phrase with multi-keyword ranked searching for sustainable edge-cloud networks in the era of industrial IoT

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