Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing

This paper presents a survey of sensors for the use in networked embedded sensing devices. The most typical sensors needed for applications in Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing are identified through a survey of 12 typical existing and implemented applications using over 300 wireless sensor nodes. In total, about 45 different types of objects with embedded networked sensor nodes build the basis for the analysis. We identified 7 general types of sensors -namely movement, light, force, temperature, audio, humidity and proximity -that are commonly used in all these settings and subsequently listed typical context information that can be derived from them. Based on the analysis the paper also introduces an exemplary platform, the Particle Sensor Board, where such sensors are implemented and presents an overview of their characteristics.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that offer an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant...

In the late 1980s Mark Weiser, manager of the Computing Science Laboratory at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, articulated and developed the vision of`ubiquitous computing' which has since (under a variety of names including`pervasive computing' and`context-aware computing') become one of the dominant models of future computing environments . Ubiquitous computing, according to Weiser, constituted a`third age' of computing, following the eras of the mainframe and the desktop personal computer (PC). Whereas the mainframe era had been characterized by a single computer system shared between hundreds of users, and the PC era had provided`a computer on every desktop', ubiquitous computing suggests that each user will be served by tens or hundreds of computational devices, located not simply on the desktop but spread throughout the environment. In ubiquitous computing, then, the site of interaction with computation is the everyday world, whose fabric and contents have been augmented with computational capacities, and whose meaning might also shift with these new technology interventions and augmentations.

Geolocation aware services are becoming attractive with the deployment of next generation wireless networks and broadband multimedia wireless networks (i.e. ubiquitous and pervasive computing) especially in indoor and campus areas. In order to construct an ad-hoc network the upcoming ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology holds great promise for revolutionizing wireless communications especially in indoor environments (Office, Residential, Industrial). The two proposals considered in this paper are: a Multi Band OFDM approach, based on the transmission of non-impulse OFDM signals combined with Frequency Hopping (FH), and the direct-sequence (DS) UWB approach, based on impulse radio transmission of UWB DS-coded pulses. In this paper, the problem of ranging error estimation in obstructed line-of-sight (OLOS) multipath channels is investigated. A Time-of-Arrival (ToA) based ranging scheme using UWB radio link is proposed. Results show that the accuracy enhancement depends on two principal factors: the strength of multipath components and the variance of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) delays, which it shows that DS-UWB is best suited for ranging, due to its larger bandwidth and its higher frequencies of operation.

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.

Computer science and engineering nowadays appears to be challenged (and driven) by technological progress and quantitative growth. Among the technological progress challenges are advances in submicron and system-on-a-chip designs, novel communication technologies, micro-electro-mechanical systems, nano and materials sciences. The vast pervasion of global networks, the growing availability of wireless communication technologies for the wide, local and personal area, and the evolving ubiquitous use of mobile and embedded information and communication technologies are indicators for accelerated quantitative growth.

The continuous advances of ubiquitous and pervasive computing have contributed to the successful increase in smart home systems. However, usually these systems are developed at a lower abstraction level very tied to specific technologies. Model-driven approaches have emerged to tackle the design of these systems, improving their reusability and maintainability and decreasing their complexity. Nevertheless, the existing model-driven approaches to develop smart home systems do not cover the whole development process, and testing activities are still relegated to the final programming stages, reducing their reusability for different technologies or platforms. Some approaches have proposed the incorporation of testing activities into the model-driven process. However, the test models defined are very tied to the specific systems and they must be redesigned for every new system to test, reducing thus the reusability of the test behavior. In this setting, this paper presents a process to define reusable tests that may be automatically applied to different smart home systems. The process is integrated into a whole MDD approach that provides support for the modeling of smart home systems at two different abstraction levels, ensuring the reusability of tests also for different smart home platforms.

The big challenge related to the contemporary research on ubiquitous and pervasive computing is that of seamless integration. For the next generation of ubiquitous and distributed applications to emerge, disruptive functionality towards opportunistic and heterogeneous device ensembles is required on all levels of operation. In this paper, we present middleware-level resource management service for situated displays in public smart spaces, acting as a scheduler and an arbiter for mobile clients. From this service, we focus ...

The use of context provision middleware is a promising approach to deal with the low-level functions involved in handling contextual events when building ubiquitous applications. Several middleware are currently available that provide support for context handling, each one adopting different models both to interact with applications and to represent contextual data. We present OpenCOPI (Open COntext Platform Integration), a platform that integrates several context provision middleware systems, providing a unified ontology-based context service for ubiquitous applications. OpenCOPI encapsulates the underlying middleware platforms and represents them as services to be provided to client applications thus facilitating the development of ubiquitous applications. This paper presents the OpenCOPI architecture, main implementation issues, and a case study that discusses the use of OpenCOPI in a ubiquitous scenario.

