Flexible coordination techniques for dynamic cloud service collaboration

The provision of individual, but also composed services is central in cloud service provisioning. We describe a framework for the coordination of cloud services, based on a tuple‐space architecture which uses an ontology to describe the services. Current techniques for service collaboration offer limited scope for flexibility. They are based on statically describing and compositing services. With the open nature of the web and cloud services, the need for a more flexible, dynamic approach to service coordination becomes evident. In order to support open communities of service providers, there should be the option for these providers to offer and withdraw their services to/from the community. For this to be realised, there needs to be a degree of self‐organisation. Our techniques for coordination and service matching aim to achieve this through matching goal‐oriented service requests with providers that advertise their offerings dynamically. Scalability of the solution is a particular concern that will be evaluated in detail

Robotic user interface enabled interactive dialogue with intelligent spaces

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86).Users can communicate with ubiquitous computing environments by natural means such as voice communication. However, users of the Intelligent Room at MIT CSAIL, a ubiquitous environment, have reported dissatisfaction communicating with the room due to the absence of a focal point and the room's inability to hold a dialogue. To enrich the user's interactive experience, we integrated a Robotic User Interface to the room, and augmented the room's natural language system to enable it to hold dialogues with users. The robotic teddy bear serves two purposes. First, it acts as the focal point of the room which users can address. Second, it enables the room to physically communicate with users by robotic gestures. We also incorporated a book recommendation system to illustrate the room's new ability to converse with users. These enhancements have heightened user experience in communicating with the Intelligent Room, as indicated by our user study.by Rubaiyat Khan.M.Eng

The Impress Context Store: A Coordination Framework for Context-Aware Systems

The dream of weaving technology into our everyday fabric of life is recently being made possible by advances in ubiquitous computing and sensor technologies. Countless sensors of various sizes have made their way into everyday commercial applications. Many projects aim to explore new ways to utilize these new technologies to aid and interact with the general population. Context-aware systems use available context information to assist users automatically, without explicit user input. By inferring user intent and configuring the system proactively for each user, context-aware systems are an integral part of achieving user-friendly ubiquitous computing environments. A common issue with building a distributed context-aware system is the need to develop a supporting infrastructure providing features such as storage, distributed messaging, and security, before the real work on processing context information can be done. This thesis proposes a coordination framework that provides an effective common foundation for context-aware systems. The separation between the context-processing logic component and the underlying supporting foundation allows researchers to focus their energy at the context-processing part of the system, instead of spending their time re-inventing the supporting infrastructure. As part of an ongoing project, Impress, the framework uses the open standard, Jabber, as its communication protocol. The Publish-Subscribe (pubsub) extension to Jabber provides interesting features that match those needed by a context-aware system. The main contribution of this thesis is the design and implementation of a coordination framework, called the Impress Context Store, that provides an effective common foundation for context-aware systems. The separation between the context-processing logic and the underlying supporting foundation allows researchers to focus their energy at the context-processing part of the system, instead of spending their time re-inventing the supporting infrastructure

Software architectural support for tangible user interfaces in distributed, heterogeneous computing environments

This research focuses on tools that support the development of tangible interaction-based applications for distributed computing environments. Applications built with these tools are capable of utilizing heterogeneous resources for tangible interaction and can be reconfigured for different contexts with minimal code changes. Current trends in computing, especially in areas such as computational science, scientific visualization and computer supported collaborative work, foreshadow increasing complexity, distribution and remoteness of computation and data. These trends imply that tangible interface developers must address concerns of both tangible interaction design and networked distributed computing. In this dissertation, we present a software architecture that supports separation of these concerns. Additionally, a tangibles-based software development toolkit based on this architecture is presented that enables the logic of elements within a tangible user interface to be mapped to configurations that vary in the number, type and location of resources within a given tangibles-based system

Extending Tuplespaces for Coordination in Interactive Workspaces

Abstract. The current interest in programming models and software infrastructures to support ubiquitous and environmental computing is heightened by the falling cost of hardware and the ubiquity of local-area wireless networking technologies. Interactive workspaces are technologically augmented team-project rooms that represent a specific sub-domain of ubiquitous computing. We argue both from related work and from our own experience with a prototype that the tuplespace model of communication forms the best basis for a coordination infrastructure for such workspaces. This paper presents the usage and characteristics expected of interactive workspaces, from which we derive a set of key system properties for any coordination infrastructure in an interactive workspace. We show that the design aspects of tuplespaces, augmented with some new extensions, yield a system model, which we call the Event Heap, that satisfies all of the desired properties. We also briefly discuss why other coordination models fall short of the desired properties, and describe our experience using our implementation of the Event Heap model. The paper focuses on a justification of the use of tuplespaces in interactive workspaces, and does not provide a detailed discussion of the Event Heap implementation or our more general experience with interactive workspaces, each of which is treated in detail elsewhere.

Linda[m] and Tiamat: Providing generative communications in a changing world

When generative communications, as exemplified by Linda [Gel85], were originally proposed, they were intended as a mechanism for coordination of parallel processes. Since that time, they have been adapted to a variety of distributed environments with great success, as can be seen in commercial systems such as T Spaces [WMLF98]. The time, space and identity decoupling afforded to coordinating entities by generative communications also seems to be ideally suited to mobile environments where devices can come and go frequently and often without warning. Such a rapidly changing environment, however, presents a new set of challenges and attempts to introduce the generative communications paradigm into these environments have, so far, met with limited success. Indeed evaluation of research platforms, such as LIME (Linda In a Mobile Environment) [PMR99.MPR01] and L[2]imbo [DFWB98] have led some to conclude that the generative communication paradigm is not well suited to mobile environments. It is my belief, however, that it is the research platforms in question, rather than the paradigm, which do not fit well with mobile environments. These platforms either attempt to impose tight constraints on an inherently loosely constrained environment, or require significant alterations to the semantics of generative communications. I believe that these systems do not work well as they are not designed around the environment, rather they are forced onto the environment. I will begin by examining why these systems do not suit their environment. This done, I will then show that the conclusions drawn from these systems, namely that generative communications are unsuitable for mobile environments, are incorrect. Further, through construction and examination of a proof of concept system built around an environment-centric design, I will show that generative communications can be provided in a mobile environment with few (minor) semantic alterations. An evaluation of some of the mechanisms used will also be presented along with characterisation of the operation of the system. A comparison with existing mobile solutions will be used to highlight how the environment-driven design results in a system which better suits the nature of the target environment