Jonathan P. Munson

Challenges: an application model for pervasive computing

The way mobile computing devices and applications are developed, deployed and used today does not meet the expectations of the user community and falls far short of the potential for pervasive computing. This paper challenges the mobile computing community by questioning the roles of devices, applications, and a users environment. A vision of pervasive computing is described, along with attributes of a new application model that supports this vision, and a set of challenges that must be met in order to bring the vision to reality.

A concurrency control framework for collaborative systems

We have developed a new framework for supporting concurrency control in collaborative applications. It supports multiple degrees of consistency and allows users to choose concurrency control policies based on the objects they are manipulating, the tasks they are performing, and the coupling and merge policies they are using. Concurrency control policies are embodied in hierarchical, constructor-based lock compatibility tables. Entries in these tables may be specified explicitly or derived automatically from coupling and merge policies. In this paper, we motivate and describe the framework, identify several useful concurrency control policies it can support, evaluate its flexibility, and give conclusions and directions for future work.

A flexible object merging framework

The need to merge different versions of an object to a common state arises in collaborative computing due to several reasons including optimistic concurrency control, asynchronous coupling, and absence of access control. We have developed a flexible object merging framework that allows definition of the merge policy based on the particular application and the context of the collaborative activity. It performs automatic, semi-automatic, and interactive merges, supports semantics-determined merges, operates on objects with arbitrary structure and semantics, and allows fine-grained specification of merge policies. It is based on an existing collaborative applications framework and consists of a merge matrix, which defines merge functions and their parameters and allows definition of multiple merge policies, and a merge algorithm, which performs the merge based on the results computed by the merge functions. In conjunction with our framework we introduce a set of merge policies for several useful kinds of merges we have identified. This paper motivates the need for a general approach to merging, identifies some important merging issues, surveys previous research in merging, identifies a list of merge requirements, describes our merging framework and illustrates it with examples, and evaluates the framework with respect to the requirements and other research efforts in merging objects.

Location-based notification as a general-purpose service

An often-discussed mobile commerce application is proximity-based coupon delivery. In a typical scenario a merchant is notified when a valued customer is within some distance of a retail outlet, upon which the customer is delivered a coupon or some notice of a special promotion. We believe that this basic mechanism of location-based notification has application far beyond commercial promotion, and is also of interest for tourism, traffic information, public service, and public safety. Furthermore, we believe that a general-purpose location-based notification service that can serve all these applications would be highly useful. However, as we will show, current architectures deployed by wireless carriers to service location-aware applications cannot handle the load of positioning requests implied by such a general-purpose service. We motivate the need for such a service, discuss the limitations of current architectures for providing location information, and detail the requirements for an architecture which would make such a service possible.

An approach to providing a seamless end-user experience for location-aware applications

With an increasing number of businesses considering the possibility of launching location-aware, mobile commerce applications, the quality of the end-user experience will become more and more critical. We propose dynamic bookmarks and location domains as mechanisms to give consumers simple and straightforward access to a dynamically changing set of location-based services. Dynamic bookmarks are descriptions of services, which are bound to actual, registered, services as a users location changes. Location domains provide meaningful location context for location-aware services. We discuss the motivation and background of our work in progress, describe the key concepts involved, and present a system architecture we have adopted.

Bluebot: Asset tracking via robotic location crawling

From manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer goods to government departments, enterprises of all kinds are gearing up to use RFID technology to increase the visibility of goods and assets within their supply chain and on their premises. However, RFID technology alone lacks the capability to track the location of items once they are moved within a facility. We present a prototype automatic location sensing system that combines RFID technology and off-the-shelf Wi-Fi based continuous positioning technology for tracking RFID-tagged assets. Our prototype system employs a robot, with an attached RFID reader, which periodically surveys the space, associating items it detects with its own location determined with the Wi-Fi positioning system. We propose four algorithms that combine the detected tags reading with previous samples to refine its location. Our experiments have shown that our positioning algorithms can bring a two to three fold improvement over the positional accuracy limitations in both the RFID reader and the positioning technology.

BlueBot: asset tracking via robotic location crawling

From manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer goods to government departments, enterprises of all kinds are gearing up to use RFID technology to increase the visibility of goods and assets within their supply chain and on their premises. However, RFID technology alone lacks the capability to track the location of items once they are moved within a facility. We present a prototype automatic location sensing system that combines RFID technology and off-the-shelf Wi-Fi based continuous positioning technology for tracking RFID-tagged assets. Our prototype system employs a robot, with an attached RFID reader, which periodically surveys the space, associating items it detects with its own location determined with the Wi-Fi positioning system. We propose four algorithms that combine the detected tags reading with previous samples to refine its location. Our experiments have shown that our positioning algorithms can bring a two to three fold improvement over the positional accuracy limitations in both the RFID reader and the positioning technology.

Services-oriented computing in a ubiquitous computing platform

Current telematics services platforms are tightly integrated, relatively fixed-function systems that manage the entire end-to-end infrastructure of devices, wireless communications, device management, subscriber management, and other functions. This closed nature prevents the infrastructure from being shared by other applications, which inhibits the development of new ubiquitous computing services that may not in themselves justify the cost of an entire end-to-end infrastructure. Services-oriented computing offers means to better expose the value of such infrastructures. We have developed a services-oriented, specification-based, ubiquitous computing platform called TOPAZ that abstracts common ubiquitous computing functions and makes them accessible to any application provider through Web-service interfaces. The nature of the TOPAZ services, as enabling long-running sessions between applications and remote clients, presents peculiar challenges to the generic issues of service metering and resource management. In this paper we describe these challenges and discuss the approach we have taken to them in TOPAZ. We first motivate and describe the TOPAZ application model and its service set. We then describe TOPAZs resource management and service metering functions, and its three-party session model that forms the basis for them.

The XVC Framework for In-Vehicle User Interfaces

XVC (extensible viewer composition) is an in-vehicle user interface framework for telematics applications. It provides a document-oriented applications model that eliminates the requirement for application providers to provide custom clients for their applications. Application providers compose interactive user interfaces through compound documents that specify content for a set of viewers, each oriented to a particular content medium. A viewers content may define actions on other viewers. This approach offers the additional benefit of offering a higher-level model to application developers, hence reducing application development costs. Our current set of viewers is oriented toward the domain of telematics applications, and includes viewers for map features, HTML-based messages, sound clips, and ticker messages. The framework is extensible to other application domains through the definition of new, domain-appropriate viewers

Management-Based license discovery for the cloud

Enterprise software is typically licensed through contracts that require organizations to monitor their own usage of the software and purchase the number or amount of licenses required by the vendors terms and conditions for that software. Vendors reserve the right to audit an organizations use of their software, and if an organization is under-licensed, costly back-payments may be required. For this reason, organizations go to great expense to maintain a complete and accurate inventory of their software so that they know their license obligations. The cloud, as an environment offering both greater flexibility in, and a higher degree of control over, an enterprises computing infrastructure, presents both new challenges for license compliance as well as new opportunities. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to producing accurate software inventories based on capturing the knowledge that is present in cloud management systems at the time of software provisioning and installation. We also demonstrate new capabilities for rule-based alerting and enforcement that are made possible by our approach.