In this paper I describe a perspective on ambient, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing called the happiness perspective. By using the happiness perspective, the application domain and how the technology is used and experienced, becomes a central and integral part of perceiving ambient technology.

The medium is the message! And the message was literacy, media democracy and music charts. Mostly one single distinguishable media such as TV, the Web, the radio, or books transmitted the message. No in the age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where information flows through a plethora of distributed interlinked media -what is the message ambient media will tell us? What means semantic in this context? Which experiences will it open to us? What is content in the age of ambient media? Ambient media are embedded throughout the natural environment of the consumer -in his home, in his car, in restaurants, and on his mobile device. Predominant sample services are smart wallpapers in homes, location based services, RFID based entertainment services for children, or intelligent homes. The goal of this paper is to define semantic ambient media and discuss the contributions to the SAME 2008 workshop.

In the near future, many hardware devices will be interconnected in large and highly dynamic distributed systems, using standard communication protocols on standard physical links. Such types of systems exist only for computers interconnected by TCP/IP networks, or for hardware devices interconnected in small areas by using specific protocols for the physical link, such as Bluetooth, Ethernet or X-10. The widespread interest in Ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems will give a new impulse to net-centric ...

Emerging ubiquitous and pervasive computing applications often need to know where things are physically located. To meet this need, many locationsensing systems have been developed, but none of the systems for the indoor environment have been widely adopted. In this paper we propose Proximity Mining, a new approach to build location information by mining sensor data. The Proximity Mining does not use geometric views for location modeling, but automatically discovers symbolic views by mining time series data from sensors which are placed in surroundings. We deal with trend curves representing time series sensor data, and use their topological characteristics to classify locations where the sensors are placed.

Research in ubiquitous and pervasive computing is multidisciplinary by nature. Whereas this is clear in the context of bringing different sciences together to construct and conduct new environments on the hardware, software and engineering level, there are other interesting topics of discussion, which are seldom addressed yet. We will focus in this workshop on: a) how can the ubiquitous technology

In recent years, smart environments have emerged as a key target area for ubiquitous and pervasive computing research. As technologists contemplate moving the focus of their research from proprietary laboratories into real living spaces , such as the domestic environment, it becomes important to gain an understanding of existing work and experiences in this area. As part of our work within the Domus strand of the Equator IRC, we have conducted an extensive survey of existing smart environment computing research; we have discovered a rich and diverse set of work drawn from many disciplines. In this paper we present an initial design space for domestic focused technologies and highlight areas that we believe require further work. In addition, we highlight a number of design opportunities drawn from the existing work in this area.

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities. An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing "how things are" for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project. This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an "in-the-world" research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling

The big challenge related to the contemporary research on ubiquitous and pervasive computing is that of seamless integration. For the next generation of ubiquitous and distributed applications to emerge, disruptive functionality towards opportunistic and heterogeneous device ensembles is required on all levels of operation. In this paper, we present middleware-level resource management service for situated displays in public smart spaces, acting as a scheduler and an arbiter for mobile clients. From this service, we focus on multidimensional resource discovery, which facilitates mobile users in locating and deploying situated displays in public and semi-public smart spaces. Dimensions for discovery include dynamic availability of the displays in both spatial and temporal scales, user and rolebased access control, as well as the support for intended service. We have implemented the discovery service and subjected it for alpha testing in an indoor setting. We report a proof-of-concept implementation of the ScreenSpot system and we demonstrate an approach of visualizing the discovery results to the user.

Users in ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments will be much more empowered in ways to access and to control their navigation. Handover, the vital event in which a user changes the attachment point in a Next Generation Network (NGN), is an important occasion and the conditions and environment in which it is executed can offer relevant information for businesses. This paper describes the capabilities of a platform which intends to exploit contextual handover information offering a rich environment that can be used by access and content providers for building innovative context-aware multi-provided services. Based on ontologies, the technique not only eases the building of versatile services but also provides a comprehensive source of information both for enriching user navigation in the network as well as for the improvement of the provider's relationship with their customers.

Systems for Ambient Intelligence environments demand at some stage a service composition task, as a mean of adaptability to the context changes. However, in contrast to what ubiquitous and pervasive computing propose, users generally find themselves involved in the service composition task, by selecting or deciding what to compose and how. This paper proposes the use of Intelligent Agents for the automation of the composition task, providing transparency from the user point of view.

