Trust management in ubiquitous computing: A Bayesian approach

Designing a trust management scheme that can effectively evaluate the relationships among devices in pervasive computing environments is a challenging task. This paper continues the investigation of our recently proposed probabilistic trust management scheme for pervasive computing environments. We argue that in addition to allowing a device to find other appropriate devices with which to interact, while detecting those that are malicious, our trust management scheme is also capable of (1) allowing a device to judge the trustworthiness of another device it interacts with, while making a better use of the received recommendations and (2) behaving as expected when a device has little or enough experience of interactions with other devices and changes dynamically occur in the proportion of malicious devices. Simulation experiments are provided to assess the achievement of the stated goals, using some representative performance metrics.     

Access control management for ubiquitous computing

The purpose of ubiquitous computing is anywhere and anytime access to information within computing infrastructures that is blended into a background and no longer be reminded. This ubiquitous computing poses new security challenges while the information can be accessed at anywhere and anytime because it may be applied by criminal users. Additionally, the information may contain private information that cannot be shared by all user communities. Several approaches are developed to protect information for pervasive environments against malicious users. However, ad hoc mechanisms or protocols are typically added in the approaches by compromising disorganized policies or additional components to protect from unauthorized access.In this paper, we present a usage control model to protect services and devices in ubiquitous computing environments, which allows the access restrictions directly on services and object documents. The model not only supports complex constraints for pervasive computing, such as services, devices and data types but also provides a mechanism to build rich reuse relationships between models and objects. Finally, comparisons with related works are analysed.     

A semantic service discovery approach for ubiquitous computing

Services in the ubiquitous computing are heterogeneous in nature. To be pervasive, these services should be defined in terms of their functionality and capabilities rather than the meaningless Universally Unique IDentifiers (UUIDs) or types of services. With that, clients can access the proper service based on semantic requests, rather then a pre-configured profile. In this paper, we study the requirements for semantic query to be feasible in service discovery processes. Current discovery protocols and the concept of semantics are brought together to construct a framework to realize the semantic service discovery for ubiquitous computing. Many issues are discussed in relation to service discovery topologies, ontology languages, and semantic query languages.     

Decision tree construction on GPU: ubiquitous parallel computing approach

General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU) computing with CUDA has been effectively used in scientific applications, where huge accelerations have been achieved. However, while today’s traditional GPGPU can reduce the execution time of parallel code by many times, it comes at the expense of significant power and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose ubiquitous parallel computing approach for construction of decision tree on GPU. In our approach, we exploit parallelism of well-known ID3 algorithm for decision tree learning by two levels: at the outer level of building the tree node-by-node, and at the inner level of sorting data records within a single node. Thus, our approach not only accelerates the construction of decision tree via GPU computing, but also does so by taking care of the power and energy consumption of the GPU. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms purely GPU-based implementation and CPU-based sequential implementation by several times.     

System software for ubiquitous computing

The authors identify two key characteristics of ubiquitous computing systems: physical integration and spontaneous interoperation. They examine how these properties affect the design of ubiquitous computing software and discuss future directions.     

Design patterns for ubiquitous computing

Design patterns offer a solution to the difficult problem of reusing prior design knowledge. We propose that such patterns also offer an effective way to communicate solutions to ubiquitous computing design problems. Some of the ubicomp design patterns include context-sensitive I/O, physical-virtual associations, global data, proxies for devices, follow-me display, appropriate levels of attention, and anticipation. Design patterns range in scale from a city to a room and, together, form a pattern language that designers can adapt to a project's particular level of complexity or detail.     

Acoustic modems for ubiquitous computing

Considers how sound offers features not available with other short-range, low bandwidth communication technologies, such as radio and infrared, enabling communication among small computing devices and humans in a ubiquitous computing environment.     

Enabling ubiquitous sensing with RFID

Radio frequency identification has attracted considerable press attention in recent years, and for good reasons: RFID not only replaces traditional barcode technology, it also provides additional features and removes boundaries that limited the use of previous alternatives. Printed bar codes are typically read by a laser-based optical scanner that requires a direct line-of-sight to detect and extract information. With RFID, however, a scanner can read the encoded information even when the tag is concealed for either aesthetic or security reasons. In the future, RFID tags will likely be used as environmental sensors on an unprecedented scale.     

Location systems for ubiquitous computing

This survey and taxonomy of location systems for mobile-computing applications describes a spectrum of current products and explores the latest in the field. To make sense of this domain, we have developed a taxonomy to help developers of location-aware applications better evaluate their options when choosing a location-sensing system. The taxonomy may also aid researchers in identifying opportunities for new location-sensing techniques     

Activity-based computing: support for mobility and collaboration in ubiquitous computing

This paper presents the design philosophy of activity-based computing (ABC), which addresses mobility and cooperation in human work activities. Furthermore, it presents the ABC framework, which is a ubiquitous computing infrastructure supporting ABC. The idea of ABC and the aim of the ABC framework is to: (1) support human activity by managing its collection of work tasks on a computer, (2) support mobility by distributing activities across heterogeneous computing environments, (3) support asynchronous collaboration by allowing several people to participate in an activity, and (4) support synchronous, real-time collaboration by enabling desktop conferencing by sharing the activity across several clients. During a period of two years, the ABC framework has been co-designed and evaluated in close cooperation with a range of clinicians in a hospital.

On location models for ubiquitous computing

Common queries regarding information processing in ubiquitous computing are based on the location of physical objects. No matter whether it is the next printer, next restaurant, or a friend is searched for, a notion of distances between objects is required. A search for all objects in a certain geographic area requires the possibility to define spatial ranges and spatial inclusion of locations. In this paper, we discuss general properties of symbolic and geometric coordinates. Based on that, we present an overview of existing location models allowing for position, range, and nearest neighbor queries. The location models are classified according to their suitability with respect to the query processing and the involved modeling effort along with other requirements. Besides an overview of existing location models and approaches, the classification of location models with respect to application requirements can assist developers in their design decisions.     

