Juan Ignacio Vazquez

Social devices: autonomous artifacts that communicate on the internet

The Internet has boosted people collaboration, enabling new forms of exchanging knowledge and engaging in social activities. The Web 2.0 paradigm (also called the Social Web) has greatly contributed to this achievement. We believe that the next wave of smart devices and digital objects will leverage the pervasiveness of Internet connectivity in order to form ecosystems and societies of artifacts that implement Internetbased social behaviors and interact with existing Internet-based social networks. In this paper, we introduce the concept of social device and describe our experiences creating different kinds of augmented objects that use the Internet in order to promote socialization, look smarter and better serve users. We finally identify several challenges in the research of devices that behave in social ways.

SoaM: A Web‐powered Architecture for Designing and Deploying Pervasive Semantic Devices

Despite several efforts during the last years, the web model and semantic web technologies have not yet been successfully applied to empower Ubiquitous Computing architectures in order to create knowledge‐rich environments populated by interconnected smart devices. In this paper we point out some problems of these previous initiatives and introduce SoaM (Smart Objects Awareness and Adaptation Model), an architecture for designing and seamlessly deploying web‐powered context‐aware semantic gadgets. Implementation and evaluation details of SoaM are also provided in order to identify future research challenges.

Flexeo: An Architecture for Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks into the Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks are a hot topic in Ubiquitous Computing for implementing context-awareness scenarios. The connection of sensor nodes to the Internet leads to new ways for remote monitoring of human behavior in real-time. In this paper, we introduce Flexeo: a flexible architecture for implementing monitoring solutions based on wireless sensor networks, with distributed intelligence at different layers. In this way, sensor-populated scenarios may communicate with Internet-based facilities enabling the vision of an Internet of Things.

mRDP: An HTTP-based lightweight semantic discovery protocol

Discovery is one of the most important activities in ubiquitous and distributed computing, with a plethora of available protocols. Most of these protocols are designed for one concrete purpose: network nodes discovery, service discovery, search of specific information stored through the network, and so forth. Designing a single discovery system able to deal with the particularities of many different information structures and purposes seems not feasible. Moreover, these data structures possess some underlaying meanings and relationships that are usually hidden from traditional discovery protocols that use simple text-based matchmaking. A semantic discovery protocol could solve this problem by taking advantage of semantically annotated data and performing reasoning over the information to obtain additional knowledge that can be crucial in processing the queries. In this paper, we describe the basics of a novel semantic discovery mechanism called mRDP (Multicast Resource Discovery Protocol) built upon HTTP and Semantic Web technology to provide more powerful discovery capabilities.

WebTag: Web Browsing into Sensor Tags over NFC

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) continue to overcome many of the challenges related to wireless sensor monitoring, such as for example the design of smarter embedded processors, the improvement of the network architectures, the development of efficient communication protocols or the maximization of the life cycle autonomy. This work tries to improve the communication link of the data transmission in wireless sensor monitoring. The upstream communication link is usually based on standard IP technologies, but the downstream side is always masked with the proprietary protocols used for the wireless link (like ZigBee, Bluetooth, RFID, etc.). This work presents a novel solution (WebTag) for a direct IP based access to a sensor tag over the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology for secure applications. WebTag allows a direct web access to the sensor tag by means of a standard web browser, it reads the sensor data, configures the sampling rate and implements IP based security policies. It is, definitely, a new step towards the evolution of the Internet of Things paradigm.

A web 2.0 platform to enable context-aware mobile mash-ups

Context-aware systems allow users to access services and multimedia data according to their current context (location, identity, preferences). Web 2.0 fosters user contribution and presents the web as an application programming platform where third parties can create new applications (mash-ups) mixing the functionality offered by others. We deem that applying Web 2.0 principles to the development of middleware support for context-aware systems could result into a wider adoption of AmI. This work provides a platform which combines social context-aware annotation of objects and spatial regions with sentient mobile devices enabling multi-modal human to environment interaction in order to enable advanced context-aware data and service discovery, filtering and consumption within both indoor and outdoor environments.

RFIDGlove: A Wearable RFID Reader

There are different experiences in the use of RFID technology for warehouse inventories. However, there is future work to do on the design of advanced reading devices, applying wearable computation techniques and wireless communications. The aim of this work is to allow a natural interaction for the user who performs inventory tasks. In this paper we show the RFIDGlove system, which consists of a glove with an integrated RFID reader, an organic micro display and a communication system. The RFIDGlove system increases the efficiency of the activities in these areas, improving the user’s experience and comfort while he/she uses the system.

A middleware for the deployment of ambient intelligent spaces

The latest mobile devices are offering more multimedia features, better communication capabilities (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS/UMTS) and are more easily programmable than ever before. So far, those devices have been used mainly for communication, entertainment, and as electronic assistants. On the other hand, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is emerging as a new research discipline merging the fields of Ubiquitous Computing and Communications, Context Awareness and Intelligent User Interfaces. The ultimate goal of AmI is to surround our working and living environments with context-aware, cooperative and invisible devices that will assist and help us in our everyday activities. Current mobile devices, which accompany us anywhere and at anytime, are the most convenient tools to help us benefit from AmI-enhanced environments. In other words, mobile devices are the best candidates to intermediate between us and our surroundings. In consequence, this paper proposes a middleware which aims to make this vision reality following a two-fold objective: (1) to simplify the creation and deployment of physical spaces hosting smart objects and (2) to transform mobile devices into universal remote controllers of those objects.

Communication architectures and experiences for web-connected physical Smart objects

We are witnessing a tremendous hype on the Internet of Things paradigm, with not only research projects, but also commercial products claiming to implement its fundamental mechanisms. Smart-connected-objects designers often have to face decisions on the global architecture of the service, since no single solution is valid for all the cases. In this paper, we explore the different criteria for designing architectures for Internet of Things solutions, along with illustrative examples of prototypes that implement these approaches.

An interaction model for passively influencing the environment

Adapting the environment in a user-centred view is at the core of ambient intelligence. This adaptation involves both context-awareness and interaction mechanisms that can be classified into active and passive. While active mechanisms have been fully explored in existing prototypes and systems, passive mechanisms and their implications need to be more deeply studied. In this work, we present some theoretical principles on passive interaction as well as their application to EMI²: an AmI architecture we are designing combining active and passive environment interaction via mobile devices.