The overall purpose of this article is partly to give a brief overview of the TangO conceptual model, partly to explore the Jini technology as a means for support of pervasive systems in general and the TangO conceptual model in particular, and to emphasize the advantages and weaknesses of the Jini technology for ubiquitous computing. We will validate our survey of the Jini Technology against the TangO model in general, and through an implementation of a Pervasive Shopping Mall in particular.

The broad variety of topics covered under the umbrella of ubiquitous computing led the research community to a fragmentation of the methods and tools used to achieve their goals. By contrast we believe that different goals do not necessarily mean different approaches. Since five years ago, we have been proponents of a unified approach based on the distributed object abstraction which allows synergies to be better exploited. Remote device management, wireless sensor and actuator networks, hardware components and now even reconfigurable hardware platforms and service platforms are considered as part of a large evolving system sharing a common middleware and a single design methodology. Considerable effort was put into the design of basic services to allow autonomous implementations on the smallest micro-controllers in the market.

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems makes ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generating attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program, and for delivering them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components exploited for solving different computational problems.

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. This has to be done in a timely fashion, and the adaptation process must be as fast as possible and mastered. Moreover the adaptation process has to ensure a consistent result when finished whereas adaptations to be implemented cannot be anticipated at design time. In

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. Context is a key to adapt suiting user needs. On the other hand, standard access control trusts users once they have authenticated, despite the fact that they may reach unauthorized contexts. We analyse how taking into account dynamic information like context in the authorization subsystem can improve security, and how this new access control applies to interaction patterns, like messaging or eventing. We experiment and validate our approach using context as an authorization factor for eventing in Web service for device (like UPnP or DPWS), in smart home security. 1

Today, ubiquitous devices lack many of the security features known in desktop computing, an industry that is known to have a plethora of security problems. As ubiquitous devices are increasingly applied in the health care industry, security aspects need to receive even more attention. Clearly, patient-related data is extremely sensitive and legal requirements (such as HIPAA) attempt to enforce strict privacy controls. While we cannot solve the overall problem, our proposal to use RFID tags to authenticate users with ubiquitous devices addresses one of the most fundamental requirements of all security mechanisms: to reliably establish the user's identity. In this paper we discuss some questions that raised during experiments with ubiquitous devices at Graz University Hospital. The main problems which could be identified included security and privacy issues (protection precautions, confidentiality, reliability, sociability). The experiments showed that new and emerging computer technologies such as mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing have an enormous potential for the improvement of manifold workflows in health care, however, psychological and technological research must be carried out together in order to bring clear benefits for the end-users and to optimize workflows in health care in the daily routine.

Research in ubiquitous and pervasive computing is multidisciplinary by nature. Whereas this is clear in the context of bringing different sciences together to construct and conduct new environments on the hardware, software and engineering level, there are other interesting topics of discussion, which are seldom addressed yet. We will focus in this workshop on: a) how can the ubiquitous technology

Research in ubiquitous and pervasive computing is multidisciplinary by nature. Whereas this is clear in the context of bringing different sciences together to construct and conduct new environments on the hardware, software and engineering level, there are other interesting topics of discussion, which are seldom addressed yet. We will focus in this workshop on: a) how can the ubiquitous technology

The continuous advances of ubiquitous and pervasive computing have contributed to the successful increase in smart home systems. However, usually these systems are developed at a lower abstraction level very tied to specific technologies. Model-driven approaches have emerged to tackle the design of these systems, improving their reusability and maintainability and decreasing their complexity. Nevertheless, the existing model-driven approaches to

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities. An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing "how things are" for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project. This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an "in-the-world" research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling

In this paper, we describe a series of techniques for building sensors, actuators and circuit boards that behave, look, and feel like paper. By embedding electro-active inks, conductive threads and smart materials directly into paper during the papermaking process, we have developed seamless composites that are capable of supporting new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at affordable costs.

The medium is the message! And the message was literacy, media democracy and music charts. Mostly one single distinguishable media such as TV, the Web, the radio, or books transmitted the message. No in the age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where information flows through a plethora of distributed interlinked media -what is the message ambient media will tell us? What means semantic in this context? Which experiences will it open to us? What is content in the age of ambient media? Ambient media are embedded throughout the natural environment of the consumer -in his home, in his car, in restaurants, and on his mobile device. Predominant sample services are smart wallpapers in homes, location based services, RFID based entertainment services for children, or intelligent homes. The goal of this paper is to define semantic ambient media and discuss the contributions to the SAME 2008 workshop.

