Kazi Masudul Alam

Toward Social Internet of Vehicles: Concept, Architecture, and Applications

The main vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to equip real-life physical objects with computing and communication power so that they can interact with each other for the social good. As one of the key members of IoT, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has seen steep advancement in communication technologies. Now, vehicles can easily exchange safety, efficiency, infotainment, and comfort-related information with other vehicles and infrastructures using vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). We leverage on the cloud-based VANETs theme to propose cyber-physical architecture for the Social IoV (SIoV). SIoV is a vehicular instance of the Social IoT (SIoT), where vehicles are the key social entities in the machine-to-machine vehicular social networks. We have identified the social structures of SIoV components, their relationships, and the interaction types. We have mapped VANETs components into IoT-A architecture reference model to offer better integration of SIoV with other IoT domains. We also present a communication message structure based on automotive ontologies, the SAE J2735 message set, and the advanced traveler information system events schema that corresponds to the social graph. Finally, we provide the implementation details and the experimental analysis to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system as well as include different application scenarios for various user groups.

C2PS: A Digital Twin Architecture Reference Model for the Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a new trend in the Internet-of-Things related research works, where physical systems act as the sensors to collect real-world information and communicate them to the computation modules (i.e. cyber layer), which further analyze and notify the findings to the corresponding physical systems through a feedback loop. Contemporary researchers recommend integrating cloud technologies in the CPS cyber layer to ensure the scalability of storage, computation, and cross domain communication capabilities. Though there exist a few descriptive models of the cloud-based CPS architecture, it is important to analytically describe the key CPS properties: computation, control, and communication. In this paper, we present a digital twin architecture reference model for the cloud-based CPS, C2PS, where we analytically describe the key properties of the C2PS. The model helps in identifying various degrees of basic and hybrid computation-interaction modes in this paradigm. We have designed C2PS smart interaction controller using a Bayesian belief network, so that the system dynamically considers current contexts. The composition of fuzzy rule base with the Bayes network further enables the system with reconfiguration capability. We also describe analytically, how C2PS subsystem communications can generate even more complex system-of-systems. Later, we present a telematics-based prototype driving assistance application for the vehicular domain of C2PS, VCPS, to demonstrate the efficacy of the architecture reference model.

EmoJacket: Consumer centric wearable affective jacket to enhance emotional immersion

This paper describes the results of a survey that was conducted to involve consumers in the design of a haptic jacket as a HCI device. It also describes how the system is designed, implemented and evaluated. The jacket contains an embedded computing system and haptic actuators that are programmed to affect its user emotionally and improve their immersion in gaming and movie watching. The prototype is composed of 6 affective haptic components: chest and neck vibration, neck warmth, heartbeat simulation, arms vibration and shivering. The paper shows that the system may be used in different applications with the proper interfacing software. Finally, evaluation shows an improvement in purpose by conducting a QoE experiment.

VeDi: A vehicular crowd-sourced video social network for VANETs

As one of the important members of Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles have seen steep advancement in communication technology.With the advent of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), vehicles now can evolve into social interactions to share safety, efficiency, and comfort related messages with other vehicles. In this paper, we study vehicular social network from Social Internet of Things (SIoT) perspective and propose VeDi, a vehicular crowd-sourced video social network for VANETs.When a user shares a video in the VeDi, it can be accessed by other surrounding vehicles. Any social interaction (e.g. view, comment, like) with the video on the roadway are stored in the social network cloud along with the video itself. In VeDi, every vehicle maintains a list of video related metadata (e.g. blur and shakiness) of available videos which are used to selectively retrieve quality videos by surrounding vehicles. We also present a method to determine representative quality scores for an entire video clip using blur and shakiness values. The prototype implementations and experimental results denote that the proposed system can be a viable option to create video social networks such as youtube, vine, and vimeo by employing vehicular crowd.

tNote: A Social Network of Vehicles under Internet of Things

The main vision of Internet of Things (IoT) is to equip real life physical objects with computing and communication power so that they can interact with each other for social good. As one of the important members of Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles have seen steep advancement in communication technology. In this paper we instantiate IoT to define a social network of vehicles, tNote, where vehicles can share transport related safety, efficiency, and comfort notes with each other. We leverage the infrastructure laid down by Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) to propose an architecture for social network of vehicles in the paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT). We have identified the social structures of vehicles, their relationship types, interactions and the components to manage the system. We also define the tNote message structure following the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) standard. The paper ends with prototype implementation details of the tNote message and the proposed system architecture along with experimental results.

InCloud: a cloud-based middleware for vehicular infotainment systems

Smart vehicles form pervasive environment to enhance user experience through multimedia enabled infotainment systems. In order to realize effective infotainment system for vehicles, we need to have context-aware applications that use latest (live) information for enhanced user experience. Such latest information is abundantly available on the Internet due to explosive growth of Web 3.0, which can be accessed through wireless communication infrastructures such as VANETs and LTE. In this paper we propose a cloud-based middleware framework, InCloud, for vehicular infotainment application development. The proposed framework follows service oriented architecture in which data filtering and fusion functionalities are delegated to the cloud. Data filtering and fusion reduce the data flow over wireless link. Furthermore, because most of the processing is done on the cloud, the client becomes lightweight and loosely coupled with Internet resources and underlying platforms in vehicles. We also propose a class-based fusion method for combining information from multiple resources on the Internet. The efficacy of the proposed framework is validated by developing three infotainment applications for vehicles: context-aware music, news, and an enhanced Direction (eDirection) application.

Mobile haptic e-book system to support 3D immersive reading in ubiquitous environments

In order to leverage the use of various modalities such as audio-visual materials in instilling effective learning behavior we present an intuitive approach of annotation based hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials such as e-books. By integrating the home entertainment system in the users reading experience combined with haptic interfaces we want to examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the users learning patterns. The proposed Haptic E--Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating image, video, 3D environment based augmented display in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience in the popular mobile e-book platform.

Adding emotional tag to augment context-awareness in social network services

In this paper we address the challenges and design considerations to add emotional tag to existing Internet-based social network services. We propose an emotion tagger that takes content from diversified Internet-based services and maps the analyzed content to an emotional value which can be used to augment semantic values of Internet-based service. To show a proof of concept working environment, we add the proposed emotion tagger with our earlier developed context-aware social network framework called SenseFace and investigate the efficiency of the tagger. We finally present our preliminary integration results.

Design and Development of a Cloud Based Cyber-Physical Architecture for the Internet-of-Things

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is considered as the next big disruptive technology field which main goal is to achieve social good by enabling collaboration among physical things or sensors. We present a cloud based cyber-physical architecture to leverage the Sensing as-a-Service (SenAS) model, where every physical thing is complemented by a cloud based twin cyber process. In this model, things can communicate using direct physical connections or through the cyber layer using peer-to-peer inter process communications. The proposed model offers simultaneous communication channels among groups of things by uniquely tagging each group with a relationship ID. An intelligent service layer ensures custom privacy and access rights management for the sensor owners. We also present the implementation details of an IoT platform and demonstrate its practicality by developing case study applications for the Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) and the connected smart home.

HE-book: A prototype haptic interface for immersive e-book reading experience

This paper presents an intuitive approach of annotation based haptic interaction with traditional digital reading materials such as eBooks. The research targets to bring a multi-sensory interface consisting of perceptual, cognitive and vibrotactile interactions with the digital reading contents. It leverages a previously developed haptic jacket to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience for the readers in various eBook platforms.