Ubiquitous enterprise service adaptations based on contextual user behavior

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have created the demand for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices. Further, with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the services are being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. Traditional human–computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information captured from mobile user behavior. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of such adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedure of the original process according to their behavior under different contexts. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. Based on this model, we analyze the design and implementation issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to adapt them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous enterprise information system.

Exploring context-awareness for ubiquitous computing in the healthcare domain

Ubiquitous technologies have potentials to play major roles in different real world organizational settings. One of the areas where applying ubiquitous technologies has been given a lot of attention is in the healthcare domain. Here, users are frequently on the move while at the same time relying increasingly on centralized computerized information. In this paper, we explore ubiquitous technologies in the real world through two studies in the healthcare domain. First, we look at the use and usability of a ubiquitous electronic patient record (EPR) system distributed on desktop and laptop computers throughout a large hospital. Secondly, we present an extension to this ubiquitous computing environment in the form of a context-aware mobile computer terminal prototype. The usability of the mobile EPR prototype was evaluated in both laboratory and field settings. Our results indicate that the usefulness of a ubiquitous computing environment supporting work activities in healthcare can benefit from context-aware mobile information access. However, interaction design for such systems must be carefully thought out and thoroughly evaluated. Also, while the use of mobile and stationary computers complement each other very well, we found that the usefulness of ubiquitous computing environments in healthcare may benefit from additional elements such as situated displays at key locations and on key objects, and from seamless integration between the different devices comprising the system as a whole.     

Multi-device application middleware: leveraging the ubiquity of the Web with webinos

The broad range of connected devices has turned the Internet into a ubiquitous concept. In addition to desktop and laptop PCs, the Internet currently connects mobile devices, home entertainment systems, and even in-car units. From this ubiquitous evolution towards sensor-rich devices, the opportunity arises for various new types of innovative software application. However, alongside rises the issue of managing the increasing diversity of device characteristics and capabilities. As device fragmentation grows, application developers are facing the need to cover a wider variety of target devices and usage scenarios. In result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be an important challenge when developing applications for a ubiquitous ecosystem. In this article, we present the webinos platform, a distributed Web runtime platform that leverages the Web for supporting self-adaptive cross-device applications. In order to enable the development of such immersive ubiquitous applications, we introduce and evaluate the concept of a context-aware federated overlay architecture.     

Ubiquitous recommender systems

Ubiquitous recommender systems combine characteristics from ubiquitous systems and recommender systems in order to provide personalized recommendations to users in ubiquitous environments. Although not a new research area, ubiquitous recommender systems research has not yet been reviewed and classified in terms of ubiquitous research and recommender systems research, in order to deeply comprehend its nature, characteristics, relevant issues and challenges. It is our belief that ubiquitous recommenders can nowadays take advantage of the progress mobile phone technology has made in identifying items around, as well as utilize the faster wireless connections and the endless capabilities of modern mobile devices in order to provide users with more personalized and context-aware recommendations on location to aid them with their task at hand. This work focuses on ubiquitous recommender systems, while a brief analysis of the two fundamental areas from which they emerged, ubiquitous computing and recommender systems research is also conducted. Related work is provided, followed by a classification schema and a discussion about the correlation of ubiquitous recommenders with classic ubiquitous systems and recommender systems: similarities inevitably exist, however their fundamental differences are crucial. The paper concludes by proposing UbiCARS: a new class of ubiquitous recommender systems that will combine characteristics from ubiquitous systems and context-aware recommender systems in order to utilize multidimensional context modeling techniques not previously met in ubiquitous recommender systems.     

Task selection in spatial crowdsourcing from worker’s perspective

With the progress of mobile devices and wireless broadband, a new eMarket platform, termed spatial crowdsourcing is emerging, which enables workers (aka crowd) to perform a set of spatial tasks (i.e., tasks related to a geographical location and time) posted by a requester. In this paper, we study a version of the spatial crowdsourcing problem in which the workers autonomously select their tasks, called the worker selected tasks (WST) mode. Towards this end, given a worker, and a set of tasks each of which is associated with a location and an expiration time, we aim to find a schedule for the worker that maximizes the number of performed tasks. We first prove that this problem is NP-hard. Subsequently, for small number of tasks, we propose two exact algorithms based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound strategies. Since the exact algorithms cannot scale for large number of tasks and/or limited amount of resources on mobile platforms, we propose different approximation algorithms. Finally, to strike a compromise between efficiency and accuracy, we present a progressive algorithms. We conducted a thorough experimental evaluation with both real-world and synthetic data on desktop and mobile platforms to compare the performance and accuracy of our proposed approaches.     

