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.     

Modeling the user state for context-aware spoken interaction in ambient assisted living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems must provide adapted services easily accessible by a wide variety of users. This can only be possible if the communication between the user and the system is carried out through an interface that is simple, rapid, effective, and robust. Natural language interfaces such as dialog systems fulfill these requisites, as they are based on a spoken conversation that resembles human communication. In this paper, we enhance systems interacting in AAL domains by means of incorporating context-aware conversational agents that consider the external context of the interaction and predict the user’s state. The user’s state is built on the basis of their emotional state and intention, and it is recognized by means of a module conceived as an intermediate phase between natural language understanding and dialog management in the architecture of the conversational agent. This prediction, carried out for each user turn in the dialog, makes it possible to adapt the system dynamically to the user’s needs. We have evaluated our proposal developing a context-aware system adapted to patients suffering from chronic pulmonary diseases, and provide a detailed discussion of the positive influence of our proposal in the success of the interaction, the information and services provided, as well as the perceived quality.     

Bringing VR and spatial 3D interaction to the masses through video games

This article examines why innovations such as the Sony EyeToy and Nintendo Wii have been so successful and discusses the research opportunities presented by the latest commercial push for spatial 3D interaction in games.     

Model-driven development of composite context-aware web applications

Context-awareness constitutes an essential aspect of services, especially when interaction with end-users is involved. In this paper a solution for the context-aware development of web applications consisting of web services is presented. The methodology proposes a model based approach and advocates in favour of a complete separation of the web application functionality from the context adaptation at all development phases (analysis, design, implementation). In essence, context adaptation takes place on top of and is transparent to the web application business functionality. Starting from UML diagrams of independent web services and respective UML context models, our approach can produce a functional composite context-aware application. At execution level this independence is maintained through an adaptation framework based on message interception.     

Understanding user intent on the web through interaction mining

Predicting the goals of internet users can be extremely useful in e-commerce, online entertainment, and many other internet-based applications. One of the crucial steps to achieve this is to classify internet queries based on available features, such as contextual information, keywords and their semantic relationships. Beyond these methods, in this paper we propose to mine user interaction activities to predict the intent of the user during a navigation session. However, since in practice it is necessary to use a suitable mix of all such methods, it is important to exploit all the mentioned features in order to properly classify users based on their common intents. To this end, we have performed several experiments aiming to empirically derive a suitable classifier based on the mentioned features.     

觉察上下文的Web服务研究与应用

现有的Web服务框架不能适应普适计算的特点,即无法为移动用户提供自定义的个性化的服务.通过对现有Web服务的扩展,提出了一个觉察上下文的自适应的Web服务开发与部署框架.在该框架中,客户端的上下文信息作为SOAP消息的头块被分布式地传递和处理,Web服务可为客户端提供自定义的个性化的服务.同时,上下文是可扩展的,通过自动的上下文处理,Web服务可自适应新的上下文而不需要改变Web服务本身.     

Preventing massive automated access to web resources

Automated web tools are used to achieve a wide range of different tasks, some of which are legal activities, whilst others are considered attacks to the security and data integrity of online services. Effective solutions to counter the threat represented by such programs are therefore required. In this work, we present MosaHIP, a Mosaic-based Human Interactive Proof (HIP), which is able to prevent massive automated access to web resources. Properties of the proposed solution grant an improved security over usual text-based and image-based HIPs, whereas the user-friendliness of the system alleviates the user from the discomfort of typing any text before accessing to a web content. Experimental evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed technique is given by submitting our system to a series of tests simulating possible bot attacks.     

Using semantic techniques to access web data

Nowadays, people frequently use different keyword-based web search engines to find the information they need on the web. However, many words are polysemous and, when these words are used to query a search engine, its output usually includes links to web pages referring to their different meanings. Besides, results with different meanings are mixed up, which makes the task of finding the relevant information difficult for the users, especially if the user-intended meanings behind the input keywords are not among the most popular on the web.     

以儿童为中心的情景式人机交互方法

通过分析儿童绘画过程中的心理过程和行为特点,提出了一种以儿童为中心的情景式人机交互方法,并成功应用到计算机辅助儿童绘画系统中.该系统采用三维技术模拟现实中的绘画场景,并且集合了笔、语音以及摄像头等多通道交互技术以提高交互效率.系统通过提供写生、临摹等功能,让儿童在享受绘画乐趣的同时提高绘画技能.     

XCML: providing context-aware language extensions for the specification of multi-device web applications

There is a vast body of research dealing with the development of context-aware web applications that can adapt to different user, platform and device contexts. However, the range and growing diversity of new devices poses two significant problems to existing approaches. First, many techniques require a number of additional design processes and modelling steps before applications can be adapted. Second, the new generation of platforms and technologies underlying these devices as well as upcoming web standards HTML5 and CSS3 have partly changed the way in which web applications are implemented nowadays and often limit the way in which they can be adapted. In this paper, we present XCML as one example of a domain-specific language that tightly integrates context-aware concepts and adaptivity mechanisms to support developers in the specification and implementation of multi-channel web applications. In contrast to most existing approaches, the objective is to use a more lightweight approach to adaptation that can dynamically evolve and support new requirements as they emerge. Our solution builds on versioning principles in combination with a context matching process based on a declaration of context-dependent variants of content, navigation and presentation in terms of context expressions at different levels of granularity that are specific to the application. To support this, a formally defined context algebra is used to parse and resolve the context expressions at compile-time and to determine the best-matching variants with respect to the client context at run-time. We present the language concepts and a possible execution environment together with context-aware developer tools for the authoring and testing of adaptive features and behaviour. We also report on two case studies: the first shows how our general approach allows for integration with existing technologies to leverage advanced context-aware mechanisms in applications developed using other platforms and languages and the second how existing web interfaces can be systematically extended to support new adaptation scenarios.     

