From Ubiquitous Computing to Ubiquitous Intelligence

If computers could be as commonplace as the written word, our everyday world would be transformed. That was the vision, announced over a decade ago, of the computer visionary Mark Weiser. In Weiser's world computers would be ubiquitous and we would interact with them almost subconsciously. This vision is currently developing, but has still some way to go. Yet Weiser's vision can be extended further, with intelligence embedded in objects ranging from mechanical components to tins. This paper outlines a future which embraces Weiser's vision but goes beyond it to a world of such intelligent devices interacting autonomously, for the benefit of people but often without human intervention. Opportunities exist, in particular for those who develop the new applications and the complex systems which support them. For the general public the greatest fearwhich needs to be allayed is a loss of privacy.     

Assessing Level of Ubiquitous Computing Services for Ubiquitous Business Design

We are entering into a new era of enterprise computing that is characterized by an emphasis on broadband convergence, knowledge sharing, and calm services. Some people refer to this as the "ubiquitous network" business model because its focus is on a high degree of connectivity between a company and its customers, suppliers, and channel partners. Moreover, immediate access to ideas, goods, and services will be of greater value than the traditional model of permanent and ponderous possession. This paper illustrates how ubiquitous computing technology can be combined with legacy computer-based information systems, along with thoughts on relevant issues of ubiquitous commerce. We also propose a model for how to assess levels of ubiquitous computing services.     

泛在计算与泛在网

1泛在计算的提出和发展笔者在2006年8月撰文《亚太主要RFID应用国家的发展特点》一文中,提及了下述事实和观点:日本接受了美国Xerox公司CEO Marx Weiser氏早在台式电脑刚刚开始普及的1986年就提出的观点Nomadic Issues in Ubiquitous Computing。这句话虽然可以直译为计算技术无处不在,但是其内容远远超过上述简单的中文解释。     

On Teaching Ubiquitous Computing

As industry demand for ubiquitous computing applications continues to increase, universities are beginning to offer related courses. A graduate-level ubicomp course at Finland's ?bo Akademi University taught both system design and research advancements to meet the students' career goals. The instructor gained experiences and learned lessons that can help other educators in the field.     

A Strategic Grid for Implementing Ubiquitous Computing

This letter offers a general framework representing the most effective strategies for implementing ubiquitous computing, given different levels of organizational information system capacity and business needs. The strategic grid offered here identifies promising movements which may potentially have a significant effect on the future development of ubiquitous computing.     

Smart Identification Frameworks for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

We present our results of the conceptual design and the implementation of ubiquitous computing applications using smart identification technologies. First, we describe such technologies and their potential application areas, then give an overview of some of the applications we have developed. Based on the experience we have gained from developing these systems, we point out design concepts that we have found useful for structuring and implementing such applications. Building upon these concepts, we have created two frameworks based on Jini (i.e., distributed Java objects) and Web Services to support the development of ubiquitous computing applications that make use of smart identification technology. We describe our prototype frameworks, discuss the underlying concepts and present some lessons learned.     

普适计算中的隐私保护

普适计算(Ubiquitous Computing)改变了人们的计算和联系方式,为研究者带来了方便与高效。但为了避免普适系统最终成为一个分布式监督系统,需要在系统设计的最初阶段就认真考虑用户的隐私问题。为此,这里将普适计算中的隐私问题划分为物理层、链路层和应用层这三层来解决,为系统设计者提供了灵活的隐私保护方案。     

普适环境中的动态更新模型

致力于普适计算下的动态更新的研究,首先分析了普适计算下动态更新的场景,针对普适环境的动态性,我们提出了区别于传统更新方式的路径更新;通过分析集中式更新模型的局限性,提出了适合普适环境的分布式更新模型;最后使用类型与效果系统为更新模型做形式化分析.     

云计算技术在泛在网络中的应用前景分析

泛在应用的广泛性与数据海量化等特征需要一种高效的信息处理手段来提供技术保证。本文首先分析了泛在网络及其应用平台对各类计算与网络资源的初步要求,对当前云计算技术的分布式处理能力进行了评估,并对云计算在未来泛在应用的研究方向提供了参考建议。同时,提出了一种基于云计算技术的泛在应用体系架构,为云计算技术的研究提供了全新的应用领域。     

Anonymous Communication in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Wireless networks such as WLANs which have already been commonplace will play an important role in providing the last mile access for ubiquitous computing environments. However, the wireless access technologies are accompanied with some security vulnerabilities that stem from the broadcasting medium. Although most of the vulnerabilities can be solved by the existing security countermeasures, there still exists the vulnerability of a message header. In most wireless access networks, the header part of each message, including the source and destination addresses, is transmitted in a plain-text format. This can be a security hole with adversaries collecting the revealed header information for a traffic analysis attack that can breach the privacy of the transmitter and receiver. In this paper, we focus on describing a solution to this problem, namely, the undesirable loss of privacy. Our main idea is to integrate address information with a conventional Message Authentication Code (MAC) and to replace both fields of the address and the MAC by an integrated code called the Address-embedded MAC (AMAC). Through detailed performance and security analysis of our scheme, we show that our AMAC scheme can guarantee privacy of a network while providing a provable security level with less overhead.     

