Service Composition Issues in Pervasive Computing

Providing new services by combining existing ones—or service composition—is an idea pervading pervasive computing. Pervasive computing technologies seek to concurrently exhibit context awareness, manage contingencies, leverage device heterogeneity, and empower users. These four goals prompt service-composition-mechanism design requirements that are unique to pervasive computing. This article catalogs service composition mechanisms and describes their variation points, which indicate how well the resulting compositions meet the four goals.     

The Seeds of Inspiration

What are some of the seeds of inspiration for pervasive computing research? For Editor in Chief Roy Want, it's his fascination with gadgets, tendency to shop for electronic odds and ends, and interest in turning fictional devices into reality—all of which relate to hacking, the topic of this special issue.     

面向普适计算的多Agent协同设计系统模型

根据普适计算的特点,提出了一种多agent协同设计系统框架模型.考虑到普适计算环境下移动设备的交互和多通道的信息集成,该模型在已有多agent协同设计系统的框架模型上增加了相应的agent,并且在设计agent的结构中包含了通道识别、上下文生成及多通道信息整合模块,以处理多通道的信息.详细介绍了在该agent模型中基于设计上下文的知识表示、搜索和更新式学习算法,以及协同设计系统中多agent知识共享的方法.该研究对于普适计算在设计领域中的应用有重要的意义.     

From research to classroom a course in pervasive computing

In a nutshell, the course is basically about emerging, visible and invisible computing systems and devices. Pervasive computing has many names, including ubiquitous computing, and its key element is the omnipresence of information devices. These devices can be embedded into cars, airplanes, ships, bikes, posters, signboards, walls, and even clothes. The course therefore focuses on independent information devices, including wearable computers, mobile phones, screen phones, and PDAs, and the services made available by them. It includes the study of computer and network architectures for pervasive computing, mobile computing, human-computer interaction using speech and vision, pervasive software systems, and experimental pervasive computing systems.     

Pervasive speech recognition

As mobile computing devices grow smaller and as in-car computing platforms become more common, we must augment traditional methods of human-computer interaction. Although speech interfaces have existed for years, the constrained system resources of pervasive devices, such as limited memory and processing capabilities, present new challenges. We provide an overview of embedded automatic speech recognition (ASR) on the pervasive device and discuss its ability to help us develop pervasive applications that meet today's marketplace needs. ASR recognizes spoken words and phrases. State-of-the-art ASR uses a phoneme-based approach for speech modeling: it gives each phoneme (or elementary speech sound) in the language under consideration a statistical representation expressing its acoustic properties.     

Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.     

普适计算中多通道交互建模研究

计算机处理速度和性能的迅猛提高并没有相应提高用户使用计算机交互的能力,其中一个重要原因就是缺少一个与之相适应的高效、自然的人机交互界面.普适计算的发展为人们提供了一个无处不在的获取服务的环境,而多通道用户界面允许用户使用自然的交互方式,如语音、手势、表情等在此环境中与系统进行协同工作,改变了传统交互手段的局限性.重点讨论了基于笔和语音的多通道交互,给出了普适环境中对多通道交互建模的框架,进一步研究了在图形信息应用中的多通道交互实例,论证了创建自然多通道交互方式的优势.     

面向用户的普适计算系统可用性度量模型

普适计算模式追求随时随地的计算境界,对相关可用性管理提出了很高的要求。现有研究大多基于定性的角度研究普适计算系统的可用性问题,本文尝试给出定量的可用性度量模型和分析。普适计算系统可用性具有典型的面向用户特点,为刻画用户行为需要引入具有非指数分布性质的模型状态,并且需要考虑用户态与系统态关联分析时的复杂情况。传统的连续时间马尔可夫链和半马尔可夫过程都不能很好地对以上情况给与分析。鉴于此,本文提出了一种基于马尔可夫重生过程(MRGP)的普适计算系统可用性度量方法。首先建立具有双扩展特点的用户模型,基于此构建了普适计算系统可用性度量的MRGP模型,对可用性进行了随机过程分析,给出了对应瞬态和稳态行为的度量方法,结合普适计算模式的特点定义了普适计算系统请求可用性度量。最后进行了数值分析,评价了用户和系统参数等因素对普适计算系统可用性度量的影响。     

