49,372 research outputs found
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
The evolution of tropos: Contexts, commitments and adaptivity
Software evolution is the main research focus of the Tropos group at University of Trento (UniTN): how do we build systems that are aware of their requirements, and are able to dynamically reconfigure themselves in response to changes in context (the environment within which they operate) and requirements. The purpose of this report is to offer an overview of ongoing work at UniTN. In particular, the report presents ideas and results of four lines of research: contextual requirements modeling and reasoning, commitments and goal models, developing self-reconfigurable systems, and requirements awareness
Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains
The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time
Towards an Indexical Model of Situated Language Comprehension for Cognitive Agents in Physical Worlds
We propose a computational model of situated language comprehension based on
the Indexical Hypothesis that generates meaning representations by translating
amodal linguistic symbols to modal representations of beliefs, knowledge, and
experience external to the linguistic system. This Indexical Model incorporates
multiple information sources, including perceptions, domain knowledge, and
short-term and long-term experiences during comprehension. We show that
exploiting diverse information sources can alleviate ambiguities that arise
from contextual use of underspecific referring expressions and unexpressed
argument alternations of verbs. The model is being used to support linguistic
interactions in Rosie, an agent implemented in Soar that learns from
instruction.Comment: Advances in Cognitive Systems 3 (2014
Augmented Utilitarianism for AGI Safety
In the light of ongoing progresses of research on artificial intelligent
systems exhibiting a steadily increasing problem-solving ability, the
identification of practicable solutions to the value alignment problem in AGI
Safety is becoming a matter of urgency. In this context, one preeminent
challenge that has been addressed by multiple researchers is the adequate
formulation of utility functions or equivalents reliably capturing human
ethical conceptions. However, the specification of suitable utility functions
harbors the risk of "perverse instantiation" for which no final consensus on
responsible proactive countermeasures has been achieved so far. Amidst this
background, we propose a novel socio-technological ethical framework denoted
Augmented Utilitarianism which directly alleviates the perverse instantiation
problem. We elaborate on how augmented by AI and more generally science and
technology, it might allow a society to craft and update ethical utility
functions while jointly undergoing a dynamical ethical enhancement. Further, we
elucidate the need to consider embodied simulations in the design of utility
functions for AGIs aligned with human values. Finally, we discuss future
prospects regarding the usage of the presented scientifically grounded ethical
framework and mention possible challenges
- …