Jari Porras

Peer-to-peer communication approach for a mobile environment

In this paper an approach to the peer-to-peer communication in a mobile environment is presented. This approach is based on the concept of personal trusted device that constantly monitors its neighborhood and collects information for the use of different applications. The reference implementation is built on top of iPaq PDAs running the Linux operating system. Class diagrams are presented for the main elements of the environment and the properties of the prototype are presented. Although this approach is not limited to any particular communication technology only Bluetooth technology is considered and presented in this paper.

Dynamic Resource Management and Cyber Foraging

Mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are rapidly advancing to become full-fledged personal computing devices. In particular, besides supporting phone calls, mobile phones nowadays provide storage, computing, communication, and multimedia capabilities thus to be considered the primary personal computing devices of the future [68]. However, although relatively powerful, mobile devices will always be constrained in terms of physical size, thus leading to limitations in their computing and communication capabilities, battery lifetime as well as screen and keyboard size. These constraints inhibit mobile devices from fully supporting increasingly demanding mobile applications. Furthermore, although processing capabilities have followed Moore’s law for the last 30 years, the more critical resource on mobile devices is battery energy density, which has shown the slowest trend in mobile computing [651].

Cloud-based bibliometric analysis service for systematic mapping studies

There is an increasing number of scientific articles being published, which makes tracking the state of the art more time-consuming. There are software tools available to help with systematic mapping studies in a field of science, but most of these tools are closed source and involve several manual time-consuming steps that could be automated further. We present an open solution as a cloud-based design for bibliographic analysis that makes the research method available for a wider audience.

Social networking on mobile environment

Social networking and social networking sites have gained popularity among internet users during the past few years. Social networks fulfill the need of users to stay connected to friends and other people interested in the same issues. Combining social networks to the mobile environment is a growing interest of mobile device users as it allows the users to be in their online social community despite their mobility. This paper introduces one social networking approach on the mobile environment. The approach is based on dynamic group creation and management in the PeerHood environment. A reference implementation of a social networking application built on top of PeerHood is presented.

Increasing collaborative communications in a programming course with gamification: a case study

In this case study we present an approach for using gamification elements to increase online student collaboration. In the study a gamified online discussion system was added to an introduction to programming course, with the aim of motivating the students to help each other. The actions in the discussion systems were analyzed and compared with user profiles and a student survey. The system had a positive impact on the course, increasing student collaboration, reduced response times and made course communications 88% more efficient by reducing email traffic.

Use of distributed resources in mobile environment

In this paper an approach to utilize distributed resources in mobile computing environment is presented. Our approach is based on the use of previously implemented mobile connectivity solution PeerHood. PeerHood observes the neighborhood of the mobile device making it possible to discover and use services of other devices (i.e. distributed resources in this environment) and thus makes it possible for our new approach to utilize these resources for remote execution of various tasks. We created a service on a fixed computer which receives tasks from other devices and executes them. Remote image analysis is used as an application to show how the approach could be efficiently used

Creating software engineering student interaction profiles for discovering gamification approaches to improve collaboration

Benefits of collaborative learning are established and gamification methods have been used to motivate students towards achieving course goals in educational settings. However, different users prefer different game elements and rewarding approaches. We present an evidence-based method and a case study where interaction analysis and k-means clustering is used to create gamification preference profiles. These profiles can be used with an agent-based simulation to evaluate how computer supported collaboration system users react to the gamification elements and how the collaboration dynamics change.

Improving battery life and performance of mobile devices with cyber foraging

The number of mobile phones has grown greatly during the last few decades. Among this trend, also the expectations and requirements we pose on the mobile devices is growing. As the hardware restrictions for efficient computing are slowly removed, the problem of battery life still exists. Current solutions for extending battery life take into consideration very strict energy saving methods as well as building larger batteries. This paper takes a look into saving battery life via remote execution method known as cyber foraging. In cyber foraging the mobile device can use nearby free computing resources to perform more complex tasks instead of executing them locally. A series of tests were carried out in order to evaluate the possibility of saving energy via remote execution. Not only this seems efficient for saving battery life, but also reducing computation times and improving the user experience.

Personal trusted device in personal communications

In this paper an approach to personal communications through the concept of personal trusted device is presented. The personal trusted device based architecture consists of separate layers, connectivity, middleware and applications. At the moment most of the effort has been put into the connectivity layer. The proposed architecture is verified through three applications: access control system, guidance system and fitness system.

Communication patterns in collaborative software engineering courses: a case for computer-supported collaboration

Collaboration has become an important teaching method in software engineering and there are several computer supported collaboration tools to aid the development and learning process. However, most studies have concentrated on intra-group studies. We believe that computer supported collaborative learning tools can also aid software engineering students to have beneficial inter-group collaboration. In this research the communication patterns in three collaborative software engineering courses were analyzed with the method of social network analysis. It was found out that students do collaborate, but mostly along pre-established social connections. The main reason for this was the difficulty in matchmaking and discovering others who were struggling with the same problems. Our proposal is to study how students in similar learning scenarios benefit from computer supported collaborative tools that increase networking opportunities. The findings presented in this paper provide a baseline for comparison when performing social network analysis in future studies.