Gonzalo Huerta-Canepa

A virtual cloud computing provider for mobile devices

A mobile device like a smart phone is becoming one of main information processing devices for users these days. Using it, a user not only receives and makes calls, but also performs information tasks. However, a mobile device is still resource constrained, and some applications, especially work related ones, usually demand more resources than a mobile device can afford. To alleviate this, a mobile device should get resources from an external source. One of such sources is cloud computing platforms. Nevertheless an access to these platforms is not always guaranteed to be available and/or is too expensive to access them. We envision a way to overcome this issue by creating a virtual cloud computing platform using mobile phones. We argue that due to the pervasiveness of mobile phones and the enhancement in their capabilities this idea is feasible. We show prior evaluation results to support our concept and discuss future developments.

An Adaptable Application Offloading Scheme Based on Application Behavior

The advancement of personal devices such as PDAs and mobile phones become ubiquitous and their increasing computing capabilities allow users to perform tasks that used to be performed on workstations. However, we cannot expect to run all tasks on top of personal devices because of the limited resources. Application offloading allow us to overcome this issue by porting part of an application to a nearby server or workstation with more capabilities. In this paper we present a new application offloading mechanism to perform offloading based on the execution history of applications, and adaptable to the current conditions of the environment and device. We record the consumed resources and the state of the device and surrogates, and we use that information to perform an adaptable offloading. We show that our scheme can prevent the overhead of profiling and also reduce the execution time of an application against pure runtime offloading.

An Overlay-Based Resource Monitoring Scheme for Social Applications in MANET

The popularity of Social Networking Service and the ubiquity of handheld devices improve chances of social interactions. Mobile social software emerges as a key part of this new trend. In order for users to enjoy this social experience, the resource state of member needs to be monitored so applications can adapt to dynamics of MANET and resource constraints on mobile devices. Previous work in resource monitoring for MANETs focuses on providing a general monitoring scheme. Therefore important group semantics, such as membership information, are not considered. This lack of consideration generates unnecessary traffic overhead and delay in responses. In this paper, we propose a resource monitoring scheme for group-based applications in MANETs. The proposed scheme is based on clusters of information that communicate each other using a group-based overlay. An evaluation shows that the proposed scheme shows shorter response time and smaller traffic overhead without accuracy degradation compared with previous work.

A multi-user ad-hoc resource manager for smart spaces

Advancement in mobile devices makes possible to add more features to them while reducing the size. If we also consider the fact that they posses advance communications features, we can convert these devices into the central manager of userspsila activities. One feature in this line is the ability to control the devices surrounding the user. Problems arise when the devices belong to a shared space. In this case we also need to consider interactions and conflicts between users. In this research we present a multi-user ad-hoc resource manager for smart spaces, which allow us to control devices present in the area, and avoid conflicts between users.

What's Happening: Finding Spontaneous User Clusters Nearby Using Twitter

Twitter is a public social service that allows users to share information as short-text messages. Previous researchers have tried to analyze the information available on Twitter to discover topic trending. However, these topics are associated with the whole network, and are not associated to a particular place. In this work, we propose a scheme to discover places where something is happening by analyzing geo-tagged tweets in a timely manner. By using the proposed scheme, users will be able to recognize spontaneous events happening nearby, and be notified about it through their smart phones. Experimental results show that by using geo-tagged information associated to tweets, events related to a particular place can be detected using clustering techniques and semantic interpretation of keywords.

A Place-Aware Stereotypical Trust Supporting Scheme

Proliferation of smartphones enables interaction among nearby users anywhere, anytime. Despite that these interaction opportunities may provide benefit to users, they also involve risks since nearby users may not be known. In this paper, we propose a decentralized stereotypical trust model that supports variation in human behavior based on context changes, specifically place. We leverage previous studies that show how the place of interaction affects the level of trust of users and applied them to a stereotypical trust scheme. Our results show that the proposed scheme not only performs faster in terms of stereotypes creation time (average 200% faster) but also reduces the rate of regarding a malicious user as a trustworthy one (average 75%) when compared to existing approach.

Trust ME: A Trust Decision Framework for Mobile Environments

Recent advancement in smart phones enables users to collaborate in mobile environments. Their diverse communication interfaces allow them to interact with nearby devices, enabling the sharing of computing capabilities and resources among collocated users. Given the personal nature of smart phones, the selection of trustworthy users must be incorporated to enable this sharing process. In this work, a context-aware trust decision scheme for mobile ad-hoc environments is presented. This scheme is decentralized as uses information acquired by mobile phones, while leveraging social theories to reflect real-life aspects properly. The proposed scheme is validated against required properties of trust decision schemes for mobile ad-hoc environments.

Urban Radar: An Enabler for Place-Aware Spontaneous Interactions

With the advancements on mobile phones and the integration of multiple communication interfaces, interaction between users is no longer restricted to spaces with connectivity with the Internet but can happen anywhere, anytime. This has promoted the development of frameworks to enable the interaction of co-located users. One of the challenging points of this interaction is to find similar and trustable users to interact with. Existing works focus mostly on properties related to mobile users to find similar users in the surroundings. However, the features of the space in which the interaction is taking place are an important factor for recommendation since it provides hints about the most suitable type of interaction among co-located users. In this work we present a mediator application called Urban Radar, designed for supporting spontaneous interaction of co-located users taking into account the semantics of the place. Our evaluation shows that the mobile social application recommendation based on placeness either extremely or mostly satisfies 60% of users.

A Personalized Navigation Guide Using a Social-Spatial Ontology

Map services help people find places they wish to visit. Users input the target address and the system returns that location on a map, with additional information such as nearby points of interest, directions to the location, etc. However, these applications mainly focus on general knowledge, failing to provide personalized information that may help users find/identify a place faster. In this paper, we present a map application based on previous user knowledge. We represent two types of knowledge - spatial and social – in the form of a social-location ontology. This ontology is then used to present a destination based on places familiar to the user. By showing an unknown location in terms of a familiar place, we allow the user to find the target location with much briefer instructions. This is especially useful on mobile devices, in which the limited screen size restricts the amount of information that can be displayed. In order to adapt to new knowledge, the ontology evolves as the user visits new places and meets new people. Our evaluation shows that users prefer to have concrete information related to a destination for easier understanding

A Multi-User Ad-Hoc Resource Manager for Public Urban Areas

Smart spaces are defined as an environment capable of communicating with users in order to support them in achieving a goal. Previously, smart spaces were restricted to closed private areas in a well defined environment. However, factors such as the omnipresence of mobile devices, the advancement in wireless communication, and the low cost of technological infrastructure allows the creation of smart spaces everywhere. One trend that is acquiring relevance these days is to use surrounding public resources to perform tasks on behalf of mobile devices, which are resource constrained. To achieve this, systems should be able to control the access to public resources, minimize possible interference among users, and maintain the purpose of public resources untouched. This work presents a multi-user ad-hoc resource manager for smart urban areas based on previous considerations. The current system helps to avoid conflicts between users by means of a distributed scheme based on social gain for the community. The management is performed without the need of a central infrastructure. Results show that it is possible to discover and manage public resources from mobile devices while handling conflicts in a distributed manner.