Social pervasive systems: The integration of social networks and pervasive systems

Sensor technology embedded in smart mobile devices branded such devices as candidates for building innovative context-aware pervasive applications. On a parallel front, the notable evolution in the shape and form of social networking and their seamless accessibility from mobile devices founded a goldmine of contextual information. Utilizing an ecosystem that combines both mobile smart devices and a big data like environment in the form of social networks allows for the creation of an elitist set of services and applications that merge the two domains. In this paper, and following the footsteps of similar research efforts that attempted to combine both domains, we describe what we label as Social Pervasive Systems that cross-pollinate a mutually influential mobile and social world with opportunities for new breeds of applications. We present herein the evolution of the merger between both worlds for a better understanding. Above and beyond what related work achieved, we present a set of new services and potential applications that emerge from this new blend, and also describe some of the expected challenges such systems will face

Consumer and Community in the Future Electricity Network: an Insight from Smart Grid Projects in Europe

Integration of growing shares of renewable energy sources into the electricity networks have resulted in the need for electricity network upgrade through pervasive deployment of information and communication technologies. Having power sources close to the consumer premises and exploiting the potential of smart metering infrastructure may lead to consumers’ empowerment and energy savings. Therefore, the consumer should be approached with clear engagement strategies in the early stages of the technological system development. The analysis of European smart grid projects points to an increasing interest in consumers and communities as focal players for the success of the future electricity system. This necessitates characterization of the consumer as well as the community from what concerns values, beliefs and goals that are culturally and geographically located. In this context, this contribution presents and discusses some EU smart grid projects with a focus on consumers and on their interactions within the community. The abstract also demonstrates successful consumers’ engagement strategies in large-scale deployment of smart metering systems at national level, highlighting the need to address social needs and concerns at an early stage of the technological system development

Social issues of power harvesting as key enables of WSN in pervasive computing

Pervasive systems have gained popularity and open the door to new applications that will improve the quality of life of the users. Additionally, the implementation of such systems over an infrastructure of Wireless Sensor Networks has been proven to be very powerful. To deal with the WSN problems related to the battery of the elements or nodes that constitute the WSN, Power Harvesting techniques arise as good candidates. With PH each node can extract the energy from the surrounding environment. However, this energy source could not be constant, affecting the continuity and quality of the services provided. This behavior can have a negative impact on the user's perception about the system, which could be perceived as unreliable or faulty. In the current paper, some related works regarding pervasive systems within the home environment are referenced to extrapolate the conclusions and problems to the paradigm of Power Harvesting Pervasive Systems from the user perspective. Besides, the paper speculates about the approach and methods to overcome these potential problems and presents the design trends that could be followed.<br/

Urban space and pervasive systems

In this paper we present an early approach for developing a theoretical framework and understanding for designing pervasive systems as an integral part of the urban landscape. The research will be conducted in the city of Bath as part of the CityWare project, in a heritage environment with tourist attractions. Here we propose to investigate the application of research methods based on Space Syntax, which encompasses a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of space and spatial patterns, as a framework for understanding the complex relationship between pervasive systems, urban space and society in general; and the impact of the deployment of pervasive systems on people’s relationships to heritage, and to each other in particular

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Looc: a Cyber-physical Social Network on Android Platforms

As the mobile Internet becomes pervasive, mobile devices have permeated into every aspect of our life, work, and society. This rapid technology evolution calls for new functionalities that enrich our interaction with cyberinfrastructure, physical presence, and societal activities and communities. This study is aimed to explore the integration between the android-based mobile platform with multimodal sensors and social networks. To achieve context-aware services, we propose a cyber-physical social network, called LooC. Based on the detailed literature review, the Looc system is designed to bridge the gap between physical social networks and the cyberspace of thousands of mobile devices. After the introduction and literature review chapters, the thesis starts by the necessary concepts to program Android applications with best practices, taking in consideration its life cycle,. The challenges in mobile social networks and cyber-physical systems are identified. Our methodology and design architecture are then presented in detail. The system implementation and case studies are further illustrated. The study shows the challenges related to develop mobile cyber-physical social network with android. The prototype of LooC was developed and integrated into other frameworks to demonstrate its usage. One of the most important challenges was find a good communication method for the social network and an appropriate way to locate individuals. Haversine formula was used to calculate the distance in our prototype. In the future work, privacy and legal issues are necessary to be addressed for mobile cyber-physical social networks in the future.Computer Science Departmen

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions