Muhammad Ashad Kabir

User-centric social context information management: an ontology-based approach and platform

Social context information has been used with encouraging results in developing socially aware applications in different domains. However, users’ social context information is distributed over the Web and managed by many different proprietary applications, which is a challenge for application developers as they must collect information from different sources and wade through a lot of irrelevant information to obtain the social context information of interest. On the other hand, it is extremely hard for information owners to control how their information should be exposed to different users and applications. Combining the social context information from the diverse sources, incorporating richer semantics and preserving information owners’ privacy could greatly assist the developers and as well as the information owners. In this paper, we introduce a social context information management system (SCIMS). It includes the ability to acquire raw social data from multiple sources; an ontology-based model for classifying, inferring and storing social context information, in particular, social relationships and status; an ontology-based policy model and language for owners to control access to their information; a query interface for accessing and utilizing social context information. We evaluate the performance of SCIMS using real data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Calendar and demonstrate its applicability through a socially aware phone call application.

Modeling and Coordinating Social Interactions in Pervasive Environments

The convergence of Internet and mobile devices has radically changed the way people communicate and interact with each other, and demand for applications that are social enough to assist their daily interactions. To support such device mediated interactions, the social relationships between actors need to be systematically modeled and represented. In addition, an application facilitating such interactions should be able to deal with the task conflicts that occur when an actor is involved in multiple interactions simultaneously. To address these issues, in this paper we present an approach to modeling and coordinating social interactions with the notion of social context. It supports social interaction modeling from both the domain- and player-centric perspectives. In particular, the player-centric model provides the basis to coordinate multiple interactions in which an actor is involved. We further introduce a fuzzy logic based reasoning technique to infer the overall importance of each interaction, assisting the actor to resolve conflicts and make decisions. Finally, we validate our approach through a prototype implementation and test cases analysis.

SCIMS: a social context information management system for socially-aware applications

Social Context Information has been used with encouraging results in developing socially-aware applications in different domains. However, users social information is distributed over the web and managed by many different proprietary applications, which is a challenge for application developers as they must collect information from different sources and wade through a lot of irrelevant information to obtain the social context information of interest. Combining the social information from the diverse sources and incorporating richer semantics could greatly assist the developers and enrich the applications. n nIn this paper, we introduce SCIMS, a social context information management system. It includes the ability to acquire raw social data from multiple sources; an ontology based model for classifying, inferring and storing social context information, in particular, social relationships and status; an ontology based policy model and language for owners to control access to their information; a query interface for accessing and utilizing social context information. We evaluate the performance and scalability of SCIMS using real data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google calendar, and demonstrate its applicability through a socially-aware phone call application.

Modeling, managing and reasoning about social contexts for socially-aware applications

Despite the huge prospects of pervasive social computing and the extensive work in context-aware applications, so far very limited work has focused on socially-aware applications. The key requirements to develop such applications are modeling, managing and reasoning about users social contexts. To fulfil these requirements, in this PhD research, we have made an attempt to model, manage and reason about social contexts to aid the development of socially-aware applications. We study different types of social contexts, their use in various socially-aware applications and possible sources to acquire such social contexts. We will investigate existing context modeling and reasoning techniques and will propose an approach to modeling and reasoning about different types of social contexts. To aid the development of socially aware applications, we will provide a middleware platform for managing the acquisition, changes and provision of social contexts.

SocioTelematics: harnessing social interaction-relationships in developing automotive applications

Abstract In a cooperative convoy, a vehicle interacts with other vehicles, service providers and infrastructure systems to make the travel safe and convenient. Through these interactions a vehicle can share its domain-specific information–acquired from service providers and infrastructure–with other vehicles in the convoy. Such interactions are subject to defined agreements and constraints between the entities ( i.e., xa0vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to service provider, and so on), which we refer as (social) interaction-relationships . Such relationships, however, may need to adapt with the changes of requirements. Also a driver may want to automate certain interactions to reduce distraction during driving. A cooperative convoy telematics system should support collaboration ( i.e., xa0allow drivers to share specific travel information) and coordination ( i.e., allow drivers to automate interactions), and be able to adapt to cope with the changes of requirements. In this paper, we address these issues and demonstrate how our social interaction-relationships modelling technique can be exploited to develop a telematics system, called SocioTelematics , providing such functionalities. This system allows collaboration and coordination preferences explicitly specified and updated to cope with the changes. In particular, our service oriented implementation enhances adaptability of the system, making it easily deployable and changeable. We have implemented a prototype system based on a client–server architecture where the client application is developed for Android and the server is running on the Amazon cloud. The system’s performance and resource consumption were quantified using real life experiments that show the feasibility of our approach.

