Designing for Seamless Task Migration in MPUIs: Bridging Task-Disconnects

Today, the proliferation of mobile computing has changed the work environment forever. As a consequence, users are forced to orchestrate a complex interaction between multiple devices, moving data and information back and forth, to accomplish their tasks. Users trudge out USB key drives, remote desktop software, e-mail and network file storage in an attempt to mitigate this orchestration. We refer to this break from the task at hand as task-disconnect. Task-disconnect represents the break in continuity that occurs when a user attempts to accomplish his or her tasks using more than one device. Our objective is to study how software can bridge this task-disconnect, enabling users to seamlessly transition their tasks among their devices. We present the theory, definition, and discussion of task-disconnect; our approach towards bridging this disconnect; and our prototype application that was built to be used across the desktop computer and the Tablet PC platforms. We then describe our subjective evaluation to measure the effectiveness of the prototype in bridging the task-disconnect. We then conclude with the results and insights gained from our evaluation

Architecture Strategies for Cyber-Foraging: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Mobile devices have become for many the preferred way of interacting with the Internet, social media and the enterprise. However, mobile devices still do not have the computing power and battery life that will allow them to perform effectively over long periods of time or for executing applications that require extensive communication or computation, or low latency. Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. This paper presents the preliminary results of a systematic literature review (SLR) on architectures that support cyber-foraging. The preliminary results show that this is an area with many opportunities for research that will enable cyber-foraging solutions to become widely adopted as a way to support the mobile applications of the present and the future

Desktop-to-Mobile Web Adaptation through Customizable Two-Dimensional Semantic Redesign

International audienceIn this paper we present a novel method for desktop-to-mobile adaptation. The solution also supports end-users in customizing multi-device ubiquitous user interfaces. In particular, we describe an algorithm and the corresponding tool support to perform desktop-to-mobile adaptation by exploiting logical user interface descriptions able to capture interaction semantic information indicating the purpose of the interface elements. We also compare our solution with existing tools for similar goals

An Approach to QoS-based Task Distribution in Edge Computing Networks for IoT Applications

abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as part of the infrastructures for advancing a large variety of applications involving connections of many intelligent devices, leading to smart communities. Due to the severe limitation of the computing resources of IoT devices, it is common to offload tasks of various applications requiring substantial computing resources to computing systems with sufficient computing resources, such as servers, cloud systems, and/or data centers for processing. However, this offloading method suffers from both high latency and network congestion in the IoT infrastructures. Recently edge computing has emerged to reduce the negative impacts of tasks offloading to remote computing systems. As edge computing is in close proximity to IoT devices, it can reduce the latency of task offloading and reduce network congestion. Yet, edge computing has its drawbacks, such as the limited computing resources of some edge computing devices and the unbalanced loads among these devices. In order to effectively explore the potential of edge computing to support IoT applications, it is necessary to have efficient task management and load balancing in edge computing networks. In this dissertation research, an approach is presented to periodically distributing tasks within the edge computing network while satisfying the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of tasks. The QoS requirements include task completion deadline and security requirement. The approach aims to maximize the number of tasks that can be accommodated in the edge computing network, with consideration of tasks’ priorities. The goal is achieved through the joint optimization of the computing resource allocation and network bandwidth provisioning. Evaluation results show the improvement of the approach in increasing the number of tasks that can be accommodated in the edge computing network and the efficiency in resource utilization.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 201

Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces

Software applications that are very large-scale, can encompass hundreds of complex user interfaces (UIs). Such applications are commonly sold as feature-bloated off-the-shelf products to be used by people with variable needs in the required features and layout preferences. Although many UI adaptation approaches were proposed, several gaps and limitations including: extensibility and integration in legacy systems, still need to be addressed in the state-of-the-art adaptive UI development systems. This paper presents Role-Based UI Simplification (RBUIS) as a mechanism for increasing usability through adaptive behaviour by providing end-users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout, based on the context-of- use. RBUIS uses an interpreted runtime model-driven approach based on the Cedar Architecture, and is supported by the integrated development environment (IDE), Cedar Studio. RBUIS was evaluated by integrating it into OFBiz, an open-source ERP system. The integration method was assessed and measured by establishing and applying technical metrics. Afterwards, a usability study was carried out to evaluate whether UIs simplified with RBUIS show an improvement over their initial counterparts. This study leveraged questionnaires, checking task completion times and output quality, and eye-tracking. The results showed that UIs simplified with RBUIS significantly improve end-user efficiency, effectiveness, and perceived usability

User Interface Migration of Web Applications with Task continuity and Platform Adaptation Support

This thesis shows the work undertaken for supporting user interface migration of web applications. Interface migration occurs when a user interacting with an application switches to a different device and the application interface is transferred onto the new device. Migration must be supported by a platform aware system able to perform interface adaptation that keeps into account the different features of the devices involved, in order to keep the interface usability. Beside adaptation, continuity is the main matter. Once the interface migrates onto a new device, the interaction can be continued without having to restart the application from the beginning. Different types of migration can occur and supporting them poses different level of difficulty. This thesis analyses the various types of migration and describes the client-server architecture implemented for supporting all of them. The thesis shows how the migration service evolved starting from a first core of basic functionalities supporting the easiest situation to the most challenging one

Roam, a seamless application framework

One of the biggest challenges in future application development is device heterogeneity.In the future,we expect to see a rich variety of computing devices that can run applications.These devices have di fferent capabilities in processors,memory,networking, screen sizes,input methods,and software libraries.We also expect that future users are likely to own many types of devices.De- pending on users changing situations and environments,they may choose to switch from one type of device to another that brings the best combination of application functionality and device mobility (size,weight,etc.).Based on this scenario,we have designed and implemented a seamless application framework called the Roam system that can both assist developers to build multi-platform applications that can run on heterogeneous devices and allow a user to move/migrate a running application among heterogeneous devices in an e ffortless manner.The Roam system is based on partitioning of an application into components and it automatically selects the most appropriate adaptation strategy at the component level for a target platform.To evaluate our system,we have created several multi-platform Roam applications including a Chess game,a Connect4 game,and a shopping aid application.We also provide measurements on application performance and describe our experience with application development in the Roam system.Our experience shows that it is relatively easy to port existing applications to the Roam system and runtime application migration latency is within a few seconds and acceptable to most non-real-time applications