A location-based personal task reminder for mobile users

[[abstract]]Personal task reminders have been indispensable for modern people, in order to remind them of their tasks at specific circumstances. Traditional paper-based reminders are still useful, but they cannot be organized efficiently. Electronic reminders based on the calendar in cell phones are more efficient and gaining popularity, but such reminders are mostly triggered by time. In many situations, tasks are only meaningful to be performed at a specific location, so it would be useful if reminders for those tasks can be triggered only when the person to be reminded is physically near or located at that location. Therefore, in this research, we develop a location-based personal task reminder for Android-based smartphones and tablets. To distinguish our work from existing ones that rely solely on the GPS technology, we take advantage of the ubiquity of IEEE 802.11 WLAN infrastructure to compliment the “blind spots” of GPS location sensing. Combining the two technologies makes it possible for the personal task reminder to be effective in both indoor and outdoor environments. We also propose two operating models for the personal task reminder to boost the usability of the application. Furthermore, as long as the WLAN infrastructure is available, our work as a foundation of location-based services can easily be extended to be used in many other scenarios, such as guiding in public transportation systems or tourist attractions, location-based learning, and even caring of the Dementia residents.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]電子版[[booktype]]紙

An End-to-End Logistics Management Application over Heterogeneous Location Systems

100學年度研究獎補助論文[[abstract]]RFID and GPS are the two technologies that receive significant attention in the field of indoor and outdoor location systems, respectively. In this research, the need of integrating multiple heterogeneous location systems is identified. We propose a hybrid system that combines both RFID and GPS technologies to achieve the goal of true end-to-end logistics management, by end-to-end we mean the journey of goods delivery may traverse across both indoor and outdoor regions. With our system, not only a manager can dispatch tasks for the deliverymen, but also the real-time location of a deliveryman can be tracked both indoors and outdoors. More importantly, the deliveryman with a mobile terminal can experience seamless positioning handover between outdoor and indoor environments. The usefulness of this logistics management application is verified through an experiment conducted in the campus environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that implements RFID and GPS positioning handover in the application of end-to-end logistics management.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙

A Hadoop-based Sensor Data Processing and Access System for Intelligent Cities

[[abstract]]巨量感測資料處理為建構智慧城市相關服務的基礎，本研究利用了Hadoop雲端運算平台當中的MapReduce分散式運算框架來進行感測資料處理，搭配HBase雲端資料庫來儲存各種感測資料，並且設計了一套基於網頁瀏覽器的使用者介面，供使用者依篩選條件選擇想要瀏覽的感測資訊及影像資料。我們預期藉由此一感測資料處理暨感測資訊存取系統的開發，可為將來建構智慧城市帶來相當之貢獻。[[sponsorship]]交通大學資訊工程系; 台南大學資訊工程系[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20130827~20130828[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]苗栗, 台

A Location-based Personal Task Management Application for Indoor and Outdoor Environments

[[abstract]]Personal task management has been essential for modern people, in order to remind them of something at a specific condition. Reminders based on the electronic calendar in cell phones are popular, but such reminders are mostly triggered by time. It is also common that some tasks are only meaningful to be performed at a specific location, so it would be useful if reminders for those tasks can be triggered only when the person to be reminded is physically near or located at that location. Therefore, in this research we implement a location-based personal task management application for Android-based smart phones and tablets. To distinguish our work from existing ones that rely solely on the GPS technology, we take advantage of the ubiquity of IEEE 802.11 WLAN (Wi-Fi) infrastructure to compliment the blind spots of GPS location sensing. Combining the two technologies make it possible for the personal task management application to be effective in both indoor and outdoor environments. Furthermore, as long as the WLAN infrastructure is available, this application can be further extended to be used in many other scenarios which comprise both indoor and outdoor environments, such as guiding in public transportation systems or tourist attractions.[[incitationindex]]EI[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20120926~20120928[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Melbourne, Australi

Realization of Communications-as-a-Service: IPTV Distribution Platform and a Network-based IPTV Audience Measurement Scheme

