A middleware service for coordinated adaptation of communication services in groups of devices

Abstract—Recent research in pervasive computing has shown that context-awareness and dynamic adaptation are fundamental requirements of mobile distributed applications. However, most approaches that focus on context-aware dynamic adaptation use only the context information available at the mobile device to trigger a local adaptation. However, for distributed collaborative applications this is clearly insufficient, since a same adaptation has to be done, in synch, at all mobile devices of the group, and hence should also be based on a commonly agreed context. Therefore, for such kinds of applications one requires mechanisms and protocols to exchange the context information among the devices and to coordinate of the adaptation operations at a group of mobile device. In this paper we present a middleware service for coordinated adaptation of communication services in groups of devices. At each device this adaptation is achieved with minimal disruption for the application’s remote interactions. This middleware service is based on the notion of global context and a generic protocol for global context election and synchronization of the adaptation steps, which we called Moratus. Our middleware service was implemented using JGroups and evaluated for groups of up to 30 devices, showing acceptable latency for groups of such size. I

[pt] UM PROTOCOLO SENSÍVEL AO CONTEXTO PARA ADAPTAÇÃO COORDENADA DE SERVIÇOS DE COMUNICAÇÃO EM REDES SEM FIO

A pesquisa em redes móveis e computação pervasiva têm demonstrado que adaptação dinâmica e sensibilidade ao contexto são requisitos básicos para aplicações nestes ambientes. Muitos dos trabalhos sobre adaptação dinâmica sensível ao contexto encontrados na literatura se baseiam nas informações de contexto de dispositivos para selecionar e executar uma determinada adaptação, mas somente no próprio dispositivo. Para aplicações distribuídas cientes do contexto envolvendo um grupo de dispositivos portáteis, executando em uma rede sem fio, por vezes faz-se necessária uma adaptação conjunta e coordenada de todos os dispositivos do grupo, adaptação essa que depende de um contexto global do grupo. Este trabalho apresenta Moratus, um protocolo para obter o contexto global de um grupo de dispositivos e executar uma única adaptação de serviços de comunicação em todos os dispositivos de forma coordenada. Este protocolo também leva em conta e trata desconexões involuntárias de membros do grupo durante o processo. O Moratus é o elemento central de um middleware, o SACS, que permite que tal adaptação coordenada ocorra de forma transparente e sem interrupção para a aplicação distribuída que usa o middleware.Research in mobile networks and pervasive computing has shown that dynamic adaptation and context-awareness are basic requirements for applications executing in such environments. Many of the works about context-awareness dynamic adaptation found in the literature use the device's context information to execute an adaptation only locally at the device. For distributed, context-aware applications composed of a group of portable devices (executing in a wireless network) sometimes it is necessary to perform a collective and coordinated adaptation at all the devices of the group, and where this adaptation depends on the global context of the group. This thesis presents Moratus, a protocol that processes the global context of a group and executes a unique adaptation of a communication service at all devices in the group in a coordinated way. This protocol also handles unplanned disconnections of group members during the adaptation process. Moratus is the central element of a middleware named SACS, which allows that such coordinated adaptation is performed transparently and without disruption for the distributed application based on this middleware

Supporting industrial processes by monitoring and visualizing collaborations

In modern dynamic industrial engineering collaboration contexts, professionals such as the facilitators or meeting coordinators, are required to guide participants before, during and after a collaborative process in order to evaluate individual and group performances and the levels of idea generation, discussion, etc. This paper presents a collaboration support system, REGALMINER, that is able to capture, process, monitor and also visualize metadata from collaboration data streams taking advantage of text mining and information retrieval techniques like sentiment analysis (a.k.a. opinion mining) and keyword extraction. The analysis produces a set of scores that represent various meeting indicators that can be used to monitor and evaluate the dynamics of an ongoing collaborative process and to provide automatic interventions to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency. Information visualization techniques are used to present the results of the analysis to the participants of the current collaborative process or to the meeting coordinator, who supervises the meeting at runtime preventing the occurrence of deviations with respect to the meeting agenda and to make necessary interventions. © 2014 IEEE

Supporting elastic collaboration: Integration of collaboration components in dynamic contexts

In dynamic problem-solving situations, groups and organizations have to become more flexible to adapt collaborative workspaces according to their needs. New paradigms propose to bridge two opposing process and ad-hoc perspectives to achieve such flexibility. However, a key challenge relies on the dynamic integration of groupware tools in the same collaborative workspace. This paper proposes a collaborative workspace (Elgar) that supports the Elastic Collaboration concept, and a standard interface to realize the integration of groupware tools, named Elastic Collaboration Components. The paper illustrates the use of such flexible collaborative workspace and the use of groupware tools in a machine diagnosis scenario that requires collaboration. Copyright 2013 ACM

Evaluating coordination support mechanisms in an industrial engineering scenario

Nowadays, industrial engineering collaboration plays a crucial role along product development life cycle, especially for problem-solving and decision-making processes. This paper evaluates the acceptance of two coordination mechanisms for groups when working on a machine diagnosis report collaboratively. The evaluation is organized as a user study and is based on two hypothesis: groups will prefer unstructured over structured coordination, and groups using structured coordination will accomplish their task more efficiently. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Supplementary information files for Effects of COVID-19 home confinement on eating behaviour and physical activity: results of the ECLB-COVID19 international online survey

Supplementary files for article Effects of COVID-19 home confinement on eating behaviour and physical activity: results of the ECLB-COVID19 international online survey. Background: Public health recommendations and governmental measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in numerous restrictions on daily living including social distancing, isolation and home confinement. While these measures are imperative to abate the spreading of COVID-19, the impact of these restrictions on health behaviours and lifestyles at home is undefined. Therefore, an international online survey was launched in April 2020, in seven languages, to elucidate the behavioural and lifestyle consequences of COVID-19 restrictions. This report presents the results from the first thousand responders on physical activity (PA) and nutrition behaviours. Methods: Following a structured review of the literature, the “Effects of home Confinement on multiple Lifestyle Behaviours during the COVID-19 outbreak (ECLB-COVID19)” Electronic survey was designed by a steering group of multidisciplinary scientists and academics. The survey was uploaded and shared on the Google online survey platform. Thirty-five research organisations from Europe, North-Africa, Western Asia and the Americas promoted the survey in English, German, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Slovenian languages. Questions were presented in a differential format, with questions related to responses “before” and “during” confinement conditions. Results: 1047 replies (54% women) from Asia (36%), Africa (40%), Europe (21%) and other (3%) were included in the analysis. The COVID-19 home confinement had a negative effect on all PA intensity levels (vigorous, moderate, walking and overall). Additionally, daily sitting time increased from 5 to 8 h per day. Food consumption and meal patterns (the type of food, eating out of control, snacks between meals, number of main meals) were more unhealthy during confinement, with only alcohol binge drinking decreasing significantly. Conclusion: While isolation is a necessary measure to protect public health, results indicate that it alters physical activity and eating behaviours in a health compromising direction. A more detailed analysis of survey data will allow for a segregation of these responses in different age groups, countries and other subgroups, which will help develop interventions to mitigate the negative lifestyle behaviours that have manifested during the COVID-19 confinement