Using semantic web technologies to access soft AEC data

Building related data tends to be generated, used and retained in a domain-specific manner. The lack of interoperability between data domains in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry inhibits the cross-domain use of data at an enterprise level. Semantic web technologies provide a possible solution to some of the noted interoperability issues. Traditional methods of information capture fail to take into account the wealth of soft information available throughout a building. Several sources of information are not included in performance assessment frameworks, including social media, occupant communication, mobile communication devices, occupancy patterns, human resource allocations and financial information.The paper suggests that improved data interoperability can aid the integration of untapped silos of information into existing structured performance measurement frameworks, leading to greater awareness of stakeholder concerns and building performance. An initial study of how building-related data can be published following semantic web principles and integrated with other ‘soft-data’ sources in a cross-domain manner is presented. The paper goes on to illustrate how data sources from outside the building operation domain can be used to supplement existing sources. Future work will include the creation of a semantic web based performance framework platform for building performance optimisation.     

Outlier trajectory detection through a context-aware distance

Pattern Analysis and Applications - This paper presents an original method to detect anomalous human trajectories based on a new and promising context-aware distance. The input of the proposed...     

Foundations for distributing the interaction: facilitating universal access through Responsive Cross-Device Applications

Universal Access in the Information Society - The emergence of the Internet of Things has created the prospect of a future in which devices can always be connected. There is a trend for information...     

Web访问流的局部性特征建模

网络访问流的局部性特征包括时间局部性和空间局部性,利用数学建模方法研究局部性特征对于缓存和预取系统的设计及性能提高具有重要的作用.通过分析和讨论,利用信息熵和变异系数建立了网络流量局部性特征新的度量方法,信息熵比Zipf定律更能反映访问流的时间局部性,变异系数则解决了访问流的相同文档间的空间局部性建模问题.实验和分析表明,这些参数能较好地描述网络访问流的局部性特征且易于使用.     

A Context-Aware Infrastructure for Supporting Applications with Pen-Based Interaction

Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the pen provide users with more flexibility and natural interaction.However,it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces because of the lack of support for their development.Toolkit-level support has been exploited to solve this problem,but this approach makes it hard to gain platform independence,easy maintenance and easy extension.In this paper a context-aware infrastructure is created,called WEAVER,to provide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applcations and legacy GUI-based applications.WEAVER aims to support the pen as another standard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse and present a high-level access interface to pen input.It emplolys application context to tailor its sevice to different applications.By modeling the application context and egistering the relevant action adapters,WEAVER can offer servicxes,such as gesture recognition,continuous handwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations,to appropriate applications.One of the distinct features of WEAVER is that off-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced with pen interaction without modifying the existing code.In this paper,the architecture and components of WEAVER are described.In addition ,examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.     

A user-centric and context-aware solution to interface management and access network selection in heterogeneous wireless environments

This paper investigates issues related to handover management of mobile terminals in heterogeneous wireless environments. The mobile terminals are equipped with multiple wireless radio interfaces and have a limited lifetime battery. Seamless mobility and power utilization efficiency become two important aspects of the handover management. We propose in this work user-centric network selection, power-saving interface management and adaptive handover initiation solutions at the terminal side to support seamless terminal-initiated and terminal-controlled vertical handover. The proposed access network selection is situation-aware and application-aware to suit different communication contexts. It enables terminals to select the most suitable access network according to various access network characteristics. Multiple wireless interfaces of a terminal device are handled in both idle and active communication modes to optimize the power consumption. We also address an adaptive handover initiation scheme to assist the service continuity. We conduct simulations and analyses of the proposed solutions to show their suitability and their efficiency.     

Mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint

We consider the problem of mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint. This constraint requires that the sequential patterns in the sequence database must contain a particular set of patterns as sub-patterns. One common application of this constraint is web usage mining which mines the user access behavior on the web. In this paper, we introduce an efficient strategy for mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint that requires only one database scan. Firstly, we present the MWAPC (M ining W eb A ccess P atterns based on super-pattern C onstraint) algorithm, in which each frequent pattern has to be checked if it contains at least one pattern from a user-defined set of patterns. Then we develop an effective algorithm, called EMWAPC that prunes the search space at the beginning of mining process and avoids checking the constraints one by one based on three proposed propositions. We have conducted the experiments on real web log databases. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the previous methods.     

智能环境基于用户交互模态的情境感知服务

智能环境系统构成的复杂性和大量的情境信息增加了为用户提供和布局服务的难度。情境感知服务系统能感知系统运行和人机交互情境,根据相应的决策机制选择适当的设备为用户提供服务,从而简化环境设施的功能布局。在决策过程中引入用户交互模态信息有利于系统根据用户的交互能力和对人机界面的偏好提供服务。把情境细分为用户信息、设备信息、软件信息和环境拓扑信息,针对智能环境提出了一种基于用户交互模态的情境感知服务系统,同时详细说明了利用该技术选择服务的推理过程及其应用方法。通过智慧家庭环境中的场景案例验证了该系统的有效性。