ConCom - a language and protocol for communication of context

With ConCom, we address the area of communication in wireless networks. We focus on heterogeneous settings with highly mobile devices carrying limited resources. ConCom present a way to express and communicate information, especially context, in a way that is similar to a naturally spoken language. ConCom uses sentences with a subject and attributes in its structure to represent and organize the transport of context and data. ConCom works connectionless and without addressing and forms an efficient way to exchange information in ubiquitous computing environments. We implemented ConCom and show applications taking advantage of it

An artificial hormone system for self-organization of networked nodes

The rising complexity of distributed computer systems give reason to investigate self-organization mechanism to build systems that are self-managing in the sense of Autonomic and Organic Computing. In this paper we propose the Artificial Hormone System (AHS) as a general approach to build self-organizing systems based on networked nodes. The Artificial Hormone System implements a similar information exchange between networked nodes like the human hormone system does between cells. The artificial hormone values are piggy-backed on messages to minimize communication overhead. To show the efficiency of the mechanism even for large scale systems we implemented a simulation environment in Java to evaluate different optimization strategies. The evaluations show that local information is enough to meet global optimization criterion.1st IFIP International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing - Biological Inspiration 2Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Exploring Bluetooth based Mobile Phone Interaction with the Hermes Photo Display

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in today’s mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study nvolving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community

Human-Centric Machine Vision

Recently, the algorithms for the processing of the visual information have greatly evolved, providing efficient and effective solutions to cope with the variability and the complexity of real-world environments. These achievements yield to the development of Machine Vision systems that overcome the typical industrial applications, where the environments are controlled and the tasks are very specific, towards the use of innovative solutions to face with everyday needs of people. The Human-Centric Machine Vision can help to solve the problems raised by the needs of our society, e.g. security and safety, health care, medical imaging, and human machine interface. In such applications it is necessary to handle changing, unpredictable and complex situations, and to take care of the presence of humans

Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation

Run-time Adaptation of Mobile Applications using Genetic Algorithms

Mobile applications run in environments where the context is continuously changing. Therefore, it is necessary to provide support for the run-time adaptation of these applications. This support is usually achieved by middleware platforms that offer a context-aware dynamic reconfiguration service. However, the main shortcoming of existing approaches is that both the list of possible configurations and the plans to adapt the application to a new configuration are usually specified at design-time. In this paper we present an approach that allows the automatic generation at run-time of application configurations and of reconfiguration plans. Moreover, the generated configurations are optimal regarding the provided functionality and, more importantly, without exceeding the available resources (e.g. battery). This is performed by: (1) having the information about the application variability available at runtime using feature models, and (2) using an genetic algorithm that allows generating an optimal configuration at runtime. We have specified a case study and evaluated our approach, and the results show that it is efficient enough as to be used on mobile devices without introducing an excessive overhead.Campus de Excelencia Andalucía Tech y Proyectos de investigación TIN2008-01942, P09-TIC-5231 y INTER-TRUST FP7-317731

An artificial hormone system for self-organization of networked nodes

The rising complexity of distributed computer systems give reason to investigate self-organization mechanism to build systems that are self-managing in the sense of Autonomic and Organic Computing. In this paper we propose the Artificial Hormone System (AHS) as a general approach to build self-organizing systems based on networked nodes. The Artificial Hormone System implements a similar information exchange between networked nodes like the human hormone system does between cells. The artificial hormone values are piggy-backed on messages to minimize communication overhead. To show the efficiency of the mechanism even for large scale systems we implemented a simulation environment in Java to evaluate different optimization strategies. The evaluations show that local information is enough to meet global optimization criterion.1st IFIP International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing - Biological Inspiration 2Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI