80,679 research outputs found
Controlling services in a mobile context-aware infrastructure
Context-aware application behaviors can be described as logic rules following the Event-Control-Action (ECA) pattern. In this pattern, an Event models an occurrence of interest (e.g., a change in context); Control specifies a condition that must hold prior to the execution of the action; and an Action represents the invocation of arbitrary services. We have defined a Controlling service aiming at facilitating the dynamic configuration of ECA rule specifications by means of a mobile rule engine and a mechanism that distributes context reasoning activities to a network of context processing nodes. In this paper we present a novel context modeling approach that provides application developers and users with more appropriate means to define context information and ECA rules. Our approach makes use of ontologies to model context information and has been developed on top of web services technology
Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients
Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE
Domain-Specific Modeling and Code Generation for Cross-Platform Multi-Device Mobile Apps
Nowadays, mobile devices constitute the most common computing device. This
new computing model has brought intense competition among hardware and software
providers who are continuously introducing increasingly powerful mobile devices
and innovative OSs into the market. In consequence, cross-platform and
multi-device development has become a priority for software companies that want
to reach the widest possible audience. However, developing an application for
several platforms implies high costs and technical complexity. Currently, there
are several frameworks that allow cross-platform application development.
However, these approaches still require manual programming. My research
proposes to face the challenge of the mobile revolution by exploiting
abstraction, modeling and code generation, in the spirit of the modern paradigm
of Model Driven Engineering
Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions
Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life,
requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly
amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing
the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been
proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of
formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding
the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by
experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the
behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are
usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are
difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission
specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for
instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission
specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification
problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships
to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in
temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and
CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The
patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted
from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441
real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these
reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing
human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and
two real robots
A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems
In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based
Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become
interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive
software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be
able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity,
flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of
these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of
concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining
high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies
different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the
design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support
software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the
development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven
development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this
article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the
features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with
self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment.
Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a
development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the
development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study
highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the
related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of
self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the
development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development
methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling
tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition,
self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen
Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"
According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient.
The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself.
Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners.
• The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another.
• The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion.
The behaviour of the entities may vary over time.
• The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment.
For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered.
The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems.
This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative.
We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration
Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India
The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India
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