A Middleware Architecture for Securing Ubiquitous Computing Cyber Infrastructures

Ubiquitous computing is revolutionizing the way applications, users, resources, and physical spaces interact. Securing cyber infrastructures for ubiquitous computing environments, such as smart buildings and campuses, can be challenging. A critical cyber infrastructure is necessary that can combine networks, processors, and devices with mechanisms, protocols, and services to offer reliable, fault-tolerant, available, and secure operations. Existing CCI implementations create statically configured, confined networked subsystems that are isolated from the public Internet and are context insensitive. This leads to multiple, incompatible subsystems incapable of interoperating, thus making operations, management, and trust difficult. The Heterogeneous Survivable Trusted Information-Assurance Architecture addresses the problem of securing critical information services in large-scale ubiquitous computing environments. Hestia is a programmable middleware solution implemented as a network of middleboxes. These middleboxes form protective layers that isolate CCI services and mediate authorized access to Hestia’s services. They also provide a programmable, distributed, object-oriented framework that enables the integration of security, privacy, and reliability mechanisms in service-access interfaces and implementations.     

Context-based Ontology-driven Recommendation Strategies for Tourism in Ubiquitous Computing

Tourism is an information-intensive business. At present, there are a lot of information and tourism resources available on the internet that lead to low searching efficiency and effectiveness, the user may get too many seeking results but not related to his interest, or few results than his expected. The user can know clearly what he wants, but sometime the user doesn’t know what kind information he needs. User’s demand can be formulated as direct demand and potential preference. At the same time, the study shows that there is strong relationship between the traveler’s potential preference and the characteristics of tourism resources. In order to solve the information overload challenge, recommendation services are increasingly emerging. Currently, recommendation methods focus on dealing with personalized matching based on the user preference. However, these methods skip the user’s direct demand. In this paper, we propose ontology-driven recommendation strategies based on user’s context. The strategies use ontology to describe and integrate tourism resources, achieve the goal of associating user’s direct needs and his potential preference as the context in recommendation. Moreover, theoretical analysis and experiments show that the proposed approach is feasible, the results of the evaluation are discussed.     

Strategic Implications for E-Business Organizations in the Ubiquitous Computing Economy

The ubiquitous economy brings both pros and cons for the organizations. The third space emerged by the development of ubiquitous computing generates new concept of community. The community is tightly coupled with people, products, and systems. Organizational strategies need to be reshaped for the changing environment in the third space and community. Organizational structure also needs to change for community serving organization. Community serving concept equipped with the standardized technology will be essential. One of the key technologies, RFID service will play a key role to acknowledge identification and services required. When the needs for sensing the environment increase, technological requirement such as the ubiquitous sensor network (USN) will be critically needed..     

Optimal 3-Coverage with Minimum Separation Requirements for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Sensors have been increasingly used for many ubiquitous computing applications such as asset location monitoring, visual surveillance, and human motion tracking. In such applications, it is important to place sensors such that every point of the target area can be sensed by more than one sensor. Especially, many practical applications require 3-coverage for triangulation, 3D hull building, and etc. Also, in order to extract meaningful information from the data sensed by multiple sensors, those sensors need to be placed not too close to each other—minimum separation requirement. To address the 3-coverage problem with the minimum separation requirement, our recent work  (Kim et al. 2008) proposes two heuristic methods, so called, overlaying method and TRE-based method, which complement each other depending on the minimum separation requirement. For these two methods, we also provide mathematical analysis that can clearly guide us when to use the TRE-based method and when to use the overlaying method and also how many sensors are required. To make it self-contained, in this paper, we first revisit the two heuristic methods. Then, as an extension, we present an ILP-based optimal solution targeting for grid coverage. With this ILP-based optimal solution, we investigate how much close the two heuristic methods are to the optimal solution. Finally, this paper discusses the impacts of the proposed methods on real-deployed systems using two example sensor systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically addresses the 3-coverage problem with the minimum separation requirement.     

