The Monkey, the Ant, and the Elephant:Addressing Safety in Smart Spaces

Smart spaces deliver digital services to optimize space use and enhance user experience. The impact of ill-programmed applications in such spaces goes beyond loss of data or a computer crash; there is the potential risk of physical harm to the space and its users. Ensuring safety in this type of cyberphysical system is critically important

Ad-Hoc networking with OWL-S and CSP

In order to achieve a ubiquitous ad-hoc environment suitable for any kind and number of compute devices, information concerning device usability must be stored and manipulated. Take, for example the home where a large number of devices - heating, cooking, lighting, entertainment, security all cooperate to provide a suitable environment for a home resident. This paper proposes a representation of home devices as OWL-S (Web service ontology) services, capable of being implemented by means of the formal algebra CSP (communication sequential process). Because of the ontological nature of OWL-S and the possibility of translating CSP equations to lightweight implementations, this proposal allows a rich semantic description of services capable of being hosted by a wide range of devices, including such ones with low computational resources. The paper describes the procedure of developing a service in OWL-S, its translation to CSP and its implementation in occam, an efficient CSP-based languag

Open vs.Closed standards for ambient intelligence: an exploratory study of adoption

Emerging forms of structurally complex information systems, such as Ambient Intelligence (AmI), requires the integration of a range of technologies. To enable such systems’ development there is a reliance on interoperability standards. However, due to their inherent characteristics, the adoption of open or closed standards by technology vendors can have impacts the later stages of the adoption and diffusion of systems. This paper reports on research-in-progress which explores the adoption of open and closed standards by technology vendors engaged in AmI development. Existing models of innovation adoption and diffusion fail to adequately account for adoption in more complex technological contexts. In order to address such deficiencies, current perspectives on standards are discussed, before a conceptual framework for structuring the research is proposed which integrates both existing adoption theory and standards-oriented research. The use of the European Consumer Electronics sector as a unit of analysis is discussed, before concluding with an overview of how the study will progress

From Smart Homes to Smart-ready Homes and Communities

Background: People have various and changing needs as they age and the number of people living with some form of dementia is steadily increasing. Smart homes have a unique potential to provide assisted living but are often designed rigidly with a specific and fixed problem in mind. Objectives: To make smart-ready homes and communities that can be adaptively and easily updated over time to support varying user needs and to deliver the needed assistance, empowerment and living independence. Method: The design and deployment of programmable assistive environment for older adults. Results: The use of platform technology (a special form of what is known today as the Internet of Things, or IoT) has enabled the decoupling of goal setting and application development from sensing and assistive technology deployment and insertion in the assistive environment. Personalising a smart home or changing its applications and its interfaces dynamically as the user needs change was possible and has been demonstrated successfully in one house - the Gator Tech Smart House. Scaling up the platform technology approach to a planned living community is underway at one of UK’s National Health Services (NHS) Healthy New Town projects. Conclusions: There is a great need to integrate technology with living spaces to provide assistance and independent living. But to smarten these spaces for lifelong living, the technology and the smart home applications must be flexible, adaptive and changeable over time. However, people do not just live at home, they live in communities. Looking at the big picture (communities), as well as the small (homes), we consider how to progress beyond smart-ready homes towards smart-ready communities

Service-Relationship Programming Framework for the Social IoT

We argue that for a true realization of innovative programming opportunities for smart spaces, the developers should be equipped with informative tools that assist them in building domain-related applications. Such tools should utilize the services offered by the space's smart things and consider the different relationships that may tie these services opportunistically to build applications. In this paper, we utilize our Inter-thing relationships programming framework to present a distributed programming ecosystem. The framework broadens the restricted set of thing-level relationships of the evolving social IoT paradigm with a set of service-level relationships. Such relationships provide guidance into how services belonging to different things can be combined to build meaningful applications. We also present a uniform way of describing the thing services and the service-level relationships along with new capabilities for the things to dynamically generate their own services, formulate the corresponding programmable interfaces (APIs) and create an ad-hoc network of socially related smart things at runtime. We then present the semantic rules that guide the establishment of IoT applications and finally demonstrate the features of the framework through a proof-of-concept application

Ad-Hoc Networking with OWL-S and CSP

In order to achieve a ubiquitous ad-hoc environment suitable for any kind and number of compute devices, information concerning device usability must be stored and manipulated. Take, for example the home where a large number of devices - heating, cooking, lighting, entertainment, security all cooperate to provide a suitable environment for a home resident. This paper proposes a representation of home devices as OWL-S (Web service ontology) services, capable of being implemented by means of the formal algebra CSP (communication sequential process). Because of the ontological nature of OWL-S and the possibility of translating CSP equations to lightweight implementations, this proposal allows a rich semantic description of services capable of being hosted by a wide range of devices, including such ones with low computational resources. The paper describes the procedure of developing a service in OWL-S, its translation to CSP and its implementation in occam, an efficient CSP-based languag

