Jun'ichi Yura

Galaxy: a service shaping approach for addressing the hidden service problem

We propose a new service modeling and lookup method based on service shaping. In existing service frameworks, assembling ubiquitous services requires application programmers to translate their requirements to the type space defined by service programmers. This translation, however, disables some of user requirements due to abstraction gap and time gap between the user tasks and service types. This raises a problem which we call the hidden service problem, where an application cannot find a service which satisfies a users request, even if the service exists. To cope with this problem, we propose a shape-based service framework, called Galaxy. In Galaxy service framework, service programmers are required to describe capability of service, called, shape, for each service in an XML document. Applications can query services by specifying partial shape without depending on programmer-defined types.

A Description Language for Universal Understandings of Heterogeneous Services in Pervasive Computing

A pervasive computing environment consists of a variety of devices, such as tiny sensor nodes, handheld devices, consumer electronics, and PCs, which are capable of communicating with others via a communication platform like Bluetooth, ZigBee, UPnP, and DLNA. Those devices should be able to communicate one another to provide users with richer pervasive computing environment, however, different communication platforms postulate different abstractions on services. This abstraction difference disables universal understandings of heterogeneous services about their compatibility and interoperability across different platforms, thereby disabling crossplatform device interaction. To address this problem, this paper proposes an XML-based technique, called Universal Service Description Language (USDL), to describe the heterogeneous services in a platform-independent way. It provides applications with self-contained documents to mechanically determine the best strategy to share the resources among multiple users in a pervasive computing environment. In this paper, we organize the requirements to deriving common abstraction scheme, and show how USDL is advantageous in pervasive computing environment by describing our experience in developing a range of applications using them.

Bridging sensor networks and the Internet on cellular phones: Towards richer and easier-to-use sensor network applications for end-users

Federation of ubiquitous applications to our daily lives requires enabling the use of those applications on terminals that end-users can use without intensive knowledge on computers or networks. This paper presents the techniques for cellular phones to achieve this goal, which consist of a sensor data transceiver, and the software for sensor data utilization. Users are allowed to leverage ubiquitous services provided by cellular phone applications just by downloading and installing the applications to their phones. The presented techniques thus can accelerate the federation of ubiquitous services to end-users. This paper shows the potential applications enabled by our techniques, describes the prototype systems, and explores the challenges that should be met in the future direction of this research.

ClickCatalog: Retracing Precious Memory using Paper-Based Media Controller

We present a novel mobile memory aid tool, called ClickCatalog System (http://www.ht.sfc.keio.ac.jp/atreader/). In our daily lives, we find many interesting items during shopping, in exposition events, or in conferences. We often try to remember them for later recall by writing memos, taking pictures, etc. Those hints (notes and pictures) are, however, easy to be lost. Using ClickCatalog System, users can collect digital records of the items with an easy-to-handle hardware called @reader, which embeds an RFID reader. After a day, they can recall the stored records using a viewer software. The viewer can be operated using the same device, @reader, by manipulating it on a paper calendar (to recall the records temporarily) or on a paper map (to do so geographically). This paper shows the prototype implementation of ClickCatalog System, a range of applications, and, our empirical study using prototype ClickCatalog System.

P-Survive: Process level energy reservation for networked sensing systems

We describe an energy reservation system which manages energy consumption for each individual application. Our system targets sensor networking environments, which supports running of multiple applications. This work guarantees application service time, which allows the service provider to predict and control the lifetime of a system.