Centaurus: An Infrastructure for Service Management in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In the near future, we will see dramatic changes in computing and networking hardware. A large number of devices (e.g., phones, PDAs, even small household appliances) will become computationally enabled. Micro/nano sensors will be widely embedded in most engineered artifacts, from the clothes we wear to the roads we drive on. All of these devices will be (wirelessly) networked using Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15 or IEEE 802.11 for short range connectivity creating pervasive environments. In this age where a large number of wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for providing a standard interface to them that is easily accessible by any user. This paper outlines the design of Centaurus, an infrastructure for presenting services to heterogeneous mobile clients in a physical space via some short range wireless links. The infrastructure is communication medium independent; we have implemented the system over Bluetooth, CDPD and Infrared, three well-known wireless technologies. All the components in our model use a language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) for communication, giving the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. Centaurus defines a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software, to be made available to diverse mobile users within a confined space.     

Information and Service Integration Based on Agent-Oriented Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing for information and service integration is currently at crucial point in its evolution, marked by the increasing developments of agent-based ubiquitous computing systems for the information and service integration. Some major features of ubiquitous computing systems (UCSs) consist of heterogeneity, decentralization, nondeterminism and dynamicity. Hence, agent-based ubiquitous computing (AUC) is a form of distributed computing by which computational processes are executed concurrently by assigning each computational process to one of agents on a UCS. The overarching goal of AUC is to support the seamless integration of information and services. Meeting this grand challenge of AUC requires that agent-orientation not tackled before is necessarily featured. To this end, taking advantage of the categorical structures we establish, in this paper, a firm formal development for featuring agent-orientation of ubiquitous computing. In other words, all of these are to formalize the AUC for information and service integration.     

A Semantic Service Discovery Network for Large‐Scale Ubiquitous Computing Environments

This paper presents an efficient semantic service discovery scheme called UbiSearch for a large‐scale ubiquitous computing environment. A semantic service discovery network in the semantic vector space is proposed where services that are semantically close to each other are mapped to nearby positions so that the similar services are registered in a cluster of resolvers. Using this mapping technique, the search space for a query is efficiently confined within a minimized cluster region while maintaining high accuracy in comparison to the centralized scheme. The proposed semantic service discovery network provides a number of novel features to evenly distribute service indexes to the resolvers and reduce the number of resolvers to visit. Our simulation study shows that UbiSearch provides good semantic searchability as compared to the centralized indexing system. At the same time, it supports scalable semantic queries with low communication overhead, balanced load distribution among resolvers for service registration and query processing, and personalized semantic matching.     

Large Scale Indoor Localization System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks for Ubiquitous Computing

The task of formulating an efficient system for determining the location of an object, results in the creation of a wide number of applications and services. For this reason, most wireless sensor network applications assume the availability of sensor location information. In this paper, an indoor localization scheme, which is based on synchronized sensor nodes, is proposed. It is efficient in terms of power consumption and location update rate. Furthermore, it resolves the scalability problem usually found in most conventional indoor localization systems in large scale indoor environments. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through experimental implementation and is compared with the Cricket system. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is a promising and feasible localization system for a large scale indoor environment.     

Context‐Aware Active Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

With the advent of ubiquitous computing environments, it has become increasingly important for applications to take full advantage of contextual information, such as the user's location, to offer greater services to the user without any explicit requests. In this paper, we propose context‐aware active services based on context‐aware middleware for URC systems (CAMUS). The CAMUS is a middleware that provides context‐aware applications with a development and execution methodology. Accordingly, the applications based on CAMUS respond in a timely fashion to contextual information. This paper presents the system architecture of CAMUS and illustrates the content recommendation and control service agents with the properties, operations, and tasks for context‐aware active services. To evaluate CAMUS, we apply the proposed active services to a TV application domain. We implement and experiment with a TV content recommendation service agent, a control service agent, and TV tasks based on CAMUS. The implemented content recommendation service agent divides the user's preferences into common and specific models to apply other recommendations and applications easily, including the TV content recommendations.     

下一代移动网络--UC(通用计算)的带头人?(上)

在世纪之交,电信的焦点也相应地从传统的面向有线电话的业务和基础设施变成了面向数据的业务,从单一的网络变成了多种网络,从非智能设备变成了智能设备,如PDA和移动计算机。 Internet的WWW和广域无线网络(比如GSM),以及局域无线通信系统都导致了这一领域的改变。在这些领域,每年的市场表现都被低估了。现在是考虑移动Internet和UC的未来、技术和市场的时候了。 在ITU的IMT-2000[2]框架里的UMTS业务的概念将是过渡到下一代移动网络的技术步骤,它通过将Internet协议运用到移动业务控制和端到端的应用而使UC变得容易。它的演进会在本文中描述。