The broad variety of topics covered under the umbrella of ubiquitous computing led the research community to a fragmentation of the methods and tools used to achieve their goals. By contrast we believe that different goals do not necessarily mean different approaches. Since five years ago, we have been proponents of a unified approach based on the distributed object abstraction which allows synergies to be better exploited. Remote device management, wireless sensor and actuator networks, hardware components and now even reconfigurable hardware platforms and service platforms are considered as part of a large evolving system sharing a common middleware and a single design methodology. Considerable effort was put into the design of basic services to allow autonomous implementations on the smallest micro-controllers in the market.

The broad variety of topics covered under the umbrella of ubiquitous computing led the research community to a fragmentation of the methods and tools used to achieve their goals. By contrast we believe that different goals do not necessarily mean different approaches. Since five years ago, we have been proponents of a unified approach based on the distributed object abstraction which allows synergies to be better exploited. Remote device management, wireless sensor and actuator networks, hardware components and now even reconfigurable hardware platforms and service platforms are considered as part of a large evolving system sharing a common middleware and a single design methodology. Considerable effort was put into the design of basic services to allow autonomous implementations on the smallest micro-controllers in the market.

In this paper, we describe a series of techniques for building sensors, actuators and circuit boards that behave, look, and feel like paper. By embedding electro-active inks, conductive threads and smart materials directly into paper during the papermaking process, we have developed seamless composites that are capable of supporting new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at affordable costs.

The use of context provision middleware is a promising approach to deal with the low-level functions involved in handling contextual events when building ubiquitous applications. Several middleware are currently available that provide support for context handling, each one adopting different models both to interact with applications and to represent contextual data. We present OpenCOPI (Open COntext Platform Integration), a platform that integrates several context provision middleware systems, providing a unified ontology-based context service for ubiquitous applications. OpenCOPI encapsulates the underlying middleware platforms and represents them as services to be provided to client applications thus facilitating the development of ubiquitous applications. This paper presents the OpenCOPI architecture, main implementation issues, and a case study that discusses the use of OpenCOPI in a ubiquitous scenario.

The use of context provision middleware is a promising approach to deal with the low-level functions involved in handling contextual events when building ubiquitous applications. Several middleware are currently available that provide support for context handling, each one adopting different models both to interact with applications and to represent contextual data. We present OpenCOPI (Open COntext Platform Integration), a platform that integrates several context provision middleware systems, providing a unified ontology-based context service for ubiquitous applications. OpenCOPI encapsulates the underlying middleware platforms and represents them as services to be provided to client applications thus facilitating the development of ubiquitous applications. This paper presents the OpenCOPI architecture, main implementation issues, and a case study that discusses the use of OpenCOPI in a ubiquitous scenario.

The continuous advances of ubiquitous and pervasive computing have contributed to the successful increase in smart home systems. However, usually these systems are developed at a lower abstraction level very tied to specific technologies. Model-driven approaches have emerged to tackle the design of these systems, improving their reusability and maintainability and decreasing their complexity. Nevertheless, the existing model-driven approaches to develop smart home systems do not cover the whole development process, and testing activities are still relegated to the final programming stages, reducing their reusability for different technologies or platforms. Some approaches have proposed the incorporation of testing activities into the model-driven process. However, the test models defined are very tied to the specific systems and they must be redesigned for every new system to test, reducing thus the reusability of the test behavior. In this setting, this paper presents a process to define reusable tests that may be automatically applied to different smart home systems. The process is integrated into a whole MDD approach that provides support for the modeling of smart home systems at two different abstraction levels, ensuring the reusability of tests also for different smart home platforms.

Developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing herald a future in which computation is embedded into our daily lives. Such a vision raises important questions about how people, especially families, will be able to engage with and trust such systems whilst ...

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. This has to be done in a timely fashion, and the adaptation process must be as fast as possible and mastered. Moreover the adaptation process has to ensure a consistent result when finished whereas adaptations to be implemented cannot be anticipated at design time. In this paper we present our mechanism for self-adaptation based on the aspect oriented programming paradigm called Aspect of Assembly (AAs). Using AAs: (1) the adaptations process is fast and its duration is mastered; (2) adaptations' entities are independent of each other thanks to the weaver logical merging mechanism; and (3) the high variability of the software infrastructure can be managed using a mono or multi-cycle weaving approach.

In this paper we discuss the problem of privacy and information disclosure in ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments. We describe a framework that uses context information to selectively disclose personal information to service providers while keeping the humancomputer interaction non-intrusive. For each interaction with a service provider, our framework will take previously disclosed personal information, user preferences and available privacy enhancing technologies into consideration to conduct an optimal information revealing strategy in a particular situation. The use of context-awareness in our framework provides the ability to infer revealing information and enables the user to adjust the privacy control in a non-intrusive manner.