Michael J. O’Grady

Agent factory micro edition: a framework for ambient applications

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future whereby the world will be saturated with embedded electronic devices that are sensitive and responsive to people. This technology will combine the concepts of intelligent systems with that of pervasive computing. Intelligent agents of varying capabilities will provide the foundations for many applications within this domain. As a means of achieving this objective a framework – Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME) has been developed to enable the creation of agent-based applications on computationally constrained devices such as cellular digital mobile phones. It has been specifically designed to tackle the performance and memory footprint issues associated with executing intentional agents on mobile devices.

Practical Problem-Based Learning in Computing Education

Computer Science (CS) is a relatively new disciple and how best to introduce it to new students remains an open question. Likewise, the identification of appropriate instructional strategies for the diverse topics that constitute the average curriculum remains open to debate. One approach considered by a number of practitioners in CS education involves Problem-Based Learning (PBL), a radical departure from the conventional lecturing format. PBL has been adopted in other domains with success, but whether these positive experiences will be replicated in CS remains to be seen. In this article, a systematic review of PBL initiatives in undergraduate and postgraduate CS is presented from a Computing Education Research (CER) perspective. This includes analyses of a range of practical didactic issues, including the degree to which PBL has been systematically evaluated, practical problem description in the literature, as well as a survey of topics for which a PBL approach has been adopted.

SIXTH: A Middleware for Supporting Ubiquitous Sensing in Personal Health Monitoring

For an arbitrary event, a lack of the prevailing context compromises understanding. In health monitoring services, this may have serious repercussions. Yet many biomedical devices tend to exhibit a lack of openness and interoperability that reduces their potential as active nodes in broader healthcare information systems. One approach to addressing this deficiency rests in the realization of a middleware solution that is heterogeneous in a multiplicity of dimensions, whilst supporting dynamic reprogramming as the needs of patients change. This paper demonstrates how such functionality may be interwoven into a middleware solution, both from a design and implementation perspective.

Evolving Ambient Intelligence

Extended periods of time sitting in front of a computer give rise to risks of developing musculoskeletal disorders. In the workplace, computer use contributes considerably to employee injury and results in significant costs to the employer in terms of sick leave and injury claims. Due to these risks there has been significant research into the areas of posture classification and subject intervention to improve posture in an office environment. The Kinecthas been shown to be a suitable hardware platform for posture classification. This paper presents a system for posture classification and novel subject intervention that leverages each of three distinct forms of persuasive computing and explores the success of each type. Our results show significant improvement in posture results from the most effective of our intervention types.

Agent-based coordination for the sensor web

This paper addresses the problem of coordination within the Sensor Web, where the Sensor Web is defined as an amorphous network of spatially distributed nodes that sense various phenomena in the environment, that are battery powered, and that communicate and coordinate wirelessly. The approach described advocates the use of a multi-agent system, and specifically the use of multi-agent distributed constraint optimisation algorithms. Developing software for low powered sensing devices introduces several problems to be addressed; the most obvious being the limited computational resources available. In this paper we discuss an implementation of ADOPT, a pre-existing algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, and describe how it has been integrated with a reflective agent platform developed for resource constrained devices, namely Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). The usefulness of this work is illustrated through the canonical multi-agent coordination problem, namely graph colouring.

Sensor discovery in ambient IoT ecosystems

Heterogeneity represents a singular barrier to the cross-domain adoption of sensor networks, limiting the take-up of Ambient Intelligence. Historically, the preferred approach has been to adopt a middleware solution to mitigate the problems associated with heterogeneity. Normally, the sensor discovery process is tightly coupled to the middleware platform, resulting in a unique implementation for each platform. Such an approach is unsustainable given the speed of developments in sensing technologies and the increased deployment of networks of sensors and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. An alternative approach is to decouple the sensor discovery process from the middleware and to regard it a discrete service that could be harnessed by different middleware platforms and external IoT services. This paper presents the design and implementation of a generic discovery service framework—POrtable Discovery Services (PODS). PODS utilises existing middleware abstractions to support heterogeneity in so far as such abstractions relate to the discovery process. An evaluation of the framework is presented using an exemplar middleware platform.

User Interface Design for Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and the interface design principles applied to them is vitally important in facilitating the elderly in achieving their daily goals of health monitoring, social interaction, physical exercise or daily reminders. Design principles for AAL systems have accommodated for a user’s physical and cognitive abilities and Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) but does not give enough recognition to interfaces that require various key user interactions as age profiles increase. This paper seeks to explore if User Interface (UI) design for the elderly needs to address this issue.

Non-intrusive Identification of Electrical Appliances

The aim of reducing greenhouse gases and increasing energy efficiency faces a number of challenges to date. A significant portion of overall energy expenditure in residential and commercial sectors is considered as wastage. Finding technological methods in order to reduce wastage has been the main focus of researchers in recent years. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is perceived as a cost-effective approach to monitor appliance level energy consumption in a building. However, this approach still faces a number of problems that need to be addressed. In this study, we propose an approach by which uncertainty of appliance’s identification that have similar signatures, is addressed. Unlike other approaches, our approach uses occupant’s behavioural information to aid appliance disaggregation algorithms. We also demonstrate our technique through experimentation in a household.

Cybernetic Approaches to Robotics

The term Cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 in his book Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), with the common view of a general science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Communication means conveying information and control means to produce desired changes using the information. Cybernetics is the science that studies the principles of organisation in complex systems, in other words, systems that behave like living beings. Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steer towards an optimal goal. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be used to understand, model and design systems of any kind: physical, technological, social, biological, ecological, psychological, and economical or any combination of these. Cybernetics had from the beginning an interested in the similarities between autonomous, living systems and machines (Heylighen and Joslyn, 2001). Therefore, a trend within this research community is to study the functional mechanisms of these autonomous and living systems and apply them to machines to make it autonomous or to behave like living systems.

Service Fusion in Mobile Contexts

Service provision for mobile users poses several challenges for those managing enterprise information systems. Some of these are ubiquitous, for example, privacy and security. Others give rise to integration and interoperability issues. The agent paradigm, though offering potential in fixed networked scenarios, has not been seriously considered as a mechanism for incorporating mobile clients, primarily due to their computational intractability on mobile devices. However, recent developments in agent and mobile computing technologies – both from a hardware and software perspective, have rendered the mobile phone a viable platform for agents. One implication of this is that agents now offer a viable platform for service delivery to mobile users. This chapter reflects on some of the pertinent issues necessary for this, including Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). The discussion is illuminated with a systematic description of EasyLife – a framework that harnesses the agent paradigm to construct and deliver services to mobile users.