Alan George Cole

An approach to providing a seamless end-user experience for location-aware applications

With an increasing number of businesses considering the possibility of launching location-aware, mobile commerce applications, the quality of the end-user experience will become more and more critical. We propose dynamic bookmarks and location domains as mechanisms to give consumers simple and straightforward access to a dynamically changing set of location-based services. Dynamic bookmarks are descriptions of services, which are bound to actual, registered, services as a users location changes. Location domains provide meaningful location context for location-aware services. We discuss the motivation and background of our work in progress, describe the key concepts involved, and present a system architecture we have adopted.

Bluebot: Asset tracking via robotic location crawling

From manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer goods to government departments, enterprises of all kinds are gearing up to use RFID technology to increase the visibility of goods and assets within their supply chain and on their premises. However, RFID technology alone lacks the capability to track the location of items once they are moved within a facility. We present a prototype automatic location sensing system that combines RFID technology and off-the-shelf Wi-Fi based continuous positioning technology for tracking RFID-tagged assets. Our prototype system employs a robot, with an attached RFID reader, which periodically surveys the space, associating items it detects with its own location determined with the Wi-Fi positioning system. We propose four algorithms that combine the detected tags reading with previous samples to refine its location. Our experiments have shown that our positioning algorithms can bring a two to three fold improvement over the positional accuracy limitations in both the RFID reader and the positioning technology.

BlueBot: asset tracking via robotic location crawling

From manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer goods to government departments, enterprises of all kinds are gearing up to use RFID technology to increase the visibility of goods and assets within their supply chain and on their premises. However, RFID technology alone lacks the capability to track the location of items once they are moved within a facility. We present a prototype automatic location sensing system that combines RFID technology and off-the-shelf Wi-Fi based continuous positioning technology for tracking RFID-tagged assets. Our prototype system employs a robot, with an attached RFID reader, which periodically surveys the space, associating items it detects with its own location determined with the Wi-Fi positioning system. We propose four algorithms that combine the detected tags reading with previous samples to refine its location. Our experiments have shown that our positioning algorithms can bring a two to three fold improvement over the positional accuracy limitations in both the RFID reader and the positioning technology.

A prototype system for static and dynamic program understanding

A tool called PUNDIT (Program Understanding Investigation Tool) is described. It is a prototype intended to serve as a vehicle for exploring and testing ideas in the area of program understanding; it combines static analysis information with information collected at runtime. The architecture of PUNDIT is described, together with its two main components (the C source analyzer and a graphical user interface). Several of the views provided by the tool are explained, including a high-level structure chart, a dynamic call graph, a control flow graph animated during program execution, a type definition window, and others. By integrating static and dynamic information, the tool provides a more comprehensive understanding of a program as the first step to reengineering or maintaining the application that can be obtained by static analysis alone.<<ETX>>