Beyond ubiquitous computing: The Malaysian HoneyBee project for Innovative Digital Economy

In the proposed advanced computing environment, known as the HoneyBee Platform, various computing devices using single or multiple interfaces and technologies/standards need to communicate and cooperate efficiently with a certain level of security and safety measures. These computing devices may be supported by different types of operating systems with different features and levels of security support. In order to ensure that all operations within the environment can be carried out seamlessly in an ad-hoc manner, there is a need for a common mobile platform to be developed. The purpose of this long-term project is to investigate and implement a new functional layered model of the common mobile platform with secured and trusted ensemble computing architecture for an innovative Digital Economic Environment in the Malaysian context. This mobile platform includes a lightweight operating system to provide a common virtual environment, a middleware for providing basic functionalities of routing, resource and network management, as well as to provide security, privacy and a trusted environment. A generic application programming interface is provided for application developers to access underlying resources. The aim is for the developed platform to act as the building block for an ensemble environment, upon which higher level applications could be built. Considered as the most essential project in a series of related projects towards a more digital socio-economy in Malaysia, this article presents the design of the target computational platform as well as the conceptual framework for the HoneyBee project.     

A polymorphic service management scheme based on virtual object for ubiquitous computing environment

For the ubiquitous computing environment, an important assumption is that all the components in any specific environment are connected with each other. With this assumption, we introduce an effective scheme to provide a personalized service based on Virtual Personal World (VPW). Virtual Personal World (VPW) which is a model focused on service continuity with specially designed components. Previous ubiquitous frameworks have been concerned with the location where a user is provided any specific service. However those questions above are not the most important problems anymore in VPW. It concentrates on the point whether the services are successive or not, wherever a user goes to any place. Services are not regarded as a sum of functions which is embedded on any objects in any certain place. We conceptually define a resource management scheme based on a unified form of the object which participates in service provision, so called virtual object (VO). Thus the service can be described as the sum of functions of VOs. With our resource management scheme, users can utilize their required object as VO wherever it is located. And also, for better utilization of VPW service, we introduce a novel form of profiles and service provision scheme based on the polymorphism. Our simulation result shows that the Ratio of VPW pure service time is 0.15 % higher than conventional location based service. And also the possibility that users can meet adequate service he wants raised 29 % in our proposed VPW environment.     

Exploring the grid's potential for ubiquitous computing

In contrast to many scientific disciplines embracing the vision of a uniform global distributed infrastructure to support their activities, ubiquitous computing is currently characterized by an extremely diverse set of infrastructure platforms. Such heterogeneity makes conducting large-scale wide-area experiments extremely difficult - most researchers choose instead to construct their own ubiquitous computing environment within which they can run their experiments. This heterogeneity makes the basic vision of ubiquitous computing difficult to realize because interworking between components at different sites isn't possible. One suggestion is that grid technologies will make an ideal starting point for developing future infrastructure support for ubiquitous computing, facilitating the deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies.     

Automatic partitioning for prototyping ubiquitous computing applications

A major challenge facing ubiquitous computing R&D is the difficulty of writing software for complex, distributed applications. Automatic application partitioning can help development teams rapidly prototype distributed ubiquitous computing systems.     

ActiveCampus: experiments in community-oriented ubiquitous computing

The continuing proliferation of handheld computing devices offers a new platform for mobile computing applications that could enrich our experience of the world around us. Yet many questions about realizing this vision remain open. We have been investigating these questions at the University of California, San Diego, through the ActiveCampus Project. ActiveCampus explores technologies that can enrich the learning community in the midst of these changes. It explores wireless context-aware computing as a means to enhance the "learning community" experience of a large urban university. We have tested two applications: ActiveClass supports classroom activities, such as asking questions during a lecture, and ActiveCampus Explorer supports context-aware activities, such as instant messaging and location-aware maps annotated with dynamic hyperlinked information.     

Potentials of IR-UWB technology for ubiquitous computing

Connectivity is very important to enable ubiquitous computing. Wireless communication plays a continual key role in future ubiquitous network where all devices need to be connected freely. Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is a new method of short-range wireless technology which is suit for ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we provided the potentials of impulse radio UWB (IR-UWB) technology in ubiquitous computing environments. Our study investigated possible communication methods which can be used in ubiquitous network. Comparisons between different communication technologies demonstrated that UWB-based solutions can support identification, location, sensing, and connectivity. In addition, we proposed two typical schemes which show how IR-UWB is used in ubiquitous computing.     

Self-organizable panel for assembling DIY ubiquitous computing

This paper proposes the concept of DIY (do-it-yourself) ubiquitous computing, an architecture allowing non-experts to establish ubiquitous computing environments in the real world. This concept has been implemented in the “u-Texture”, which is a self-organizable panel that works as a building block. While the traditional scheme attaches devices such as computers, sensors, and network equipments externally to make everyday objects smart, the u-Texture has these devices built in beforehand to assemble smart objects. The u-Texture can change its own behavior autonomously through recognition of its location, its angle of inclination, and surrounding environment by assembling these factors physically. This paper describes the design, the implementation, and various applications of u-Textures to confirm that the concept can contribute to establishment of ubiquitous computing environments in the real world without expert users.     

The Interactive Workspaces project: experiences with ubiquitous computing rooms

The Interactive Workspaces project explores new possibilities for people working together in technology-rich spaces. The project focuses on augmenting a dedicated meeting space with large displays, wireless or multimodal devices, and seamless mobile appliance integration.