SocioTelematics: Leveraging Interaction-Relationships in Developing Telematics Systems to Support Cooperative Convoys

In a cooperative convoy, a vehicle interacts with other vehicles, service providers and infrastructure systems to make the travel safe and convenient. Through these interactions a vehicle can share its domain-specific information -- acquired from service providers and infrastructure - with other vehicles in the convoy. Such interactions are subject to defined agreements and constraints between the entities (i.e., vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to service providers, and so on), which may need to adapt with the changes of requirements. Also a driver may want to automate certain interactions to reduce distraction during driving. A cooperative convoy telematics system should support collaboration (i.e., allow drivers to share specific travel information) and coordination, and be able to cope with the changes. In this paper, we address these issues and demonstrate how our interaction-relationship modeling technique can be exploited to develop a telematics system provides such flexibility. This system allows interactions and coordination preferences explicitly specified and updated to cope with the changes. In particular, our service oriented implementation enhances flexibility and adaptability of the system making it easily deployable and changeable. We have implemented a prototype based on a client-server architecture where the client application is developed for Android and the server is running on the Amazon cloud. The systems performance and resource consumption were evaluated using real-life experiments.

Reader level filtering for efficient query processing in RFID middleware

In RFID systems, middleware is used to filter a large amount of streaming data gathered continuously from readers to process application requests. The high volume of data makes the middleware often in a highly overloaded situation. The reader filtering capability can be used to reduce data volume and middleware work-load. However, if the middleware dispatches query conditions to readers without any adjustment, it may generate a huge amount of duplicate data and imposes considerable load on the middleware. As such, an appropriate schema for data volume reduction is required. In this paper, we propose a query decomposition technique to divide queries into sub-queries for middleware and reader level execution. This new approach of query execution resolves the problem of duplicate data generation. Our experiments show that the proposed approach considerably improves the performance of middleware by reducing query processing time and network traffic between reader and middleware. We exploit RFID readers filtering capability for processing query efficiently.We present query models for RFID middleware and reader.We present algorithms to decompose query to process by middleware and reader.Our approach resolves the problem of duplicate data generation and improves the performance of middleware.

SCaaS: A Platform for Managing Adaptation in Collaborative Pervasive Applications

In this paper, we present a social context as a service (SCaaS) platform for managing adaptations in collaborative pervasive applications that support interactions among a dynamic group of actors such as users, stakeholders, infrastructure services, businesses and so on. Such interactions are based on predefined agreements and constraints that characterize the relationships between the actors and are modeled with the notion of social context. In complex and changing environments, such interaction relationships, and thus social contexts, are also subject to change. In existing approaches, the relationships among actors are not modeled explicitly, and instead are often hard-coded into the application. Furthermore, these approaches do not provide adequate adaptation support for such relationships as the changes occur in user requirements and environments. In our approach, inter-actor relationships in an application are modeled explicitly using social contexts, and their execution environment is generated and adaptations are managed by the SCaaS platform. The key features of our approach include externalization of the interaction relationships from the applications, representation and modeling of such relationships from a domain and actor perspectives, their implementation using a service oriented paradigm, and support for their runtime adaptation. We quantify the platform’s adaptation overhead and demonstrate its feasibility and applicability by developing a telematics application that supports cooperative convoy.

SOCIAL CONTEXT AS A SERVICE: MANAGING ADAPTATION IN COLLABORATIVE PERVASIVE APPLICATIONS

We present a social context as a service (SCaaS) platform for managing adaptations in collaborative pervasive applications that support interactions among a dynamic group of actors such as users, stakeholders, infrastructure services, businesses and so on. Such interactions are based on predefined agreements and constraints that characterize the relationships between the actors and are modeled with the notion of social context. In complex and changing environments, such interaction relationships, and thus social contexts, are also subject to change. In existing approaches, the relationships among actors are not modeled explicitly, and instead are often hard-coded into the application. Furthermore, these approaches do not provide adequate adaptation support for such relationships as the changes occur in user requirements and environments. In our approach, inter-actor relationships in an application are modeled explicitly using social contexts, and their execution environment is generated and adaptations ar...

SocioPlatform: A platform for social context-aware applications

With an explosive growth in the popularity of social media and increasing prevalence and features of advanced mobile devices, interest has grown significantly in applications that are aware of users’ social context and are able to assist them in their daily activities. A key requirement of developing social context-aware applications is the platform support to reduce the complexity of engineering such applications. In this chapter, the authors present such a platform, namely SocioPlatform, to aid the development of social context-aware applications by acquiring, reasoning, storing and provisioning different types of social context information, and managing their runtime interactions and adaptation. The platform hides the complexity of managing social context, and thus assists the development of social context-aware applications. The authors demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the platform by developing two different types of such applications.