The BET project: Behavior-enabled IoT

IoT is changing the way Internet is used due to the availability of a large amount of data timely collected from every-day life objects. Designing applications in this new scenario poses new challenges. This extended abstract discusses them and presents the objective of the BeT project whose main aim is to introduce a reference architecture, a conceptual framework, and related techniques to design behavior-enabled IoT systems and applications.Comment: 2 page

beacon based context aware architecture for crowd sensing public transportation scheduling and user habits

Abstract: Crowd sourcing and sensing are relatively recent paradigms that, enabled by the pervasiveness of mobile devices, allow users to transparently contribute in complex problem solving. Their effectiveness depends on people voluntarism, and this could limit their adoption. Recent technologies for automating context-awareness could give a significant impulse to spread crowdsourcing paradigms. In this paper, we propose a distributed software system that exploits mobile devices to improve public transportation efficiency. It takes advantage of the large number of deployed personal mobile devices and uses them as both mule sensors, in cooperation with beacon technology for geofecing, and clients for getting information about bus positions and estimated arrival times. The paper discusses the prototype architecture, its basic application for getting dynamic bus information, and the long-term scope in supporting transportation companies and municipalities, reducing costs, improving bus lines, urban mobility and planning

First Class Futures: Specification and implementation of Update Strategies

International audienceA natural way to benefit from distribution is via asynchronous invocations to methods or services. Upon invocation, a request is enqueued at the destination side and the caller can continue its execution. But a question remains: “what if one wants to manipulate the result of an asynchronous invocation?” First-class futures provide a transparent and easy-to-program answer: a future acts as the placeholder for the result of an asynchronous invocation and can be safely transmitted between processes while its result is not needed. Synchronization occurs automatically upon an access to the result. As references to futures disseminate, a strategy is necessary to propagate the result of each request to the processes that need it. This paper studies the efficient transmission of results: it presents three strategies in a semi-formal manner, providing experimental results highlighting their benefits and drawbacks

First Class Futures: Specification and implementation of Update Strategies

International audienceA natural way to benefit from distribution is via asynchronous invocations to methods or services. Upon invocation, a request is enqueued at the destination side and the caller can continue its execution. But a question remains: “what if one wants to manipulate the result of an asynchronous invocation?” First-class futures provide a transparent and easy-to-program answer: a future acts as the placeholder for the result of an asynchronous invocation and can be safely transmitted between processes while its result is not needed. Synchronization occurs automatically upon an access to the result. As references to futures disseminate, a strategy is necessary to propagate the result of each request to the processes that need it. This paper studies the efficient transmission of results: it presents three strategies in a semi-formal manner, providing experimental results highlighting their benefits and drawbacks

Efficient Data-Intensive Event-Driven Interaction in SOA

International audienceThis paper presents a middleware that enables the efficient delivery of events carrying large attachments. We transpar- ently decouple event-description from event-data, in order to avoid useless data-transfers and modifications to endpoints business logic. Our solution relieves the event-delivery sys- tem of large data transfers, by enabling direct, but trans- parent, publisher to subscriber data-exchange. The experi- ments show that we can reduce the average event delivery time by half, compared to a standard approach requiring the full mediation of the event-delivery system

Analysis of different future objects update strategies in proactive

In large-scale distributed systems, asynchronous communication and future objects are becoming wide spread mechanisms to tolerate high latencies and to improve global performances. Automatic continuation, that is the propagation of a future object outside the activity that has generated it, can be used to further increase concurrency at system level through the anticipation of tasks. An important aspect of automatic continuation, which can cause different performance in different application and deployment scenarios, is the mechanism for updating result values of future objects, when they are ready. In this paper, we analyze the behaviour of the implementation of different updating strategies, by comparing them with the one currently implemented in ProActive. The experimental results show that the lazy home-based strategy behaves better than other strategies in some application scenarios that are very common in distributed applications. 1

Enhancing Cooperative Playback Systems with Efficient Encrypted Multimedia Streaming

Distributed platforms for live and on-demand media streaming delivery such as content distribution networks and media ondemand systems, are being diffused mainly due to the widespread availability of IP-based, bandwidth-capable digital networks. Provision of multimedia group services is usually supported by transmitting media streams to subscribers organized in a multicast group. Although multicast streaming saves bandwidth and improves scalability, it is prone to be hacked. This paper proposes an efficient technique centered on the Blowfish symmetric encryption algorithm for securing media streams based on the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). The developed technique along with an ad-hoc key distribution mechanism is seamlessly embedded into our Java-based cooperative playback system- ViCRO C, which allows multicast transmission on-demand of archived multimedia sessions to a cooperative group of clients. 1

Keyword−based‚ context−aware selection of natural language query patterns

Pervasive access to distributed data sources by means of mobile devices is becoming a frequent realistic operational context in many application domains. In these scenarios data access may be thwarted by the scarce knowledge that users have of the application and of the underlying data schemas and complicated by limited query interfaces, due to the small size of the devices. A viable solution to this problem could be expressing the queries in natural language; however, in applications like medical emergencies, data management systems must obey requirements such as very fast and precise data access which make this solution infeasible. To reduce the time needed to get answers to user queries, the paper proposes a lightweight, context-aware approach based on the combination of keywords with natural language queries. The method employs ontologies and query patterns to support the users in formulating the most appropriate query for retrieving the desired data. Precision and query efficiency are further improved by focusing searches only to the data which are meaningful w.r.t. the current context, thus supporting the users' situation awareness. The approach has been integrated in the SAFE system, developed for mobile and Web, and has been applied in cardiology to support medical personnel in emergency interventions on patients affected by chronic cerebro-vascular diseases. Experimental results have shown that the proposed solution significantly reduces the time to get useful data w.r.t. traditional form-based approaches