Gavin Brebner

Client-Side Profile Storage

As Internet users, we provide personal information to a growing number of service providers with little or no control over its usage, and no means to properly track subsequent access of this information. Some companies have recently made announcements proposing to handle our personal information centrally, offering the possibility of a unified repository, but raising additional trust and privacy concerns. We have chosen to investigate an alternative to this trend by storing personal information on client devices, increasing the possibility of putting the user in control of his or her personal information. A user can have multiple heterogeneous devices, so this generates a need for the distribution of profile data. We report on work that addresses this distribution issue using a coherency protocol well adapted to handle data migration, and are extending this protocol to incorporate trust-related features.

Storing and Accessing User Context

Mobile networks have undergone rapid development these last decades; the mobile user is no longer the exception. In addition, the mobile user employs an increasing number of devices and has access to an ever-increasing number of services and functionalities. Personalization and context-aware applications attempt to simplify access to and usage of this multitude of devices and services. However, both require the availability of reliable user context information to be effective. In this paper, we present a personal context storage system enabling a user to access personal information and personalized services from any personal device. A user centric replication model and a novel access interface well adapted to context access patterns are techniques we put forward to get round the well-known trade-off between consistency and availability for the specific storage system we focus on: a user centred storage system.

A Middleware Architecture for Personalized Communities of Devices

This position paper outlines our vision for a world of user devices not continuously connected to the Internet. Our first concern is to ease the usage of these devices by adapting their services to the user with data from a local profile. Maintaining the privacy of these user data is a major requirement that impacts all the work we do around collecting and exploiting these data. A major problem is to ensure the visibility of these data in a volatile environment.