Alejandro Paz-Lopez

UniDA: Uniform Device Access Framework for Human Interaction Environments

Human interaction environments (HIE) must be understood as any place where people carry out their daily life, including their work, family life, leisure and social life, interacting with technology to enhance or facilitate the experience. The integration of technology in these environments has been achieved in a disorderly and incompatible way, with devices operating in isolated islands with artificial edges delimited by the manufacturers. In this paper we are presenting the UniDA framework, an integral solution for the development of systems that require the integration and interoperation of devices and technologies in HIEs. It provides developers and installers with a uniform conceptual framework capable of modelling an HIE, together with a set of libraries, tools and devices to build distributed instrumentation networks with support for transparent integration of other technologies. A series of use case examples and a comparison to many of the existing technologies in the field has been included in order to show the benefits of using UniDA.

JEAF: A Java Evolutionary Algorithm Framework

There are not many tools in the evolutionary computing field that allow researchers to implement, modify or compare different algorithms. Additionally, those tools usually lack flexibility, maintenance or some other characteristic, so researchers program their own solutions most of the time, reimplementing algorithms that have already been implemented hundreds of times. This paper introduces a new framework for evolutionary computation called JEAF (Java Evolutionary Algorithm Framework) that tries to offer a platform to facilitate the tasks of comparing, analyzing, modifying and implementing evolutionary algorithms, reusing components and programming as few as possible. JEAF also aims to be a tool for evolutionary algorithm users that employ these algorithms to solve other problems not related with evolutionary computation. In this sense, JEAF provides methods to distribute an evolutionary process and to plug external tools to perform the evaluation of candidate solutions.

Social learning for collaboration through ASiCo based neuroevolution

This paper discusses an algorithm that provides a way to obtain ensembles of collaborating artificial neural networks (ANNs) online. That is, its purpose is to find solutions to problems based on the interaction of sets of, in principle, heterogeneous ANNs whose joint behaviour results in an emergent solution. This approach is intrinsically able to handle lifelong adaptation within the society in order to comply with changing situations or demands in dynamic environments. It is called Asynchronous Situated Coevolution (ASiCo) and was designed for the lifelong coevolution of artificial neural network societies. ASiCo deals with the evolutionary part of neuroevolution and it can support any type of neural network structure or even neural network construction mechanism. Consequently, it can be extended with some of the techniques found in single ANN neuroevolutionary mechanisms when considering the simultaneous evolution of network weights and network topology. The operation and characteristics of this strategy are illustrated through some experiments carried out using a well known benchmark collaboration task.

DAAF: A Device Abstraction and Aggregation Framework for Smart Environments

Largely motivated by the ubiquitous computing vision, computers have been steadily becoming integrated in peoples life, expanding the ability of software applications to interact with the environment and the users. This has led to the creation of smart environments that support people in their daily life by exploiting information acquired using sensor networks. These systems are usually populated by multiple non-interoperable technologies that make the development, deployment and reutilization of applications a complex and repetitive task. This paper presents DAAF, a Device Abstraction and Aggregation Framework that provides a common conceptual model of a device network, and a set of tools, which allow a flexible integration of heterogeneous sensor networks, enabling fast development and reconfiguration of smart environment applications.

Some Issues and Extensions of JADE to Cope with Multi-agent Operation in the Context of Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) can be taken as one of the principal test beds for the integration of Systems, Humans and Cybernetics. Multi-agent based Ambient Intelligence solutions have proliferated in the last few years in order to cope with the intrinsically distributed and complex interaction based nature of the problem. Different multi-agent platforms have been used in this regard, being JADE one of the standard solutions adopted due the variety of services it provides and to its FIPA compliance. Nevertheless, JADE was designed as a general Multi-agent platform and not for the particular demands of AmI systems. Consequently, its behavior in this realm is not as optimal as it could be. In this paper, we analyze some of the problems JADE presents for its application to AmI, especially in terms of communications, and describe some of the extensions we have developed in order to solve them. The resulting system exhibits enhanced communication capabilities, promotes the division of tasks into decoupled components and makes component reutilization easy. This platform constitutes an environment with tools for the development and deployment of AmI applications.

Dandelion: decoupled distributed user interfaces in the HI 3 ambient intelligence platform

Ambient Intelligence and Ubiquitous Computing systems must deal with a wide variety of environments, users and devices. Designing and implementing their interaction systems is quite a complicated task because it is difficult to know in advance the conditions in which the system will be run. This article presents Dandelion, a framework that uses a model-driven approach to support the development of user interfaces for UC and AmI systems by defining a series of high-level declarative models. It decouples the application logic from the interaction elements, which can be physically distributed throughout the environment, and even changed dynamically.

On the Use of Mixed Reality for Setting up Control and Coordination Strategies for Teams of Autonomous UAV

A mixed reality simulation framework is being developed as a tool to facilitate the elaboration, testing and deployment of control and collaborative strategies for teams of UAVs. The virtual world within the framework must contain a model of the phenomenon under analysis. It has been shown that, for complex cases, the use of real UAVs in an initiation phase could serve to simplify this model while increasing its accuracy. In a second step, a subsequent intermediate phase is implemented now. In this phase the virtual model is first scaled and then used to provide measurement data to the real planes that are equipped with virtual sensors in an augmented reality scenario. This way the cost and time of checking the coordination strategies and communications when several real planes are flying simultaneously can be greatly reduced. Once everything is tuned and adjusted within this intermediate phase, the whole system could be implemented in the full size real environment. An application on pollutant plume dispersion is used as a workbench case to show how this procedure is implemented in practice.

A Framework for the Development of Context-Adaptable User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing Systems

This paper addresses the problem of developing user interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing (UC) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. These kind of systems are expected to provide a natural user experience, considering interaction modalities adapted to the user abilities and preferences and using whatever interaction devices are present in the environment. These interaction devices are not necessarily known at design time. The task is quite complicated due to the variety of devices and technologies, and the diversity of scenarios, and it usually burdens the developer with the need to create many different UIs in order to consider the foreseeable user-environment combinations. Here, we propose an UI abstraction framework for UC and AmI systems that effectively improves the portability of those systems between different environments and for different users. It allows developers to design and implement a single UI capable of being deployed with different devices and modalities regardless the physical location.

Autonomous Evaluation of Interaction Resource Adequateness for Ambient Intelligence Scenarios

One of the main problems of Ambient Intelligence systems is that developers have to design and implement different user interfaces for each combination of user and environmental characteristics. This paper deals with alleviating this problem through the implementation of a UI development framework, called Dandelion, which postpones until run-time the implementation of the UI for a specific scenario. In particular, we address the autonomous evaluation of the adequateness of interaction devices for the scenario in order to facilitate the final automatic generation of an adapted UI.

Improving the Portability of Ambient Intelligence Systems

Ambient Intelligence and Ambient Assisted Living systems are required to provide a natural user experience, where the interaction is resolved by using devices and modalities adapted to the user abilities and preferences, and even to the environment conditions. Because of the variety of devices and technologies, and the diversity of scenarios, developing these interaction systems is a complicated task. This paper proposes an UI abstraction framework for the development of AmI and AAL systems that effectively improves the portability of those systems between different environments. It allows developers to design and implement a single UI capable of being deployed with different devices and modalities regardless the physical location.