Dirk Husemann

Personal mobile hub

As advances are made in wearable computing, there is a need for a personal mobile hub that can manage interactions between the wearable devices and act as a proxy for these devices. In this paper we describe why this is a good model, why the interfaces need to be open, and why different parties in the value chain, such as wireless service providers and device manufacturers, may prefer such architecture. Our personal mobile hub supports multiple wireless protocols, some short range and some wide area so that the power of the Internet is available even to body worn sensors. We describe custom hardware that we built for this purpose and also the software necessary to make this concept work. We have tested out this architecture with an end-to-end application. The working system was demonstrated at the annual IBM Stockholders meeting in 2004 and is also available for customers to see at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab in Zurich.

Standards in the smart card world

Abstract In this paper, I take you on a guided tour through the world of smart card standards. We briefly touch ISO 7816, the defining standards for smart cards; then we take a longer look at current de-facto standards for smart card operating systems (SCOSs) such as JavaCard, MULTOS, BasicCard, and Windows for Smart Cards. The paper concludes with a discussion of PC/SC, MUSCLE, and the OpenCard Framework which are smart card middlewares for smart card-application communication.

DEAPspace: transient ad-hoc networking of pervasive devices

The DEAPspace project is building an interaction framework for connecting pervasive devices over the wireless medium, supporting the development of new proximity-based collective distributed applications. The main components of this framework are the discovery algorithm and the service description model. DEAPspace provides devices with useful information about the other devices in their surroundings. This information can be queried in a consistent way that will tolerate evolutions, and allow legacy devices to continue to function in the fast-developing world of pervasive gadgets. The discovery is done in a power-efficient, and network-friendly way, and will adapt to a wide range of error conditions. This framework has been implemented, and allows the development of distributed applications that use ad-hoc transient networking as part of their function. The primary implementation was in Java. A subset of the code was also written in C, to allow the use of machines which do not have a JVM. In addition to simulation, the code has been tested over TCP/IP and the Ethernet interface of an 802.11 link.

Automatic Classification of Change Requests for Improved IT Service Quality

Faulty changes to the IT infrastructure can lead to critical system and application outages, and therefore cause serious economical losses. In this paper, we describe a change planning support tool that aims at assisting the change requesters in leveraging aggregated information associated with the change, like past failure reasons or best implementation practices. The thus gained knowledge can be used in the subsequent planning and implementation steps of the change. Optimal matching of change requests with the aggregated information is achieved through the classification of the change request into about 200 fine-grained activities. We propose to automatically classify the incoming change requests using various information retrieval and machine learning techniques. The cost of building the classifiers is reduced by employing active learning techniques or by leveraging labeled features. Historical tickets from two customers were used to empirically assess and compare the accuracy of the different classification approaches (Lucene index, multinomial logistic regression, and generalized expectation criteria).

OpenCard: talking to your smart card

The authors discuss smart card technology, focusing on their OpenCard Framework. They discuss applications of smart cards and high level APIs. They consider how smart cards are attractive for mobile computing.

The OpenCard Framework

The increasing interest in conducting electronic business over the Internet requires authentication and secured transactions. The use of smart cards in an Internet context and especially in connection with Java has not been standardized. This paper presents the architecture of the OpenCard Framework, an industry initiative to standardize smart card middleware for Java. The reference implementation for the framework in the Java programming language is described. Related standardization efforts will be reviewed briefly.

CA-PK: conditional access for broadcast networks

This paper presents a conditional access solution suitable for broadcast networks (e.g. Eureka‐147 DAB, XM Radios SDARS, etc.). This solution, called CA‐PK (Conditional Access through Public Keys), can only be implemented in software, although it can utilize external crypto processors and allows a content provider to operate a conditional access system independently of third parties (i.e. DAB or GSM network operators). Furthermore, it integrates the consumer into the protection chain, creating a social environment that discourages illegal redistribution of access keys. Copyright

New channels, old concerns: scalable and reliable data dissemination

An interesting trend in the continuing convergence of information technologies is the emergence of the Internet as a content provider in its own right, as opposed to its simply being one of many delivery channels. For example, it is increasingly the primary source for items such as court rulings and software releases. Unfortunately the IP protocols normally employed for reliable data transfer are of the point-to-point type and not well suited to large-scale one-to-many dissemination. Sudden rushes to obtain new items can cause severe traffic congestion and degrade network service across a whole region. Even worse, sites which are routinely popular cause routine congestion. Broadcast technologies should be able to provide a better solution in terms of scalability. The Internet has a mature protocol suite for IP multicast and more recently the traditional wireless broadcast industry has started moving from analog to digital transmission formats. However, in both these cases the emphasis in protocol development has been on support for continuous media, which requires timeliness of delivery rather than bit-perfect data integrity. A further problem with the new digital broadcast channels is their lack of support for integration with the Internet. This paper examines some of the issues involved in providing both reliable and scalable dissemination across broadcast channels and describes the DABWeb architecture for Internet content dissemination via digital broadcast.

Change Risk Expert: Leveraging advanced classification and risk management techniques for systematic change failure reduction

This application track paper describes the Change Risk Expert (CRE) tool, which is designed to help reduce change failure rates. CRE assists Change Requesters to adequately plan changes by semi- automatically classifying change tickets, by informing about past failure rates and reasons, by systematically managing change risks, and by providing standard change implementation plans.

Editorial: The WEB we live in

Remember those days when connecting to the Internet was usually something involving plain old telephone lines, things called dial-up modems, and was accompanied by ear-splitting noises while the modem apparently got into sync with the universe at large? Back when buying a book involved going into a real-life store? Back when chatting was something you did face-to-face and mail was something that involved sheets of paper, envelopes and little sticky things called stamps? Back when going online meant dialing in to AOL or CompuServe or BTX? All of that seems like ancient history nowadays, like tales from the beginnings of the industrial revolution, back then when everything was still powered by steam and Charles Dickens was prowling the gas-lit and fog-filled streets of London. Actually, only about 20 years have passed since the days of the acoustic coupler. We have moved from the Web as something of interest to technophiles only to something that most of us use every moment of our lives – to check on our loved ones, to buy and download books, music, videos, tickets, arrange our vacation, to watch that show we missed last night, to share pictures, videos, and the latest and greatest insights we just were struck by. Even more exciting: With the Web we have started to turn our societies, our lives, and our ways of conducting business inside out! Web-applications such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter, while also being entertaining, enable us to graduate from being consumers to becoming producers. Technologies such as the emerging 3D printing technology – interestingly enough not driven by any of the established printer manufacturers but instead by academics and interested amateurs! – and the grassroots-powered Arduino efforts now help us to break through that virtual, real-life barrier that confined us to the cyberspace so far: the virtual becomes real! As the Web turns 20 this year we thought we would take a closer look at the Web we live in, at how it has developed over the last decades, and what we can expect to see in the near and further future. We have been fortunate in getting several experts to share their knowledge and insight with us. We decided to base this special issue on two papers from Google in which Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page and colleagues describe their ideas for the first ver-