Mires: a publish/subscribe middleware for sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of small devices with computational power, wireless communication and sensing capability. These networks have been developed for a wide range of applications, such as habitat monitoring, object tracking, precision agriculture, building monitoring and military systems. Meanwhile, middleware systems have also been proposed in to facilitate both the development of these applications and provide common application services. The development of middleware for sensor networks, however, places new challenges on middleware developers due to the low availability of resources and processing capacity of the sensor nodes. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation of a middleware for WSN named Mires. Mires incorporates characteristics of message-oriented middleware by allowing applications communicate in a publish/subscribe way. In order to illustrate the proposed middleware, we have also developed an environment-monitoring application and a data aggregation service.

Supporting ordering and consistency in a distributed Event Heap for Ubiquitous Computing

The Stanford Event Heap has been shown to provide appropriate support for constructing interactive workspace applications. Given this success it is natural to consider the Event Heap as a platform to support other classes of Ubiquitous Computing applications. In this paper we argue that the distributed, spontaneous nature of these applications places additional demands on the Event Heap that require extensions to both the engineering and API. Suitable extensions are described and their use to support a typical Ubicomp application is discussed.

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Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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Advanced networking services for distributed multimedia streaming applications

Increased network speeds coupled with new services delivered via the Internet have increased the demand for intelligence and flexibility in network systems. This paper argues that both can be provided by new hardware platforms comprised of heterogeneous multi-core systems with specialized communication support. We present and evaluate an experimental network service platform that uses an emergent class of devices—network processors—as its communication support, coupled via a dedicated interconnect to a host processor acting as a computational core. A software infrastructure spanning both enables the dynamic creation of application-specific services on the network processor, mediated by middleware and controlled by kernel-level communication support. Experimental evaluations use a Pentium IV-based computational core coupled with an IXP 2400 network processor. The sample application services run on both include an image manipulation application and application-level multicasting.

Toward the parallelization of GSL

In this paper, we present our joint efforts to design and develop parallel implementations of the GNU Scientific Library for a wide variety of parallel platforms. The multilevel software architecture proposed provides several interfaces: a sequential interface that hides the parallel nature of the library to sequential users, a parallel interface for parallel programmers, and a web services based interface to provide remote access to the routines of the library. The physical level of the architecture includes platforms ranging from distributed and shared-memory multiprocessors to hybrid systems and heterogeneous clusters. Several well-known operations arising in discrete mathematics and sparse linear algebra are used to illustrate the challenges, benefits, and performance of different parallelization approaches.

A web services framework for distributed model management

Distributed model management aims to support the wide-spread sharing and usage of decision support models. Web services is a promising technology for supporting distributed model management activities such as model creation and delivery, model composition, model execution and model maintenance to fulfill dynamic decision-support and problem solving requests. We propose a web services based framework for model management (called MM-WS) to support various activities of the model management life cycle. The framework is based on the recently proposed Integrated Service Planning and Execution (ISP & E) approach for web services integration. We discuss encoding of domain knowledge (as individual models) and utilize the MM-WS framework to interleave synthesis of composite models with their execution. A prototypical implementation with an example is used to illustrate the utility of the framework to enable distributed model management and knowledge integration. Benefits and issues of using the framework to support model-based decision-making in organizational contexts are outlined.

Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone

Quantitative usability requirements are a critical but challenging, and hence an often neglected aspect of a usability engineering process. A case study is described where quantitative usability requirements played a key role in the development of a new user interface of a mobile phone. Within the practical constraints of the project, existing methods for determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these are met, could not be applied as such, therefore tailored methods had to be developed. These methods and their applications are discussed.

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Towards building large scale live media streaming framework for a U-city

This paper proposes camera and media stream management techniques at the middleware level for implementing a U-City (ubiquitous city). The study focuses on overcoming the difficulties associated with developing middleware capable of processing and streaming multimedia data from a large number of cameras by expanding the traditional media processing technology. The content of the study can be classified into two main categories: One is a camera array management technique that involves the middleware-level framework and protocol for managing the camera array. The other is the media stream management technique for effective delivery management and processing of the multimedia streams from the camera array.