普适计算环境下信任机制的研究进展

在普适计算环境下,各种资源、设备和用户均是高度动态变化的,服务请求者和服务提供者一般互相不了解,因此普适计算环境下各陌生实体间的相互认证是传统的基于身份的认证机制无法解决的.普适计算信任建模机制可以解决普适计算环境下的不确定性问题,为陌生实体间建立信任关系,因此成为普适计算中的一个研究热点.基于此,本文对于目前国外关于普适计算信任建模机制的研究现状做了一个总结,通过分析和比较,给出了普适计算信任建模的设计原则,探讨了普适计算信任建模问题的未来发展方向.     

Google PhD Forum at PerCom 2009

Sixteen PhD students presented their research at the PhD Forum at PerCom 2009. The PhD forum offered the students an opportunity for interaction with and feedback from senior researchers in pervasive computing.     

Designing with Care: The Future of Pervasive Healthcare

Humane care—which is an important design paradigm relevant for pervasive healthcare—means designing systems with care, keeping in mind both users and other stakeholders. Understanding human values is a key factor in creating any successful healthcare application and is essential to avoid dehumanizing and stigmatizing users. By considering human values, designers and developers can create pervasive healthcare applications that better fit users' needs and desires. The Designing with Care 09 workshop aimed to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to share their experiences with incorporating values into the design of pervasive healthcare systems and to help understand the sensitive issues involved in designing for healthcare. Based on the findings from the workshop, the present state of the art is discussed, and a research agenda is presented.     

动态计算网络:一种面向物联网的普适计算框架

随着物联网的发展,大量不同的设备通过各种不同的方式连接到物联网中,使普适计算环境更加复杂和多样化,因此要求在物联网环境下的普适计算框架能适应新的计算条件的变化。提出了一种新的普适计算框架,以便在物联网环境中普适计算系统能够自动适应复杂多样的软硬件运行环境,使软件无需修改就可以在整个物联网环境中任意地执行,实现普适计算的服务发现、上下文感知与服务迁移功能。提出物联网环境下普适计算的基本运算单元为"动态计算网络",使用"设备动态匹配"作为普适计算软件自动适应环境的解决方案。提出的动态计算网络增强了普适计算软件对物联网环境的适应性,为面向物联网的通用软件系统设计提供了一种有效的解决方法。     

Smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing

Applications and services for pervasive computing have been dramatically grown and have contributed extensively to our daily experiences in recent years. Smart systems, devices, and spaces are proactive for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Smart information technology (IT) is also an outcome of the state of the art and novel mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies that include highly capable handheld device, pervasive and personal device, etc. This special issue will be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in pervasive and ubiquitous computing using smart devices and services. This special issue called for original papers describing the latest developments, trends, and solutions of smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing including real-time operating systems (OS), tiny OS and middleware supports, mobile system performance, trustworthy Internet and communications, agents and mobile and pervasive services, among others. In particular, this special issue focuses on a remote control and media-sharing system, flash storage-based smart system, heterogeneous mobile OS, and prediction and auto-execution system for pervasive computing.     

普适计算系统可用性度量

普适计算系统可用性度量具有典型的面向用户特点,为刻画用户行为需要引入具有非指数分布性质的用户状态,并且需要考虑用户态与系统态关联分析时的复杂情况。传统的连续时间马尔科夫链和半马尔科夫过程都不能很好地对以上情况给予分析。鉴于此,文章基于马尔科夫重生过程(MRGP)提出了普适计算系统的可用性度量方法。首先建立具有普适计算模式的用户模型,基于此构建了普适计算系统可用性度量的MRGP模型,对可用性进行了随机过程分析,给出了对应瞬态和稳态行为的度量方法,结合普适计算模式的特点定义了普适计算系统请求可用性度量。最后进行了数值分析,评价了普适计算系统可用性在MTTF和MTTR下的变化情况,据此导出来构建高可用普适计算系统需要考虑一些原则,并分析了用户和系统参数等因素对普适计算系统可用性度量的影响。     

