Smartphone sensing platform for emergency management

The increasingly sophisticated sensors supported by modern smartphones open up novel research opportunities, such as mobile phone sensing. One of the most challenging of these research areas is context-aware and activity recognition. The SmartRescue project takes advantage of smartphone sensing, processing and communication capabilities to monitor hazards and track people in a disaster. The goal is to help crisis managers and members of the public in early hazard detection, prediction, and in devising risk-minimizing evacuation plans when disaster strikes. In this paper we suggest a novel smartphone-based communication framework. It uses specific machine learning techniques that intelligently process sensor readings into useful information for the crisis responders. Core to the framework is a content-based publish-subscribe mechanism that allows flexible sharing of sensor data and computation results. We also evaluate a preliminary implementation of the platform, involving a smartphone app that reads and shares mobile phone sensor data for activity recognition.Comment: 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management ISCRAM2014 (2014

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

A role-based software architecture to support mobile service computing in IoT scenarios

The interaction among components of an IoT-based system usually requires using low latency or real time for message delivery, depending on the application needs and the quality of the communication links among the components. Moreover, in some cases, this interaction should consider the use of communication links with poor or uncertain Quality of Service (QoS). Research efforts in communication support for IoT scenarios have overlooked the challenge of providing real-time interaction support in unstable links, making these systems use dedicated networks that are expensive and usually limited in terms of physical coverage and robustness. This paper presents an alternative to address such a communication challenge, through the use of a model that allows soft real-time interaction among components of an IoT-based system. The behavior of the proposed model was validated using state machine theory, opening an opportunity to explore a whole new branch of smart distributed solutions and to extend the state-of-the-art and the-state-of-the-practice in this particular IoT study scenario.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

SKYPE: Top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window

© 2016 VLDB Endowment 21508097/16/03. As the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data has been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/ subscribe over sliding window. A novel system, called Skype (Top-k Spatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. Moreover, to reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-based k-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a costeffective way. Extensive experiments verify the great effciency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques

Top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window

© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. With the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data have been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window. A novel centralized system, called Skype (Top-kSpatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. To reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-basedk-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a cost-effective way. Extensive experiments verify the great efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques. Furthermore, to support better scalability and higher throughput, we propose a distributed version of Skype, namely DSkype, on top of Storm, which is a popular distributed stream processing system. With the help of fine-tuned subscription/message distribution mechanisms, DSkype can achieve orders of magnitude speed-up than its centralized version

Vitis: A Gossip-based Hybrid Overlay for Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are attractive solutions for building Internet-scale publish/subscribe systems. However, scalability comes with a cost: a message published on a certain topic often needs to traverse a large number of uninterested (unsubscribed) nodes before reaching all its subscribers. This might sharply increase resource consumption for such relay nodes (in terms of bandwidth transmission cost, CPU, etc) and could ultimately lead to rapid deterioration of the system’s performance once the relay nodes start dropping the messages or choose to permanently abandon the system. In this paper, we introduce Vitis, a gossip-based publish/subscribe system that significantly decreases the number of relay messages, and scales to an unbounded number of nodes and topics. This is achieved by the novel approach of enabling rendezvous routing on unstructured overlays. We construct a hybrid system by injecting structure into an otherwise unstructured network. The resulting structure resembles a navigable small-world network, which spans along clusters of nodes that have similar subscriptions. The properties of such an overlay make it an ideal platform for efficient data dissemination in large-scale systems. We perform extensive simulations and evaluate Vitis by comparing its performance against two base-line publish/subscribe systems: one that is oblivious to node subscriptions, and another that exploits the subscription similarities. Our measurements show that Vitis significantly outperforms the base-line solutions on various subscription and churn scenarios, from both synthetic models and real-world traces

VINEA: a policy-based virtual network embedding architecture

Network virtualization has enabled new business models by allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical network. To concurrently run multiple customized virtual network services, such infrastructure providers need to run a virtual network embedding protocol. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto the physical network. We present the design and implementation of a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the (invariant) embedding mechanisms: resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel policy configurations are compared over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities.National Science Foundation (CNS-0963974