A Rule-based Service Customization Strategy for Smart Home Context-aware Automation

The continuous technical progress of the smartphone built-in modules and embedded sensing techniques has created chances for context-aware automation and decision support in home environments. Studies in this area mainly focus on feasibility demonstrations of the emerging techniques and system architecture design that are applicable to the different use cases. It lacks service customization strategies tailoring the computing service to proactively satisfy users’ expectations. This investigation aims to chart the challenges to take advantage of the dynamic varying context information, and provide solutions to customize the computing service to the contextual situations. This work presents a rule-based service customization strategy which employs a semantic distance-based rule matching method for context-aware service decision making and a Rough Set Theory-based rule generation method to supervise the service customization. The simulation study reveals the trend of the algorithms in time complexity with the number of rules and context items. A prototype smart home system is implemented based on smartphones and commercially available low-cost sensors and embedded electronics. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy in handling the heterogeneous context for decision making and dealing with history context to discover the underlying rules. It shows great potential in employing the proposed strategy for context-aware automation and decision support in smart home applications

Investigation of a hierarchical context-aware architecture for rule-based customisation of mobile computing service

The continuous technical progress in mobile device built-in modules and embedded sensing techniques creates opportunities for context-aware mobile applications. The context-aware computing paradigm exploits the relevant context as implicit input to characterise the user and physical environment and provide a computing service customised to the contextual situation. However, heterogeneity in techniques, complexity of contextual situation, and gap between raw sensor data and usable context keep the techniques from truly integration for extensive use. Studies in this area mainly focus on feasibility demonstration of the emerging techniques, and they lack general architecture support and appropriate service customisation strategy. This investigation aims to provide general system architecture and technical approaches to deal with the heterogeneity problem and efficiently utilise the dynamic context towards proactive computing service that is customised to the contextual situation. The main efforts of this investigation are the approaches to gathering, handling, and utilising the dynamic context information in an efficient way and the decision making and optimisation methods for computing service customisation. In brief, the highlights of this thesis cover the following aspects: (1) a hierarchical context-aware computing architecture supporting interoperable distribution and further use of context; (2) an in-depth analysis and classification of context and the corresponding context acquisition methods; (3) context modelling and context data representation for efficient and interoperable use of context; (4) a rule-based service customisation strategy with a rule generation mechanism to supervise the service customisation. In addition, feasibility demonstration of the proposed system and contribution justification of this investigation are conducted through case studies and prototype implementations. One case study uses mobile built-in sensing techniques to improve the usability and efficiency of mobile applications constrained by resource limitation, and the other employs the mobile terminal and embedded sensing techniques to predict users’ expectations for home facility automatic control. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed context handling architecture and service customisation methods. It shows great potential for employing the context of the computing environment for context-aware adaptation in pervasive and mobile applications but also indicates some underlying problems for further study

Opportunities of Interactive Learning Systems with Evolutions in Mobile Devices: A Case Study

Rapid technical advances and proliferation of mobile devices in recent years have created chances for its application in learning activity. Its strength lies in distribution and access of multimedia content and context aware service provisioning. However, heterogeneity in hardware, software and user preference of mobile computing systems has brought forth new research barriers for cross-platform application. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness, this paper presents the design and implementation of a Wireless Response System (WRS) for in-class interaction between teacher and learners based on the latest mobile phones as a case study. This research aims at utilizing the latest mobile devices and internet technologies such as XML, Ajax to improve the simplicity, friendliness, speed and multimedia capability of the traditional approaches with mobile device features. Tests and evaluations are carried out in class, and results show that the system is user friendly, fast and reliable. The performance evaluation of the system demonstrates that the application of the latest mobile technologies has greatly improved the performance of the system compared with traditional approaches, and the application of mobile devices in learning activities deserves more research effort

Implementing the Emerging Mobile Technologies in Facilitating Mobile Exam System

Because of the wide possession of the handheld mobile devices, the application of the mobile technologies in enhancing learning activities attracts much research interest. This investigation aims at implementing students faced mobile technologies into test and exam to simplify the exam management and performance assessment. The research work focuses on the aspects of mobile device and platform oriented design, light-weight and efficient application, fast and convenient question navigation, and performance assessment, etc. In order to conduct an appropriate information service to the heterogeneous resource limited devices, the context-aware service notion is introduced to the system design. The user profile and device information are modeled and managed efficiently according to the data characteristics and their interrelationships for information adaptation. The assessment module can provide statistical results for learning performance analysis. A prototype system named Mobile Exam System (MES) is implemented on Apple iOS and Google Android OS in the current stage. Based on the work finished, some mobile oriented functions based on promising mobile technologies are suggested for next stages. The test and analysis demonstrate that the implementation of latest mobile technologies into exam is a successful attempt toward pervasive mobile learning and assessment

Mobile Exam System – MES: Architecture for Database Management

As the mobile applications are constantly facing a rapid development in the recent years especially in the academic environment such as student response system (Lópeza, Royoa, Labordab & Calvoa, 2009; Ngai & Gunasekaran, 2007; Mary & Biju, 2008; Nayak & Erinjeri, 2008; Roth, Ivanchenko & Record, 2008; Lu, Stav & Pain, 2009; Lu, 2009; Turning technologies, 2010) used in universities and other educational institutions; there has not been reported an effective and scalable Database Management System to support fast and reliable data storage and retrieval. This paper presents Database Management Architecture for an Innovative Evaluation System based on Mobile Learning Applications. The need for a relatively stable, independent and extensible data model for faster data storage and retrieval is analyzed and investigated. It concludes by emphasizing further investigation for high throughput so as to support multimedia data such as video clips, images and documents