An Extensible Ubiquitous Architecture for Networked Devices in Smart Living Environments

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The Importance of Being Thing:Or the Trivial Role of Powering Serious IoT Scenarios

In this article, we call for a "Walk Before You Run" adjustment in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) research and development exercise. Without first settling the quest for what thing is or could be or do, we run the risk of presumptuous visions, or hypes, that can only fail the realities and limits of what is actually possible, leading to customers and consumers confusion as well as market hesitations. Specifically, without a carefully-designed Thing architecture in place, it will be very difficult to find the “magic” we are so addicted and accustomed to – programming! Programming the IoT, as we once programmed the mainframe, the workstation, the PC and the mobile devices, is the natural way to realize a fancy IoT scenario or an application. Without Thing architectures and their enablement of new programming models for IoT – we will continue to only envision fancy scenarios but unable to unleash the IoT full potential. This article raises these concerns and provides a view into the future by first looking back into our short history of pervasive computing. The article focuses on the domain of “Personal” IoT and will address key new requirements for such Thing architecture. Also, practicing what we preach, we present our ongoing efforts on the Atlas Thing Architecture showing how it supports a variety of thing notions, and how it enables novel models for programmability

A service-oriented privacy model for smart home environments

Smart home technology is an application of ubiquitous computing that equips living environments with different types of sensors, actuators, and appliances under computer control to improve the quality of life for inhabitants. Services such as health and behavior monitoring, personalized customization of home operation, control and automation of the environment, and assistance with physical or mental tasks enable inhabitants to live safer, more comfortable, and more independent lives. Many commercial and research efforts are investigating the vast potential that smart homes and related products provide to assist the activities of daily living. However, the resulting efforts frequently suffer from two main limitations that hinder their widespread use. First, resulting products are usually proprietary, offering closed services that are tailored to specific applications and cannot be easily reused or extended by other services in the smart home. Second, the invasiveness of the technology and use of personal information may allow the privacy of the inhabitants to be violated.;We have previously addressed the privacy issue by calling for a privacy policy-based framework [1][2] to control the collection, storage, use and dissemination of personal information in smart home environments. This framework supports several high level goals, including promoting inhabitant awareness of the abilities of devices/services contained in the smart home space, using privacy policies that express the contextual nature of privacy, providing mechanisms and tool support for the authoring, deployment, enforcement, and auditing of privacy policies, as well as creating and verifying policy models to detect conflicts and incorrect specification of privacy policies. In this thesis, we focus on the modeling and verification of policies by proposing a combination of the service-oriented computing and privacy policy paradigms to create a preliminary privacy model for smart homes. We then offer an example scenario and discuss how we employ model checking techniques to verify various aspects of our proposed policy model. The major contributions of this work are four-fold: (1) We extend the notion of personal privacy to include the control of how household objects are used by smart home services. (2) We introduce the use of service-oriented computing to bind resources to the policy space. (3) We define a novel service-oriented privacy policy model that authorizes both the flow of personally sensitive data and the control of environment objects based on inhabitant preferences and various system contexts. (4) We introduce the use of model checking techniques to verify correctness properties of privacy policy models and their enforcement.;The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 gives background information about smart homes, information privacy, policy-based management in distributed systems, and model checking, section 3 presents existing privacy analyses and policy models, section 4 presents our novel privacy model, section 5 illustrates with an example scenario how model checking can be used to verify our privacy model, and section 6 concludes with discussion and future work. Appendix A contains model implementation files, and Appendix B contains property specification files

IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS): Data-Oriented Environment for Interactive Smart Spaces

Smart devices around us produce a considerable volume of data and interact in a wide range of scenarios that guide the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT adds informative and interactive aspects to our living spaces, converting them into smart spaces. However, the development of applications is challenged by the fragmented nature due to the vast number of different IoT things, the format of reported information, communication standards, and the techniques used to design applications. This paper introduces IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS), a data-oriented framework to enable communication interoperability between the ecosystem's entities. The framework abstracts things' information, reported data items, and developers' applications into programmable objects referred to as Cards. Cards represent specific entities and interactions of focus with meta-data. The framework then indexes cards' meta-data to enable interoperability, data management, and application development. The framework allows users to create virtual smart spaces (VSS) to define cards' accessibility and visibility. Within VSS, users can identify accessible data items, things to communicate, and authorized applications. The framework, in this paper, defines four types of Cards to represent: participating IoT things, data items, VSS, and applications. The proposed framework enables the development of synchronous and asynchronous applications. The framework dynamically creates, updates, and links the cards throughout the life-cycle of the different entities. We present the details of the proposed framework and show how our framework is advantageous and applicable