[[abstract]]With the advent of the next-generation networks (NGN) and the new technologies in the field of cloud computing, both individuals and enterprises are enjoying a great variety of networking and computing services with higher quality and lower cost than before. In this research, we identify that the concepts of NGN and cloud computing can be combined to create innovative services. Specifically, the distinguishing feature of NGN – services and underlying transport networks are unbundled – opens a new window for researchers to develop innovative cloud services in NGN. Accordingly, we demonstrate the concept of Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) in cloud computing by proposing an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) distribution platform as a CaaS service. In this sense, enterprises wishing to become an IPTV service provider can lease the CaaS service and start their business with minimal upfront cost. Furthermore, we propose a network-based multicast IPTV audience measurement scheme as an add-on feature for the CaaS service. Compared with measurement schemes that collect data from the set-top boxes directly, the network-based scheme not only scales well when the audience is large, but also better preserves subscriber privacy. Besides, this scheme is truly NGN-conformant because the audience measurement is conducted inside the transport network, not in the IPTV service itself. We believe that our work may shed some light on the research of creating more innovative cloud-based NGN services in the future.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙

A Sensor Data Processing and Access Platform based on Hadoop for Smart Environments

[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20140910~20140912[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Salerno, Ital

Increasing Service Availability in a Wireless Home Network Environment

[[abstract]]Service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is an inspiring and evolving concept in the context of IT and business services. Recently, various networked embedded systems are penetrating into our life; the unique characteristics of these systems pose many technological challenges. Specifically, the capabilities to interoperate across home appliances and personal digital devices are critical in a smart home environment. As a consequence, the SOA paradigm is introduced as a basis to enhance the service interoperability. However, the service availability is another important concern. In this paper, we focus on augmenting the smart home environment with high service availability. First, we point out the potential problems by adopting the universal plug and play (UPnP) quality of service (QoS) architecture to deliver services with QoS requirements in wireless home networks. After that, we propose a local detour mechanism to tolerate link congestions and node/link failures. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism is based on standard UPnP actions, so that modifications to the existing UPnP QoS architecture are not required. Compared with content-adaptive and resource-adaptive-based approaches operated on fixed service routing paths, our work not only guarantees content quality, but also tolerates topology changes in wireless home networks.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙

On Improving Fault Tolerance for Heterogeneous Hadoop MapReduce Clusters

[[abstract]]The computing paradigm of MapReduce has gained extreme popularity in the area of large-scale data-intensive applications in recent years. Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce, can be set up easily and rapidly on commodity hardware to form a massive computing cluster. In such a cluster, task failures and node failures are not an anomaly, which will cause a substantial impact on Hadoop’s performance. Although Hadoop can restart failed tasks automatically and compensate for slow tasks by enabling speculative execution, many researchers have identified the shortcomings of Hadoop’s fault tolerance. In this research, we try to improve them by designing a simple checkpointing mechanism for Map tasks, and using a revised criterion for identifying slow tasks. Specifically, our checkpointing mechanism saves the partial output produced by the Mappers, and our criterion for identifying slow tasks considers tasks with variable progress rates. By preliminary simulations, although the results show only marginal performance improvement compared with native Hadoop and the LATE scheduler, we believe that our approaches have the potential to offer greater performance gain on real workload.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20131216~20131219[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Fuzhou, Chin

A Crowdsourcing Approach to Promote Safe Walking for Visually Impaired People

[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20141103~20141105[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Hong Kong, Chin

A Job-Oriented Load-Distribution Scheme for Cost-Effective NameNode Service in HDFS

[[abstract]]Apache Hadoop has been widely used in big data processing and distributed computations. In the Hadoop ecosystem, data are stored and managed by the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), in which the NameNode machine is a single point of failure. Although HDFS Federation and HDFS High Availability solve the problem, it comes at significant cost of extra server hardware. Therefore, we aim at improving the availability of the NameNode service in a more cost-effective way. The primary innovation is the joint consideration of MapReduce jobs and the resulting HDFS operations. Specifically, we dynamically allocate a SubNameNode for each job in one of the existing TaskTrackers to provide the NameNode service. Since the load of the single NameNode is naturally distributed to the SubNameNodes, the failure rate of the NameNode machine can be reduced. Moreover, with SubNameNodes more local to the participating TaskTrackers, TaskTrackers can access the NameNode service more efficiently.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]電子