Asa MacWilliams

Smart Home Challenges and Approaches to Solve Them: A Practical Industrial Perspective

Why are smart homes not successfully deployed on the market, even though there are many demonstrator systems in research and industry? Over the past years, we have built and improved one smart home platform ourselves and have been involved with many other comparable systems. In this paper, we share the problems we have come across, and present pragmatic approaches towards solving them.

Distributed Software Maintenance Using an Autonomic System Management Approach based on the Viable System Model

Most current software management solutions are missing a systematic and holistic approach for global system management, and apply only to specific system components. This limits the systems extensibility, and does not meet interoperability requirements from the growing heterogeneity of the operating environment. This paper discusses an alternative approach to common management of evolving distributed software, inspired by the research in the field of open systems and cybernetic models. The approach involves adapting Stanford Seers viable system model (VSM) to the concrete needs of distributed software, supporting evolutionary integration of new functionality, while preserving system stability. We introduce meta-data bindings to existing information models as a basis for management of hierarchical and recursive software elements, and an architecture for composition of interacting components with verification of their capabilities during deployment and runtime. The architecture is designed to satisfy criteria of the viable system model and to assure conditions necessary for autonomic behavior

A retinoblastoma orthologue is a major regulator of S-phase, mitotic, and developmental gene expression in Dictyostelium.

Background The retinoblastoma tumour suppressor, Rb, has two major functions. First, it represses genes whose products are required for S-phase entry and progression thus stabilizing cells in G1. Second, Rb interacts with factors that induce cell-cycle exit and terminal differentiation. Dictyostelium lacks a G1 phase in its cell cycle but it has a retinoblastoma orthologue, rblA. Methodology/Principal Findings Using microarray analysis and mRNA-Seq transcriptional profiling, we show that RblA strongly represses genes whose products are involved in S phase and mitosis. Both S-phase and mitotic genes are upregulated at a single point in late G2 and again in mid-development, near the time when cell cycling is reactivated. RblA also activates a set of genes unique to slime moulds that function in terminal differentiation. Conclusions Like its mammalian counterpart Dictyostelium, RblA plays a dual role, regulating cell-cycle progression and transcriptional events leading to terminal differentiation. In the absence of a G1 phase, however, RblA functions in late G2 controlling the expression of both S-phase and mitotic genes.

Architecture for Distributed Component Management in Heterogeneous Software Environments

—This paper proposes an alternative approach to software management in heterogeneous environments. It targets encapsulation and dependency management of component systems using Stanford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) as requirements and organizational model. VSM is expressed with meanings of Common Information Model (CIM) extensions that serve as basis for an object-oriented representation of managed components. A control-loop architecture is proposed to facilitate monitoring of heterogeneous component environments using the developed model.

Overview of Indoor Positioning Technologies for Context Aware AAL Applications

Many AAL scenarios, such as those found in the public-funded German R&D project SmartSenior, are based on location information about a person, which makes the position key context information. Previous papers have dealt with the design of a SmartSenior positioning system for emergency scenarios, both indoors and outdoors. This paper focuses on non-critical non-emergency scenarios, e.g., activity recognition and indoor navigation. We present the state-of-the-art in indoor positioning and the current research trend towards including additional sensor information to achieve positioning enhancements and gather more context information. After introducing a few interesting scenarios, we present a guideline on how indoor positioning can be classified in technical ways and also in more abstract ways. We also define metrics (accuracy, costs, privacy, context information) which we then use to evaluate the current state-of-the-art research. Based on this evaluation, we discuss possible solutions for the previously presented scenarios.

Dynamic Software Visualization with BusyBorg - A Proof of Concept

To create a common understanding of a software system, for users and developers, we believe that run-time visualization of both behavior and internal structure is critical. This is particularly true for distributed embedded systems, which are designed to be unobtrusive, making them difficult to comprehend for people who are not familiar with them. We suggest a novel method to visualize software behavior in real-time flexibly and comfortably, facilitating understanding of software. We conducted a feasibility study with a proof of-concept prototype. Our results indicate that visualizing structure and behavior in real-time supports software comprehension for new architects, developers and users, and can even provide new insights to experienced developers.