Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Viewpoint | Personal Data and the Internet of Things: It is time to care about digital provenance

The Internet of Things promises a connected environment reacting to and addressing our every need, but based on the assumption that all of our movements and words can be recorded and analysed to achieve this end. Ubiquitous surveillance is also a precondition for most dystopian societies, both real and fictional. How our personal data is processed and consumed in an ever more connected world must imperatively be made transparent, and more effective technical solutions than those currently on offer, to manage personal data must urgently be investigated.Comment: 3 pages, 0 figures, preprint for Communication of the AC

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Web2Touch 2019: Semantic Technologies for Smart Information Sharing and Web Collaboration

This foreword introduces a summary of themes and papers of the Web2Touch (W2T) 2019 Track at the 28th IEEE WETICE Conference held in Capri, June 2019. W2T 2019 includes ten full papers and one short paper. They all address relevant issues in the field of information sharing for collaboration, including, big data analytics, knowledge engineering, linked open data, applications of smart Web technologies, and smart care. The papers are a portfolio of hot issues in research and applications of semantics, smart technologies (e.g., IoT, sensors, devices for tele-monitoring, and smart contents management) with crucial topics, such as big data analysis, knowledge representation, smart enterprise management, among the others. This track shows how cooperative technologies based on knowledge representation, intelligent tools, and enhanced Web engineering can enhance collaborative work through smart service design and delivery, so it contributes to radically change the role of the semantic Web and applications

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

Artificial intelligence and visual analytics in geographical space and cyberspace: Research opportunities and challenges

In recent decades, we have witnessed great advances on the Internet of Things, mobile devices, sensor-based systems, and resulting big data infrastructures, which have gradually, yet fundamentally influenced the way people interact with and in the digital and physical world. Many human activities now not only operate in geographical (physical) space but also in cyberspace. Such changes have triggered a paradigm shift in geographic information science (GIScience), as cyberspace brings new perspectives for the roles played by spatial and temporal dimensions, e.g., the dilemma of placelessness and possible timelessness. As a discipline at the brink of even bigger changes made possible by machine learning and artificial intelligence, this paper highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with geographical space in relation to cyberspace, with a particular focus on data analytics and visualization, including extended AI capabilities and virtual reality representations. Consequently, we encourage the creation of synergies between the processing and analysis of geographical and cyber data to improve sustainability and solve complex problems with geospatial applications and other digital advancements in urban and environmental sciences

Designing Human-Centered Collective Intelligence

Human-Centered Collective Intelligence (HCCI) is an emergent research area that seeks to bring together major research areas like machine learning, statistical modeling, information retrieval, market research, and software engineering to address challenges pertaining to deriving intelligent insights and solutions through the collaboration of several intelligent sensors, devices and data sources. An archetypal contextual CI scenario might be concerned with deriving affect-driven intelligence through multimodal emotion detection sources in a bid to determine the likability of one movie trailer over another. On the other hand, the key tenets to designing robust and evolutionary software and infrastructure architecture models to address cross-cutting quality concerns is of keen interest in the “Cloud” age of today. Some of the key quality concerns of interest in CI scenarios span the gamut of security and privacy, scalability, performance, fault-tolerance, and reliability. I present recent advances in CI system design with a focus on highlighting optimal solutions for the aforementioned cross-cutting concerns. I also describe a number of design challenges and a framework that I have determined to be critical to designing CI systems. With inspiration from machine learning, computational advertising, ubiquitous computing, and sociable robotics, this literature incorporates theories and concepts from various viewpoints to empower the collective intelligence engine, ZOEI, to discover affective state and emotional intent across multiple mediums. The discerned affective state is used in recommender systems among others to support content personalization. I dive into the design of optimal architectures that allow humans and intelligent systems to work collectively to solve complex problems. I present an evaluation of various studies that leverage the ZOEI framework to design collective intelligence

Internet of Robotic Things Intelligent Connectivity and Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and “things” have evolved significantly. “Things” now range from simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to smart wireless sensors, intelligent wireless sensors and actuators, robotic things, and autonomous vehicles operating in consumer, business, and industrial environments. The emergence of “intelligent things” (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). In IoRT, collaborative robotic things can communicate with other things, learn autonomously, interact safely with the environment, humans and other things, and gain qualities like self-maintenance, self-awareness, self-healing, and fail-operational behavior. IoRT applications can make use of the individual, collaborative, and collective intelligence of robotic things, as well as information from the infrastructure and operating context to plan, implement and accomplish tasks under different environmental conditions and uncertainties. The continuous, real-time interaction with the environment makes perception, location, communication, cognition, computation, connectivity, propulsion, and integration of federated IoRT and digital platforms important components of new-generation IoRT applications. This paper reviews the taxonomy of the IoRT, emphasizing the IoRT intelligent connectivity, architectures, interoperability, and trustworthiness framework, and surveys the technologies that enable the application of the IoRT across different domains to perform missions more efficiently, productively, and completely. The aim is to provide a novel perspective on the IoRT that involves communication among robotic things and humans and highlights the convergence of several technologies and interactions between different taxonomies used in the literature.publishedVersio