A user-friendly platform for developing and accessing grid services

This article presents an enhanced platform that provides a friendly environment of developing grid services and accessing grid services over Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3). This platform includes a class of functions for processing parameters input from a developer via GUI, a class of functions for generating files required for defining a grid service specified, and a class of functions for creating client program and facilitating accesses of the deployed services. As a result, the development and access of grid services requires less special expert knowledge of a developer at the server side and users at the client side, the efficiency of developing and accessing grid services can be improved. This paper describes our design ideas, necessary functions, and implementations. The comparisons with other related toolkits are given and the extended version of the platform on top of the web service environment rather than GT3.

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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ONTRACK: Dynamically adapting music playback to support navigation

Listening to music on personal, digital devices whilst mobile is an enjoyable, everyday activity. We explore a scheme for exploiting this practice to immerse listeners in navigation cues. Our prototype, ONTRACK, continuously adapts audio, modifying the spatial balance and volume to lead listeners to their target destination. First we report on an initial lab-based evaluation that demonstrated the approach’s efficacy: users were able to complete tasks within a reasonable time and their subjective feedback was positive. Encouraged by these results we constructed a handheld prototype. Here, we discuss this implementation and the results of field-trials. These indicate that even with a low-fidelity realisation of the concept, users can quite effectively navigate complicated routes.

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Scaling analysis of a neocortex inspired cognitive model on the Cray XD1

This paper presents the implementation and scaling of a neocortex inspired cognitive model on a Cray XD1. Both software and reconfigurable logic based FPGA implementations of the model are examined. This model belongs to a new class of biologically inspired cognitive models. Large scale versions of these models have the potential for significantly stronger inference capabilities than current conventional computing systems. These models have large amounts of parallelism and simple computations, thus allowing highly efficient hardware implementations. As a result, hardware-acceleration of these models can produce significant speedups over fully software implementations. Parallel software and hardware-accelerated implementations of such a model are investigated for networks of varying complexity. A scaling analysis of these networks is presented and utilized to estimate the throughput of both hardware-accelerated and software implementations of larger networks that utilize the full resources of the Cray XD1. Our results indicate that hardware-acceleration can provide average throughput gains of 75 times over software-only implementations of the networks we examined on this system.

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

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Rapid prototyping of social group dynamics in multiagent systems

In this article we present an engineering approach for the integration of social group dynamics in the behavior modeling of multiagent systems. To this end, a toolbox was created that brings together several theories from the social sciences, each focusing on different aspects of group dynamics. Due to its modular approach, the toolbox can either be used as a central control component of an application or it can be employed temporarily to rapidly test the feasibility of the incorporated theories for a given application domain. This is exemplified by applying the toolbox to different applications.

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Usage-based dynamic pricing of Web services for optimizing resource allocation

Web services technology is becoming an important technological trend in Web application development and integration. Based on open standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, Web services allow Web-based applications to communicate with each other through standardized XML messaging and to form loosely coupled distributed systems. Although the open feature of Web services benefits service providers in servicing consumers, the unlimited computing resources access of Web services to network bandwidth, storage throughput, and CPU time may lead to overexploitation of the resources when applications based on the Web services technology are widely accepted. Therefore, it is critical to optimize the operation of Web services, subject to the QoS requirements of service requests, to assure the total benefits of the service providers and the service consumers. This paper proposes a usage-based dynamic pricing approach to optimizing resource allocation of Web services in the principle of economics, and reports on a pilot implementation demonstrating the technical feasibility of the proposed approach.

Socializing artifacts as a half mirror of the mind

In the near future, our life will normally be surrounded with fairly complicated artifacts, enabled by the autonomous robot and brain–machine interface technologies. In this paper, we argue that what we call the responsibility flaw problem and the inappropriate use problem need to be overcome in order for us to benefit from complicated artifacts. In order to solve these problems, we propose an approach to endowing artifacts with an ability of socially communicating with other agents based on the artifact-as-a-half-mirror metaphor. The idea is to have future artifacts behave according to the hybrid intention composed of the owner’s intention and the social rules. We outline the approach and discuss its feasibility together with preliminary work.

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E-redesigning of society: towards experiential connectivity of generations in Lithuania

The paper reflects on the unique experience of social and technological development in Lithuania since the regaining of independence as a newly reshaped society constructing a distinctive competitive IST-based model at global level. This has presented Lithuanian pattern of how to integrate different experiences and relations between generations in implementing complex information society approaches. The resulting programme in general is linked to the Lisbon objectives of the European Union. The experience of transitional countries in Europe, each different but facing some common problems, may be useful to developing countries in Africa.

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