Usability study of ME2.0

Mobile context-aware applications execute in the background of hosts mobile devices. The applications source process and aggregate hosts’ contextual and personal information. This information is disclosed to ubiquitously pervasive services that adapt their offerings to individual preferences. Unfortunately, many developers continue to ignore the user perspective in context-aware application designs as they complicate their overall task and generate exponential requirements. The additional incorporation of privacy mechanisms in context-aware applications to safeguard context and personal information disclosures also complicates users’ tasks resulting to misconfigured or completely abandoned applications. Misconfigured applications give end-users a false assurance of privacy exposing them to comprising services. We present a usability study on Mobile Electronic Personality Version 2 a privacy enhanced context-aware mobile application for personalising ubiquitous services and adapting pervasive smart-spaces. We draw conclusions on key issues related to user needs, based on user interviews, surveys, prototypes and field evaluations. Users’ needs are evaluated against five themes, learn-ability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction and privacy contention. In addition, design layout preferences, privacy manageability and consensus design comprehension are also evaluated. Clarity of priorities in context-aware mobile applications shaped by usability studies effectively increases the acceptance of levels of potential users.     

A model for learning objects adaptation in light of mobile and context-aware computing

The growth usage of mobile technologies and devices such as smartphones and tablets, and the almost ubiquitous wireless communication set the stage for the development of novel kinds of applications. One possibility is exploiting this scenario in the field of education, so creating more intelligent, flexible and customizable systems. Mobile devices can be used to help students to learn, considering their learning styles, surroundings, devices and profiles. In this way, the main goal of this article is to propose EduAdapt, an architectural model for the adaptation of learning objects considering device characteristics, learning style and other student’s context information. To make this adaptation we used inferences and rules in a proposed ontology, named OntoAdapt. We believe that such ontology can help recommending learning objects to students or adapt these objects according to the context (context-aware computing). We evaluate this proposal in two ways. Firstly, we used scenarios and metrics to assess the ontology. Secondly, we developed a prototype of EduAdapt model and submitted to a class of 20 students with the intention of evaluating the usability and adherence to adapted objects, resulting in a 78 % of acceptance. In brief, the evaluation presented encouraging results, indicating that the proposed model would be useful in the learning process.     

Building ubiquitous QoC-aware applications through model-driven software engineering

As every-day mobile devices can easily be equipped with multiple sensing capabilities, ubiquitous applications are expected to exploit the richness of the context information that can be collected by these devices in order to provide the service that is the most appropriate to the situation of the user. However, the design and implementation of such context-aware ubiquitous appplications remain challenging as there exist very few models and tools to guide application designers and developers in mastering the complexity of context information. This becomes even more crucial as context is by nature imperfect. One way to address this issue is to associate to context information meta-data representing its quality. We propose a generic and extensible design process for context-aware applications taking into account the quality of context (QoC). We demonstrate its use on a prototype application for sending flash sale offers to mobile users. We present extensive performance results in terms of memory and processing time of both elementary context management operations and the whole context policy implementing the Flash sale application. The cost of adding QoC management is also measured and appears to be limited to a few milliseconds. We show that a context policy with 120 QoC-aware nodes can be processed in less than 100 ms on a mobile phone. Moreover, a policy of almost 3000 nodes can be instantiated before exhausting the resources of the phone. This enables very rich application scenarios enhancing the user experience and will favor the development of new ubiquitous applications.     

iConAwa - An intelligent context-aware system

Context-awareness becomes an increasingly important concept in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. Applications and services, which run in these kinds of highly dynamic environments, should be aware of and adapt to their contexts. Context-aware applications improve and enrich people’s interactions with devices, computers and other people.In this paper, design and development of iConAwa, which is an intelligent context-aware multi-agent system proactively providing mobile users with context-aware information and services, is described. In iConAwa, mobile users can get information and services about nearby resources (attraction points) according to their context and also communicate with each other by exchanging messages. Context and point of interest ontologies are developed in OWL. Context and points of interest are modelled in a flexible and extensible way by the developed ontology models. Knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse are also provided by using these ontology models. iConAwa makes use of rule-based context reasoning which provides derivation of high level implicit context from low level explicit context. With this approach context reasoning is decoupled from the source code of the system. JADE agent development framework is used to develop the agents and Jena semantic web framework is used to manipulate ontologies and for rule based reasoning.     

