Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

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

Characteristics of Web-based textual communications

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University 2012.Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical references.In this thesis, we analyze different aspects of Web-based textual communications and argue that all such communications share some common properties. In order to provide practical evidence for the validity of this argument, we focus on two common properties by examining these properties on various types of Web-based textual communications data. These properties are: All Web-based communications contain features attributable to their author and reciever; and all Web-based communications exhibit similar heavy tailed distributional properties. In order to provide practical proof for the validity of our claims, we provide three practical, real life research problems and exploit the proposed common properties of Web-based textual communications to find practical solutions to these problems. In this work, we first provide a feature-based result caching framework for real life search engines. To this end, we mined attributes from user queries in order to classify queries and estimate a quality metric for giving admission and eviction decisions for the query result cache. Second, we analyzed messages of an online chat server in order to predict user and mesage attributes. Our results show that several user- and message-based attributes can be predicted with significant occuracy using both chat message- and writing-style based features of the chat users. Third, we provide a parallel framework for in-memory construction of term partitioned inverted indexes. In this work, in order to minimize the total communication time between processors, we provide a bucketing scheme that is based on term-based distributional properties of Web page contents.Küçükyılmaz, TayfunPh.D

Multimedia

The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications

Modeling, Designing, and Implementing an Ad-hoc M-Learning Platform that Integrates Sensory Data to Support Ubiquitous Learning

Learning at any-time, at anywhere, using any mobile computing platform learning (which we refer to as “education in your palm”) empowers informal and formal education. It supports the continued creation of knowledge outside a classroom, after-school programs, community-based organizations, museums, libraries, and shopping malls with under-resourced settings. In doing so, it fosters the continued creation of a cumulative body of knowledge in informal and formal education. Anytime, anywhere, using any device computing platform learning means that students are not required to attend traditional classroom settings in order to learn. Instead, students will be able to access and share learning resources from any mobile computing platform, such as smart phones, tablets using highly dynamic mobile and wireless ad-hoc networks. There has been little research on how to facilitate the integrated use of the service description, discovery and integration resources available in mobile and wireless ad-hoc networks including description schemas and mobile learning objects, and in particular as it relates to the consistency, availability, security and privacy of spatio-temporal and trajectory information. Another challenge is finding, combining and creating suitable learning modules to handle the inherent constraints of mobile learning, resource-poor mobile devices and ad-hoc networks. The aim of this research is to design, develop and implement the cutting edge context-aware and ubiquitous self-directed learning methodologies using ad-hoc and sensor networks. The emphasis of our work is on defining an appropriate mobile learning object and the service adaptation descriptions as well as providing mechanisms for ad-hoc service discovery and developing concepts for the seamless integration of the learning objects and their contents with a particular focus on preserving data and privacy. The research involves a combination of modeling, designing, and developing a mobile learning system in the absence of a networking infrastructure that integrates sensory data to support ubiquitous learning. The system includes mechanisms to allow content exchange among the mobile ad-hoc nodes to ensure consistency and availability of information. It also provides an on-the-fly content service discovery, query request, and retrieving data from mobile nodes and sensors

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Detecting spam relays by SMTP traffic characteristics using an autonomous detection system

Spam emails are flooding the Internet. Research to prevent spam is an ongoing concern. SMTP traffic was collected from different sources in real networks and analyzed to determine the difference regarding SMTP traffic characteristics of legitimate email clients, legitimate email servers and spam relays. It is found that SMTP traffic from legitimate sites and non-legitimate sites are different and could be distinguished from each other. Some methods, which are based on analyzing SMTP traffic characteristics, were purposed to identify spam relays in the network in this thesis. An autonomous combination system, in which machine learning technologies were employed, was developed to identify spam relays in this thesis. This system identifies spam relays in real time before spam emails get to an end user by using SMTP traffic characteristics never involving email real content. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of this system. And results show that the system can identify spam relays with a high spam relay detection rate and an acceptable ratio of false positive errors

Modeling usage of an online research community

Although online communities have been thought of as a new way for collaboration across geographic boundaries in the scientific world, they have a problem attracting people to keep visiting. The main purpose of this study is to understand how people behave in such communities, and to build and evaluate tools to stimulate engagement in a research community. These tools were designed based on a research framework of factors that influence online participation and relationship development. There are two main objectives for people to join an online community, information sharing and interpersonal relationship development, such as friends or colleagues. The tools designed in this study are to serve both information sharing and interpersonal relationship development needs. The awareness tool is designed to increase the sense of a community and increase the degree of social presence of members in the community. The recommender system is designed to help provide higher quality and personalized information to community members. It also helps to match community members into subgroups based on their interests. The designed tools were implemented in a field site - the Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) Research community. A longitudinal field study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed tools. This research explored people\u27s behavior inside a research community by analyzing web server logs. The results show that although there are not many interactions in the community space, the WebCenter has been visited extensively by its members. There are over 2,000 hits per day on average and over 5,000 article accesses during the observation period. This research also provided a framework to identify factors that affect people\u27s engagement in an online community. The research framework was tested using the PLS modeling method with online survey responses. The results show that perceived usefulness performs a very significant role in members\u27 intention to continue using the system and their perceived preliminary networking. The results also show that the quality of the content of the system is a strong indicator for both perceived usefulness of the community space and perceived ease of use of the community system. Perceived ease of use did not show a strong correlation with intention to continue use which was consistent with other studies of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). For the ALN research community, this online community helps its members to broaden their contacts, improve the quality and quantity of their research, and increase the dissemination of knowledge among community members