Philosophy, privacy, and pervasive computing

Philosophers and others concerned with the moral good of personal privacy most often see threats to privacy raised by the development of pervasive computing as primarily being threats to the loss of control over personal information. Two reasons in particular lend this approach plausibility. One reason is that the parallels between pervasive computing and ordinary networked computing, where everyday transactions over the Internet raise concerns about personal information privacy, appear stronger than their differences. Another reason is that the individual devices which can become linked in a pervasive computing environment: PDAs, GPS sensors, RFID chips/readers, publicly-located video surveillance cameras, Internet-enabled mobile phones, and the like, each raise threats to individual privacy. Without discounting the value of this approach, this paper aims to propose an alternative; and, as a result of recasting the threat to individual privacy from pervasive computing, to identify other, and deeper, moral goods that pervasive computing puts at risk that otherwise might remain concealed. In particular, I argue that pervasive computing threatens to compromise what I call existential autonomy: the right to decide for ourselves at least some of the existential conditions under which we form and develop our ways of life, including our relations to information technology. From this perspective, some moral goods at stake in protecting privacy in an environment of pervasive computing emerge that have less to do with furthering human well-being through the promotion of self-identity and subjectivity, than with stimulating curiosity, receptivity to difference, and, most broadly, openness to the world.     

位置感知计算的概论、关键问题和技术探讨

自从Mark Weiser在1991年提出普适计算的思想以来,计算模式经历主机计算、桌面计算的阶段后正朝普适计算方向蓬勃发展.上下文感知是普适计算的最重要的特征,同时也是主要的研究领域.自从二十世纪70年代美国军方推出军民两用的室外定位系统GPS,以及1989年Roy Want等开发出支持大规模使用、价格低廉的室内位置传感系统Active Badge以来,位置感知由于其高鲁棒性和确定性、技术的可获得性而成为当前上下文感知计算的一个真正的研究热点.本文从普适计算和智能空间的特征和要求出发,阐述了位置感知计算的主要概念、思想,并根据当前最新的研究状况,解释了位置感知计算面临的主要问题和相应的技术方法,最后叙述了作为本课题组研究的试验系统--智能教室的技术路线.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究

普适计算中间件是目前普适计算领域的研究热点之一。普适计算环境的动态性和异构性对中间件技术提出了新的要求,而动态对象模型中间件和自适应中间件能够适应普适计算环境。文章主要分析了这两种中间件的基本原理、关键技术和特点。     

Diagnosing diabetes using neural networks on small mobile devices

Pervasive computing is often mentioned in the context of improving healthcare. This paper presents a novel approach for diagnosing diabetes using neural networks and pervasive healthcare computing technologies. The recent developments in small mobile devices and wireless communications provide a strong motivation to develop new software techniques and mobile services for pervasive healthcare computing. A distributed end-to-end pervasive healthcare system utilizing neural network computations for diagnosing illnesses was developed. This work presents the initial results for a simple client (patient’s PDA) and server (powerful desktop PC) two-tier pervasive healthcare architecture. The computations of neural network operations on both client and server sides and wireless network communications between them are optimized for real time use of pervasive healthcare services.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究与进展

当前,普适计算已经成为计算机科学中一个极具活力和影响力的研究领域。普适计算环境规模很大并且具有高度异构性,如网络架构的异构性、硬件平台的异构性、操作系统的异构性、应用服务的异构性等,而普适计算中间件技术可以解决异构性和跨平台特征,提供不同服务的集成应用,因此成为普适计算中的一个研究热点。基于此,本文对于目前国外关于普适计算中间件技术的研究现状做了一个总结;通过分析和比较,给出了普适计算中间件的设计原则;探讨了普适计算中间件技术的未来发展方向。     

普适计算系统架构的研究

目前,普适计算已经成为计算机科学中的一个研究热点,而关于普适计算系统整体体系架构的研究工作还不多见.针对普适计算环境的特点,认为普适计算系统架构是一个开放的复杂大系统,可以利用大系统的控制论方法来解决这个分布式系统架构的一些关键问题,并提出了一种新的构建普适计算智能控制系统架构的方法,为问题的解决提供了一种新的研究思路.