CARISMA: context-aware reflective middleware system for mobile applications

Mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, have gained wide-spread popularity. These devices will increasingly be networked, thus enabling the construction of distributed applications that have to adapt to changes in context, such as variations in network bandwidth, battery power, connectivity, reachability of services and hosts, etc. In this paper, we describe CARISMA, a mobile computing middleware which exploits the principle of reflection to enhance the construction of adaptive and context-aware mobile applications. The middleware provides software engineers with primitives to describe how context changes should be handled using policies. These policies may conflict. We classify the different types of conflicts that may arise in mobile computing and argue that conflicts cannot be resolved statically at the time applications are designed, but, rather, need to be resolved at execution time. We demonstrate a method by which policy conflicts can be handled; this method uses a microeconomic approach that relies on a particular type of sealed-bid auction. We describe how this method is implemented in the CARISMA middleware architecture and sketch a distributed context-aware application for mobile devices to illustrate how the method works in practice. We show, by way of a systematic performance evaluation, that conflict resolution does not imply undue overheads, before comparing our research to related work and concluding the paper.     

Architectural patterns for applications with external user interface elements

Coupling mobile devices and other remote interaction technology with software systems surrounding the user enables for building interactive environments under explicit user control. The realization of explicit interaction in ubiquitous or pervasive computing environments introduces a physical distribution of input devices, and technology embedded into the environment of the user. To fulfill the requirements of emerging trends in mobile interaction, common approaches for system design need adaptations and extensions. This paper presents the adaptation and extension of the Model-View-Controller approach to design applications of remote, complementary, duplicated and detached user interface elements.     

EgoSpaces: facilitating rapid development of context-aware mobile applications

Today's mobile applications require constant adaptation to their changing environments, or contexts. Technological advances have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information available for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires a middleware that provides context information to applications in an abstract form. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such a middleware that allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract context specifications in settings that exhibit transient interactions with opportunistically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions the middleware provides and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using it. Finally, we provide examples demonstrating the infrastructure's ability to support differing tasks from a wide variety of application domains.     

Context-aware mobile service for routing the fastest subway path

The rapid growth of the IT industry during the last few decades has increased demands on mobile devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and GPS navigation systems. With emerging concepts of context-aware computing, the mobile devices can provide mobile users with timely information by using not only common knowledge but also environmental context such as current time and location. Lately, the context-aware applications have been actively investigated and have been contributed to numerous application areas such as real-time electronic catalogues and navigation systems for tourists. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware application for finding the fastest subway route. We have developed the proposed application as an implemented system named Optimize Your Time System (OYT System, for short). A terminal device of the OYT System is equipped with a GPS receiver and the system’s server contains a timetable of all trains in a target subway system. On perceiving users’ context such as current time and location automatically from GPS, the OYT System can display the optimal route which takes the shortest time for the user to reach the specified destination. In this paper, we present details of the OYT System and some experimental examples.     

MIMOSA: context-aware adaptation for ubiquitous web access

The ubiquitous computing scenario is characterized by heterogeneity of devices used to access services, and by frequent changes in the user’s context. Hence, adaptation according to the user’s context and the used devices is necessary to allow mobile users to efficiently exploit Internet-based services. In this paper, we present a distributed framework, named MIMOSA, that couples a middleware for context-awareness with an intermediary-based architecture for content adaptation. MIMOSA provides an effective and efficient solution for the adaptation of Internet services on the basis of a comprehensive notion of context, by means of techniques for aggregating context data from distributed sources, deriving complex contextual situations from raw sensor data, evaluating adaptation policies, and solving possible conflicts. The middleware allows programmers to modularly build complex adaptive services starting from simple ones, and includes tools for assisting the user in declaring her preferences, as well as mechanisms for detecting incorrect system behaviors due to a wrong choice of adaptation policies. The effectiveness and efficiency of MIMOSA are shown through the development of a prototype adaptive service, and by extensive experimental evaluations.     

Augmented reality agents for user interface adaptation

Most augmented reality (AR) applications are primarily concerned with letting a user browse a 3D virtual world registered with the real world. More advanced AR interfaces let the user interact with the mixed environment, but the virtual part is typically rather finite and deterministic. In contrast, autonomous behavior is often desirable in ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp), which requires the computers embedded into the environment to adapt to context and situation without explicit user intervention. We present an AR framework that is enhanced by typical Ubicomp features by dynamically and proactively exploiting previously unknown applications and hardware devices, and adapting the appearance of the user interface to persistently stored and accumulated user preferences. Our framework explores proactive computing, multi‐user interface adaptation, and user interface migration. We employ mobile and autonomous agents embodied by real and virtual objects as an interface and interaction metaphor, where agent bodies are able to opportunistically migrate between multiple AR applications and computing platforms to best match the needs of the current application context. We present two pilot applications to illustrate design concepts. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hayeks Katallaxie — Ein zukunftsweisendes Konzept für die Wirtschaftsinformatik?

