Christos Laoudias

Crowdsourcing with Smartphones

Smartphones can reveal crowdsourcings full potential and let users transparently contribute to complex and novel problem solving. This emerging area is illustrated through a taxonomy that classifies the mobile crowdsourcing field and through three new applications that optimize location-based search and similarity services based on crowd-generated data. Such applications can be deployed on SmartLab, a cloud of more than 40 Android devices deployed at the University of Cyprus that provides an open testbed to facilitate research and development of smartphone applications on a massive scale.

Crowdsourced indoor localization for diverse devices through radiomap fusion

Crowdsourcing is an emerging field that allows to tackle difficult problems by soliciting contributions from common people, rather than trained professionals. In the post-pc era, where smartphones dominate the personal computing market offering both constant mobility and large amounts of spatiotemporal sensory data, crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular. In this context, crowdsourcing stands as the only viable solution for collecting the large amount of location-related network data required to support location-based services, e.g., the signal strength radiomap of a fingerprinting localization system inside a multi-floor building. However, this benefit does not come for free, because crowdsourcing also poses new challenges in radiomap creation. We focus on the problem of device diversity that occurs frequently as the contributors usually carry heterogeneous mobile devices that report network measurements very differently. We demonstrate with simulations and experimental results that the traditional signal strength values from the surrounding network infrastructure are not suitable for crowdsourcing the radiomap. Moreover, we present an alternative approach, based on signal strength differences, that is far more robust to device variations and maintains the localization accuracy regardless of the number of contributing devices.

The Airplace Indoor Positioning Platform for Android Smartphones

In this demonstration paper, we present an indoor positioning system developed for Android smartphones, coined Airplace. To infer the unknown user location we rely on ubiquitous WLANs and exploit Received Signal Strength (RSS) values from neighboring Access Points (AP) that are constantly monitored by the mobile devices under normal operation. Our system follows a mobile-based network-assisted architecture to eliminate the communication overhead and respect user privacy. In a typical scenario, when a user walks inside a building a smartphone client conducts a single communication with our Distribution Server to receive the RSS radiomap and is then able to position itself independently using the observed RSS values. Moreover, we have implemented an Android application to facilitate the collection of RSS values by users that may contribute their data to our system for constructing and updating the radiomap through crowdsourcing1. We will demonstrate the real-time positioning capabilities of the system during the conference by allowing attendees to carry an Android tablet in order to view their position on a floorplan map, while walking around inside the demo area (interactive scenario). Moreover, we will illustrate how to evaluate the performance of different positioning algorithms using profiled data in a trace-driven scenario. Our objective is to highlight the effectiveness and applicability of our system and at the same time the participants will be able to appreciate the potential of indoor location-oriented services and applications.

Localization Using Radial Basis Function Networks and Signal Strength Fingerprints in WLAN

Fingerprinting localization techniques provide reliable location estimates and enable the development of location aware applications especially for indoor environments, where satellite based positioning is infeasible. In our approach we utilize Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprints collected in known locations and employ a Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network to approximate the function that maps fingerprints to location coordinates. We present a clustering scheme to reduce the size and computational complexity of the RBF architecture and demonstrate the applicability of this approach in a real-world WLAN setup. Experimental results indicate that the RBF based method is an efficient approach to the location determination problem that outperforms existing techniques in terms of the positioning error.

Indoor Localization Using Neural Networks with Location Fingerprints

Reliable localization techniques applicable to indoor environments are essential for the development of advanced location aware applications. We rely on WLAN infrastructure and exploit location related information, such as the Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements, to estimate the unknown terminal location. We adopt Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) as a function approximation approach to map vectors of RSS samples, known as location fingerprints, to coordinates on the plane. We present an efficient algorithm based on Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks and describe a data clustering method to reduce the network size. The proposed algorithm is practical and scalable, while the experimental results indicate that it outperforms existing techniques in terms of the positioning error.

