An agent-based service-oriented approach to evolving legacy software systems into a pervasive computing environment.

This thesis focuses on an Agent-Based Service-Oriented approach to evolving legacy system into a Pervasive Computing environment. The methodology consists of multiple phases: using reverse engineering techniques to comprehend and decompose legacy systems, employing XML and Web Services to transform and represent a legacy system as pervasive services, and integrating these pervasive services into pervasive computing environments with agent based integration technology. A legacy intelligent building system is used as a case study for experiments with the approach, which demonstrates that the proposed approach has the ability to evolve legacy systems into pervasive service environments seamlessly. Conclusion is drawn based on analysis and further research directions are also discussed

Wireless Communications in the Era of Big Data

The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adaptable for managing the bigdata traffic in wireless networks. On the other hand, instead of viewing mobile bigdata as a unwanted burden, we introduce methods to capitalize from the vast data traffic, for building a bigdata-aware wireless network with better wireless service quality and new mobile applications. We highlight several promising future research directions for wireless communications in the mobile bigdata era.Comment: This article is accepted and to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Algorithms leveraging smartphone sensing for analyzing explosion events

The increasing frequency of explosive disasters throughout the world in recent years have created a clear need for the systems to monitor for them continuously to improve the post-disaster emergency events such as rescue and recovery operations. Disasters both man-made and natural are unfortunate and not preferred, however monitoring them may be a lifesaving phenomenon in emergency scenarios. Dedicated sensors deployed in the public places and their associated networks to monitor such events may be inadequate and must be complemented for making the monitoring more pervasive and effective. In the recent past, modern smartphones with significant processing, networking and storage capabilities have become a rich source of mobile infrastructure empowering participatory sensing to address many problems in the area of pervasive computing. In the work presented in this dissertation, smartphone sensed data during disastrous scenarios is extensively studied, analyzed and algorithms were built for participatory sensing to address the problems, specifically in the context of Explosion -- Events which are of interest to the current study. This work presents description of the systems for assisting people by detecting, ranging and estimating intensity of the explosion events leveraging multi-modal smartphone sensors. This work also presents various challenges and opportunities in utilizing the capabilities of the sensors in smartphone for building such systems along with practical applications, limitations and future directions --Abstract, page iii

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

Unobtrusive and pervasive video-based eye-gaze tracking

Eye-gaze tracking has long been considered a desktop technology that finds its use inside the traditional office setting, where the operating conditions may be controlled. Nonetheless, recent advancements in mobile technology and a growing interest in capturing natural human behaviour have motivated an emerging interest in tracking eye movements within unconstrained real-life conditions, referred to as pervasive eye-gaze tracking. This critical review focuses on emerging passive and unobtrusive video-based eye-gaze tracking methods in recent literature, with the aim to identify different research avenues that are being followed in response to the challenges of pervasive eye-gaze tracking. Different eye-gaze tracking approaches are discussed in order to bring out their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify any limitations, within the context of pervasive eye-gaze tracking, that have yet to be considered by the computer vision community.peer-reviewe

Pervasive computing at tableside : a wireless web-based ordering system

Purpose &ndash; The purpose of this paper is to introduce a wireless web-based ordering system called iMenu in the restaurant industry. Design/methodology/approach &ndash; By using wireless devices such as personal digital assistants and WebPads, this system realizes the paradigm of pervasive computing at tableside. Detailed system requirements, design, implementation and evaluation of iMenu are presented.Findings &ndash; The evaluation of iMenu shows it explicitly increases productivity of restaurant staff. It also has other desirable features such as integration, interoperation and scalability. Compared to traditional restaurant ordering process, by using this system customers get faster and better services, restaurant staff cooperate more efficiently with less working mistakes, and enterprise owners thus receive more business profits. Originality/value &ndash; While many researchers have explored using wireless web-based information systems in different industries, this paper presents a system that employs wireless multi-tiered web-based architecture to build pervasive computing systems. Instead of discussing theoretical issues on pervasive computing, we focus on practical issues of developing a real system, such as choosing of web-based architecture, design of input methods in small screens, and response time in wireless web-based systems.<br /