Mobile crowdsensing with mobile agents

We introduce mobile agents for mobile crowdsensing. Crowdsensing campaigns are designed through different roles that are implemented as mobile agents. The role-based tasks of mobile agents include collecting data, analyzing data and sharing data in the campaign. Mobile agents execute and control the campaign autonomously as a multi-agent system and migrate in the opportunistic network of participants’ devices. Mobile agents take into account the available resources in the devices and match participants’ privacy requirements to the campaign requirements. Sharing of task results in real-time facilitates cooperation towards the campaign goal while maintaining a selected global measure, such as energy efficiency. We discuss current challenges in crowdsensing and propose mobile agent based solutions for campaign execution and monitoring, addressing data collection and participant-related issues. We present a software framework for mobile agents-based crowdsensing that is seamlessly integrated into the Web. A set of simulations are conducted to compare mobile agent-based campaigns with existing crowdsensing approaches. We implemented and evaluated a small-scale real-world mobile agent based campaign for pedestrian flock detection. The simulation and evaluation results show that mobile agent based campaigns produce comparable results with less energy consumption when the number of agents is relatively small and enables in-network data processing with sharing of data and task results with insignificant overhead.     

Adaptive connectivity management middleware for heterogeneous wireless networks

The trends of network convergence and mobile accessibility in the Internet are bringing new challenges to the connectivity management of end hosts. Concerning network convergence, the configuration of heterogeneous access networks should be taken into consideration. As for mobile accessibility, seamless handoff between diverse access points is a challenging issue. This article presents the design and implementation of connectivity management middleware (CMM), a channel-based architecture for context-aware connectivity management. This architecture can both provide network awareness to applications and manage network resources in an adaptive fashion. In the case of network awareness, the platform provides interfaces for applications to query network QoS and availability status, as well as subscribe connection events. As for adaptive resource management, channel-based transport services for seamless access switching and disconnection treatment are provided based on a policy mechanism. A prototype is implemented with which experiments were performed in a GPRS-WLAN integrated environment in order to demonstrate the operational correctness of the architecture. Performance metrics are measured and analyzed.     

What if it Switched on the Sun? Exploring Creativity in a Brainstorming Session with Children Through a Vygotskyan Perspective

We contribute in this study a first step in theory-based understanding on how creativity in collaborative design sessions relates to the elements that are present in a creative act. These elements include group composition, objects present, practices used, and previous knowledge of the participants. The context of this study was our search for lightweight methods for technology design with children, which can be used in a school context with large groups, will require as little amount of training as possible, and can be set up quickly. We formed a mixed group, consisting of young children, an older child and an adult, with the aim of involving children in creative collaborative brainstorming during the very early phases of design, so as to come up with fruitful ideas for technology development. We report our process and examine the implications of our results in relation to different elements that trigger and affect creativity in the collaborative design process. Use of Vygotsky’s cycle of creativity as our theoretical lens together with timeline analysis method presented in the paper were essential for seeing beneath the surface of what happened in this complex, collaborative creative process. Our results can be used for further methodological development of creative collaborative sessions, both with children and adults.     

Requesting Pervasive Services by Touching RFID Tags

As the vision of pervasive computing gradually becomes a reality, we are seeing an increasing number of services in our everyday environments. We don't just access them at desktop computers but everywhere our activities lead us-using mobile terminals and built-in technology. Although a positive phenomenon, this transition also introduces considerable challenges to discovering and selecting services. The authors propose a general framework for requesting pervasive services by touching RFID tags. Visual symbols communicate to users the objects that they can touch and that activate services. When a user touches such a symbol with a mobile phone, the data stored in the tag and other contextual information related to the situation trigger the requested service. The authors designed a set of visual symbols and implemented the required functionality as component-based middleware. They studied this novel system's usability and user experience. This article is part of a special issue on RFID Technology.     

Context-aware pervasive service composition and its implementation

Incorporating service composition and pervasive computing into managing users’ complex everyday activities calls for the Pervasive Service Composition paradigm for everyday life. In this paper, we propose the concept of Context-Aware Pervasive Service Composition (CAPSC), which aims at enabling a pervasive system to provide user service compositions that are relevant to the situation at hand. We investigate CAPSC requirements and design a CAPSC architecture by taking into account context-aware peer coordination, context-aware process service adaptation, and context-aware utility service adaptation. We present a proof of concept application prototype as well.     

Entity Notation: enabling knowledge representations for resource-constrained sensors

The forthcoming ambient systems will contain a large amount of sensors. Representing the data produced by these sensors in a format suitable for ambient intelligence applications would enable a large number of useful services. However, such formats tend to require processing power and communication bandwidth not available in many sensors utilizing ultra low-power microcontrollers and radio chip solutions. This paper presents a lightweight data representation, Entity Notation, to tackle this problem. Sensors with limited computation and communication capabilities can use Entity Notation to describe the data they produce. Entity Notation can be transformed into knowledge representations in a straightforward manner, and hence, the data produced by sensor nodes can be utilized with ease by any ambient intelligence system compatible with the common knowledge representations. This paper presents the design of Entity Notation, its implementations on embedded sensors and the evaluation of its performance.