SmartTrace: Finding similar trajectories in smartphone networks without disclosing the traces

In this demonstration paper, we present a powerful distributed framework for finding similar trajectories in a smartphone network, without disclosing the traces of participating users. Our framework, exploits opportunistic and participatory sensing in order to quickly answer queries of the form: “Report objects (i.e., trajectories) that follow a similar spatio-temporal motion to Q, where Q is some query trajectory.” SmartTrace, relies on an in-situ data storage model, where geo-location data is recorded locally on smartphones for both performance and privacy reasons. SmartTrace then deploys an efficient top-K query processing algorithm that exploits distributed trajectory similarity measures, resilient to spatial and temporal noise, in order to derive the most relevant answers to Q quickly and efficiently. Our demonstration shows how the SmartTrace algorithmics are ported on a network of Android-based smartphone devices with impressive query response times. To demonstrate the capabilities of SmartTrace during the conference, we will allow the attendees to query local smartphone networks in the following two modes: i) Interactive Mode, where devices will be handed out to participants aiming to identify who is moving similar to the querying node; and ii) Trace-driven Mode, where a large-scale deployment can be launched in order to show how the K most similar trajectories can be identified quickly and efficiently. The conference attendees will be able to appreciate how interesting spatio-temporal search applications can be implemented efficiently (for performance reasons) and without disclosing the complete user traces to the query processor (for privacy reasons)1. For instance, an attendee might be able to determine other attendees that have participated in common sessions, in order to initiate new discussions and collaborations, without knowing their trajectory or revealing his/her own trajectory either.

A new test pattern generator for high defect coverage in a BIST environment

In this paper we propose a new Test Pattern Generator (TPG) for the detection of realistic faults occurring in CMOS nanometer technologies. The proposed TPG compares favorably to the corresponding already known TPGs with respect to the fault coverage obtained by test sequences of the same length. Another advantage of the proposed TPG is that the same TPG can be used for testing more than one modules in a SOC.

Crowdsourced Trace Similarity with Smartphones

Smartphones are nowadays equipped with a number of sensors, such as WiFi, GPS, accelerometers, etc. This capability allows smartphone users to easily engage in crowdsourced computing services, which contribute to the solution of complex problems in a distributed manner. In this work, we leverage such a computing paradigm to solve efficiently the following problem: comparing a query trace Q against a crowd of traces generated and stored on distributed smartphones. Our proposed framework, coined SmartTrace+, provides an effective solution without disclosing any part of the crowd traces to the query processor. SmartTrace+, relies on an in-situ data storage model and intelligent top-K query processing algorithms that exploit distributed trajectory similarity measures, resilient to spatial and temporal noise, in order to derive the most relevant answers to Q. We evaluate our algorithms on both synthetic and real workloads. We describe our prototype system developed on the Android OS. The solution is deployed over our own SmartLab testbed of 25 smartphones. Our study reveals that computations over SmartTrace+ result in substantial energy conservation; in addition, results can be computed faster than competitive approaches.

Hand-grip and body-loss impact on RSS measurements for localization of mass market devices

In this paper we present the effect of the hand-grip and the presence of the human body on received signal strength measurements when performing positioning of mass market devices in indoor environments. We demonstrate that the mitigation of both human body and hand-grip influence can enhance the positioning accuracy and that the human factor cannot be neglected in experimental activities with real mobile devices.

3D Ray Tracing for device-independent fingerprint-based positioning in WLANs

We study the use of 3D Ray Tracing (RT) to construct radiomaps for WLAN Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint-based positioning, in conjunction with calibration techniques to make the overall process device-independent. RSS data collection might be a tedious and time-consuming process and also the measured radiomap accuracy and applicability is subject to potential changes in the wireless environment. Therefore, RT becomes a more attractive and efficient way to generate radiomaps. Moreover, traditional fingerprint-based methods lead to radiomaps which are restricted to the device used to generate the radiomap and fail to provide acceptable performance when different devices are considered. We address both challenges by exploiting 3D RT-generated radiomaps and using linear data transformation to match the characteristics of various devices. We evaluate the efficiency of this approach in terms of the time spent to create the radiomap, the amount of data required to calibrate the radiomap for different devices and the positioning error which is compared against the case of using dedicated radiomaps collected with each device.