Moritz Strasser

Geduldige Technologie für ungeduldige Patienten: Führt Ubiquitous Computing zu mehr Selbstbestimmung?

Technologie ermoglicht neue Anwendungen und kann unter bestimmten Umstanden gesellschaftsverandernde Folgen haben. Gegenwartig erleben wir das Aufkommen von Ubiquitous Computing, wodurch es sogar moglich wird, Alltagsgegenstande zu informatisieren. Trotz zahlreicher noch ungeloster technischer Probleme werden die wirtschaftlichen Potentiale uberaus hoch eingeschatzt. Es stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob die gesellschaftlichen Folgen antizipiert und akzeptiert werden konnen. Die Wissenschaft hat zu einer umfassenden Bewertung bisher keine unumstrittenen Verfahren entwickeln konnen. Es verbleibt das Experiment und der anschliesende Diskurs.

Sicherheit im Ubiquitous Computing: Schutz durch Gebote?

Solange man unter Sicherheit vor allem Zugriffskontrolle versteht, bestehen wenig Chancen, ein angemessenes Sicherheitsniveau fur Systeme des Ubiquitous Computing zu erreichen. Solche Systeme sind vor allem durch die spontane Interaktion mobiler und kontextsensitiver Komponenten gepragt. Durch ihre Einfuhrung werden sich die Angriffe auf Computersysteme verandern, denn es ist offensichtlich, dass Fehler und damit eine der wichtigsten Quellen fur Schwachstellen in IT-Systemen bereits heute rasant zunehmen. Der Austausch von ausfuhrbarem Code wird die Fehlerrate weiter steigern. In diesem Beitrag wird ar-gumentiert, dass gegenwartige Sicherheitsmechanismen auf Zugriffskontrolle und Nutzeridentitaten basieren und dass damit keine ausreichende Modellbasis besteht, um Angriffen in Systemen des Ubiquitous Computing zu begegnen.

Self-Organized Scheduling in Hospitals by Connecting Agents and Mobile Devices

This chapter describes the conceptualization and realization of a real-time managed mobile information system in healthcare. The particular application addressed is a dynamic, self-organized scheduling of the treatment of patients. Building blocks for this project are locatable, interactive Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to connect medical staff and patients; physical resources are connected by locatable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips. These physical objects are represented in the information system by software agents. The multi-agent platform EMIKA implements a negotiation-based schedule system to enable a dynamic planning process. The EMIKA-System has been developed to prototype level and functionally tested in a real-time laboratory [SaEM2002]. Lessons learned from the realization pertain to technical functionality and to privacy and security issues.

Influence of ubiquitous computing on organizational structure

The changeover of client-server to distributed embedded systems, discussed in the area of ubiquitous computing (UC), entails a large automated processing of tasks due to the fact that the user cannot interact with each application in an explicit way. This technical situation gives cause to consider the repercussions of technology on organisational forms. On the basis of scheduling processes in hospital, the EMIKA project shows the automatability of scheduling under the computing paradigm of self-organization.

Decentralized management of persistent bandwidth provision for mobile devices in cellular radio networks

WLAN, GSM and UMTS are the most acquainted radio networks for digital telephony and data transfer and for this reason (business) applications arise rapidly. In contrast to wire networks (e.g. Ethernet), radio networks have strict restraints: because of their physical characteristics radio networks implicate a permanent contest about bandwidth; a static access point is sharing one frequency together with all mobile user devices connected. Thus a competition for the bandwidth naturally arises as the bottleneck bandwidth is available to all participants and cannot be extended unlimited in a fixed number of usable channels. The paper introduces an economic approach that balances the scarce quantity of bandwidth in a market system with the help of an internal payment system. This coordination of bandwidth can be implemented both by a central point - like a stock market instance - or decentralized within the radio network cells. Research results, comparing central coordination to a decentralized organized subject to different network topologies and -parameters have shown that networks underlying high dynamic appearance of peers outperform the centralized mechanism by far. Furthermore, it is shown, that for the dispersion of bandwidth and the choice of the access point, market mechanisms can be mapped to radio networks and efficient allocations can be reached in comparison to previous techniques and central coordination.