The mobile and increasingly ubiquitous use of information technology leads to more dynamic, constantly self-reconfiguring networks. Their services are available anytime and anywhere; as software agents, they can make local, context-aware decisions. F. A. von Hayek developed a theory for economic coordination based on individual decision making. This paper presents the explanation concepts of economic self-organisation as at least one option for the design of decentralized coordination of information systems consisting of autonomous software agents with limited information processing capacity and incomplete information. Experiments using a multi-agent system show that a targeted change of this basic rule set directly influences the behaviour of the individual elements and indirectly the behaviour of the overall system.     

A new model for context-aware transactions in mobile services

With the ubiquity of handheld devices (such as smart phones and PDAs) and the availability of a wide range of mobile services (such as mobile banking, road traffic updates, and weather forecast), people can nowadays access information and conduct online transactions virtually anywhere and anytime. In such flexible, dynamic but less reliable environment, transaction management technology is believed to provide service reliability and data consistency. Indeed, in mobile and ubiquitous environments where devices as well as services can seamlessly join and leave the ubiquitous network; transaction management can be very helpful during the recovery of services from failure. Current transaction models and commit protocols do not take into account context information. However, in mobile environments, it is imperative to consider context information in the commit of a transaction—i.e., a transaction can be successfully completed if it meets the required context. In this paper, we propose a new model for context-aware transactions and their performance management in mobile environments. Unlike conventional transactions, context-aware transactions adapt to the required context. By context, we mean the service’s context as well as the users’ context that includes users’ needs and preferences. This paper designs and develops the proposed transaction model and evaluates its performance in terms of time and message complexities as well as transaction’s throughput.     

Adaptive Behaviors in Autonomous Navigation with Collision Avoidance and Bounded Velocity of an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

Integration of Control Theory and Genetic Programming paradigm toward development a family of controllers is addressed in this paper. These controllers are applied for autonomous navigation with collision avoidance and bounded velocity of an omnidirectional mobile robot. We introduce the concepts of natural and adaptive behaviors to relate each control objective with a desired behavior for the mobile robot. Natural behaviors lead the system to fulfill a task inherently. In this work, the motion of the mobile robot to achieve desired position, ensured by applying a Control-Theory-based controller, defines the natural behavior. The adaptive behavior, learned through Genetic-Programming, fits the robot motion in order to avoid collision with an obstacle while fulfilling velocity constraints. Hence, the behavior of the mobile robot is the addition of the natural and the adaptive behaviors. Our proposed methodology achieves the discovery of 9402 behaviors without collisions where asymptotic convergence to desired goal position is demonstrated by Lyapunov stability theory. Effectiveness of proposed framework is illustrated through a comparison between experiments and numerical simulations for a real mobile robot.     

Mobile context-based framework for threat monitoring in urban environment with social threat monitor

Engaging users in threat reporting is important in order to improve threat monitoring in urban environments. Today, mobile applications are mostly used to provide basic reporting interfaces. With a rapid evolution of mobile devices, the idea of context awareness has gained a remarkable popularity in recent years. Modern smartphones and tablets are equipped with a variety of sensors including accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure gauges, light and GPS sensors. Additionally, the devices become computationally powerful which allows for real-time processing of data gathered by their sensors. Universal access to the Internet via WiFi hot-spots and GSM network makes mobile devices perfect platforms for ubiquitous computing. Although there exist numerous frameworks for context-aware systems, they are usually dedicated to static, centralized, client-server architectures. There is still space for research in the field of context modeling and reasoning for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight context-aware framework for mobile devices that uses data gathered by mobile device sensors and performs on-line reasoning about possible threats based on the information provided by the Social Threat Monitor system developed in the INDECT project.     

High level MANET protocol: Enhancing the communication support for mobile collaborative work

Mobile collaborative activities involve on-demand interactions among nomad users. Unavailability of communication support in the physical scenario where users are located cannot be a limitation to carry out such collaboration instances. Mobile workers can take advantage of the communication capability embedded in their mobile devices in order to create communication channels between them. The Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are infrastructures that can be used to support the nomad users' activities. However, these networks have a short communication threshold; therefore, they need to include a routing protocol as part of its infrastructure to allow mobile workers to collaborate when they are not physically close. This paper presents an application level routing protocol that was designed to support nomad workers performing mobile collaborative activities. The protocol, named High Level MANET Protocol (HLMP), provides several automatic services that are required by mobile collaborative systems. Some of these services are the automatic MANET formation, peer detection and messages routing. HLMP has been implemented in a mobile communication infrastructure and used in several mobile groupware systems.