A Communication Middleware for Ubiquitous Multimedia Adaptation Services

Ubiquitous services have gained increasing attention in the area of mobile communication aiming to allow service access anywhere, anytime and anyhow while keeping complexity to a minimum for both users and service providers. Ubiquitous environment features a wide range and an increasing number of access devices and network technologies. Context-aware content/service adaptation is deemed necessary to ensure best user experience. We developed an Adaptation Management Framework (AMF) Web Service which manages the complexity of dynamic and autonomous content adaptation and serves as an invisible enabler for ubiquitous service delivery. It remains challenging to manage the tasks involved in the communication between the AMF Web Service and the user's environment, typically represented by various types of intelligent agents. This work presents a middleware which manages those tasks and serves not only as a protocol gateway, but also as a message translator, a service broker, a complexity shield etc., between AMF Web Services and User Agents

Programming, Composing, Deploying for the Grid

Grids raise new challenges in the following way: heterogeneity of underlying machines/networks and runtime environments (types and performance characteristics), not a single administrative domain, versatility. So the need to have appropriate programming and runtime solutions in order to write, deploy then execute applications on such heterogeneous distributed hardware in an effective and efficient manner. We propose in this article a solution to those challenges which takes the form of a programming and deployment framework featuring parallel, mobile, secure and distributed objects and components

Rover: Architectural Support for Exposing and Using Context

Technology has advanced to the point where many people feel it has created a world with an insurmountable amount of information. Information includes messages people send to each other, logged data from their activities, and the services available to them. This problem has been exaggerated in modern societies by high availability of Internet connectivity. All types of information contains context, whether they have been stated explicitly or understood implicitly. Understanding, handling, and using context represents one of the most critical steps towards coping with the amount of information available today. In this dissertation, we examine two topics: context and the design of a context-aware platform. We describe fundamental types of context associated with every piece of information and discuss issues which may occur when implementing a system which utilizes context. We present a context-aware platform called Rover. The Rover architecture provides a conceptual framework geared towards understanding how application developers can utilize a variety of aspects of context to assist the development of modern applications. To aid developers in figuring out what context may be useful in their application, we describe the concept of a Rover ecosystem: a logical organization analogous to how similar groups of people interact with each other. We also discuss how information and context can be shared between ecosystems. To examine the feasibility of the Rover architecture's conceptual framework, we have implemented a reference implementation of the core unit of a Rover ecosystem: the Rover server. We discuss the details of the Rover server and describe the implementation of an emergency response application which demonstrates the utility of the conceptual framework