Kevin Doolin

Pervasive Computing in Daidalos

Daidalos offers a platform for service and identity management that supports secure context-aware and personalizable delivery of service discovery, composition, and adaptation. It also provides a runtime environment for deployment and execution.

SOCIETIES: where pervasive meets social

Traditionally, pervasive systems are designed with a focus on the individual, offering services that take advantage of their physical environment and provide a context-aware, personalised user experience. On the other hand, social computing is centred around the notion of a community, leveraging the information about the users and their social relationships, connecting them together often using different criteria that can range from a users physical location and activity to personal interests and past experiences. The SOCIETIES Integrated Project attempts to bridge these different technologies in a unified platform allowing individuals to utilise pervasive services in a community sphere. SOCIETIES aims to use community driven context awareness, preference learning and privacy protection for intelligently connecting people, communities and things. Thus, the goal of SOCIETIES is to radically improve the utility of Future Internet services by combining the benefits of pervasive systems with these of social computing. This paper provides an overview of the vision, concepts, methodology, architecture and initial evaluation results towards the accomplishment of this goal.

Supporting Ubiquitous IMS-based Teleconferencing Through Discovery and Composition of IMS and Web Components

Natural communication among people happens in flexible ways and is strongly affected by the users’ situation (such as communication tools available, user’s location, and user’s preferences). This situation or context information is seldom used to initiate communication sessions among users. Current communication systems are indifferent about users’ context, often require time consuming manual configurations and often result in conferencing tools not being easily accessible when needed. This leads to lower adoption of innovative communications services. IMS SIP (IP Multimedia Subsystem, Session Initiation Protocol) sessions allow users to access the session from different points of contact (home, office, etc.), however, IMS still requires a prior knowledge of all SIP components that might be used in a SIP session. Furthermore, IMS makes limited use of context information (mainly user-defined availability). To address these issues our research approach combines techniques from pervasive computing with IMS networking principles to facilitate compositions of communication sessions based on users’ context. We propose a platform and APIs for pervasive application development support to allow greater intelligence in IMS applications. We additionally provide mechanisms for IMS applications to apply their intelligence to the configuration of physical devices and web resources used to set up a conference. The innovations proposed in this paper are: (1) A new standard for intelligent IMS-based conferencing applications. (2) Application Development Interfaces (APIs) for a platform for pervasive computing. (3) An architecture for a pervasive IMS platform.

Pervasive Service Platform (PSP): Facilitating Pervasive Services

Pervasive computing is a new and emerging technology. The concept of pervasiveness and its deployment into reality are still not well aligned. This is because the vision of pervasiveness is a highly complex area that encompasses a large number of issues. The real vision of pervasiveness will never become a reality if everyone involved needs to repeatedly address all the issues involved in the concept. This paper focuses on the DAIDALOS pervasive service platform (PSP) as an enabler of pervasive services. DAIDALOS is an EU Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project with 46 multinational partners from both the industry and academia. The paper details the strategy employed in DAIDALOS to facilitate service providers to offer pervasive services on top of the PSP. It argues that pervasiveness should be provided to service providers as part of the platform, instead of requiring pervasiveness to be totally embedded in the services themselves. This approach consequently opens up the service provision market to more players, driving the idea of a truly pervasive world. The paper gives an overview of the DAIDALOS platform as a pervasive service enabler, detailing how it facilitates pervasiveness by removing most of the work from the service providers themselves

Enhancing Mobile Social Networks with Ambient Intelligence

Mobile social computing has exploded into people’s lives during the past 10 years, but to become truly pervasive it needs to be much more context-aware and personalizable. The next generation of social media needs to be able to react and adapt to the physical environments in which people live and act. The SOCIETIES project is integrating research undertaken in the field of pervasive computing with social computing to develop the next generation of social media systems. The vehicle for this is the “pervasive community”, and this chapter outlines the innovations required to realize this concept. Pervasive communities can restore the symbiosis between our digital and physical worlds.

Enhanced Middleware for Collaborative Privacy in Community Based Recommendations Services

Recommending communities in social networks is the problem of detecting, for each member, its membership to one of more communities of other members, where members in each community share some relevant features which guaranteeing that the community as a whole satisfies some desired properties of similarity. As a result, forming these communities requires the availability of personal data from different participants. This is a requirement not only for these services but also the landscape of the Web 2.0 itself with all its versatile services heavily relies on the disclosure of private user information. As the more service providers collect personal data about their customers, the growing privacy threats pose for their patrons. Addressing end-user concerns privacy-enhancing techniques (PETs) have emerged to enable them to improve the control over their personal data. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative privacy middleware (EMCP) that runs in attendees’ mobile phones and allows exchanging of their information in order to facilities recommending and creating communities without disclosing their preferences to other parties. We also provide a scenario for community based recommender service for conferences and experimentation results.

Novel Pervasive Computing Services Experienced through Personal Smart Spaces

A major research challenge in the IT domain nowadays is to enable new experiences by building intelligent spaces around users, enhanced by pervasive computing services. The European FP7 Project PERSIST (PERsonal Self-Improving SmarT spaces) is investigating a novel approach to meet this challenge. PERSIST aims to define an ecosystem on top of which novel pervasive services can be built. This paper explains the notion of a Personal Smart Space (PSS), provides a reference case study and describes some aspects of how PSSs might operate. PERSIST is also researching on new paradigms for harmonizing p2p functionalities with network services. We present a case study and bring into focus the main challenges We are mastering for pursuing a middleware to support PSSs management and mutual interaction.

IoT in Agriculture: Designing a Europe-Wide Large-Scale Pilot

The technologies associated with the Internet of Things have great potential for application in the domain of food and agriculture, especially in view of the societal and environmental challenges faced by this sector. From farm to fork, IoT technologies could transform the sector, contributing to food safety, and the reduction of agricultural inputs and food waste. A major step toward greater uptake of these technologies will be the execution of IoT-based large-scale pilots (LSPs) in the entire supply chain. This article outlines the challenges and constraints that an LSP deployment of IoT in this domain must consider. Sectoral and technological challenges are described in order to identify a set of technological and agrifood requirements. An architecture based on a system of systems approach is briefly presented, the importance of addressing the interoperability challenges faced by this sector is highlighted, and we elaborate on requirements for new business models, security, privacy, and data governance. A description of the technologies and solutions involved in designing pilots for four agrifood domains (dairy, fruit, arable, meat and vegetable supply chain) is eventually provided. In conclusion, it is noted that for IoT to be successful in this domain, a significant change of culture is needed.

Architectures and Platforms for AMI: Workshop Summary Report

The workshop on architectures and platforms was organized at AMI-08 as a collaborative effort involving 4 projects (ASTRA, DAIDALOS, PERSIST, and Ubicollab). These projects address, in different ways, the challenge of developing platforms for Ambient Intelligence. The workshop aimed at bringing together the different perspectives gained in these projects, opening the discussion to the wider research community. In particular, focus has been on comparing and discussing lessons learned in the development of specific vs. generic platforms for AMI.

Toward Context-Aware Mobile Social Networks

CA-MSNs are more intelligent and user-friendly than conventional online or mobile social networks. We first classify CA-MSNs into four categories, and divide their life cycle into four phases: discovery, connection, interaction, and organization. We then introduce personal and community context, and discuss the corresponding taxonomy. Subsequently, we elaborate how such context can be leveraged to enhance each life cycle phase. We also present our practices on designing various CA-MSN applications. Finally, future research directions are identified to shed light on the next generation MSNs from the context awareness perspective.