Nicolas Liampotis

Federation and sharing in the context marketplace

The emerging pervasive computing services will eventually lead to the establishment of a context marketplace, where context consumers will be able to obtain the information they require by a plethora of context providers. In this marketplace, several aspects need to be addressed, such as: support for flexible federation among context stakeholders enabling them to share data when required; efficient query handling based on navigational, spatial or semantic criteria; performance optimization, especially when management of mobile physical objects is required; and enforcement of privacy and security protection techniques concerning the sensitive context information maintained or traded. This paper presents mechanisms that address the aforementioned requirements. These mechanisms establish a robust spatially-enhanced distributed context management framework and have already been designed and carefully implemented.

A Privacy Framework for Personal Self-Improving Smart Spaces

There are various critical privacy issues that need to be addressed in the majority of smart space environments. This paper elaborates on the design of a privacy protection framework for Personal Self-Improving Smart Spaces (PSSs), a concept introduced by the Persist project Consortium. Compared to other smart spaces, such as smart homes and vehicles, this new paradigm provides a truly ubiquitous and fully personalisable user-centric environment. However, the information that needs to be collected, processed and distributed in such an environment is by nature highly privacy-sensitive, as it includes user profile data and preferences, as well as data regarding the past, current and even future user activities and context in general. In this respect, the designed privacy framework aims to address all privacy issues that arise by providing facilities which support multiple digital identities of PSS owners and privacy preferences for deriving privacy policies based on the context and the trustworthiness of the third parties that interact with PSSs.

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.

Cross-community context management in Cooperating Smart Spaces

Recently, social networks have become the most prevalent IT paradigm, as the vast majority of Internet users maintain one or multiple social networking accounts. These accounts, irrespectively of the underlying service, contain rich information and data for the owner’s preferences, social skills, everyday activities, beliefs and interests. Along with these services, the computation, sensing and networking capabilities of the state of the art mobile and portable devices, with their always-on mode, assist users in their everyday lives. Thus, the integration of social networking services with current pervasive computing systems could provide the users with the potential to interact with other users that have similar interests, preferences and expectations; and in general, the same or similar context, for limited or not time periods, in order to ameliorate their overall experience, communicate, socialise and improve their everyday activities with minimal effort. This paper introduces a cross-community context management framework that is suitable for Cooperating Smart Spaces, which couple the advantages of pervasive computing and social networking. This framework goes beyond the state of the art, among others, in that cross-community context from a multitude of sources is collected and processed to enhance the end user experience and increase the perceived value of the services provided.

Personalisation in a System Combining Pervasiveness and Social Networking

One of the key objectives of a pervasive computing system is to provide appropriate support to enable the user to manage the increasingly complex environment surrounding her. This includes managing the ever-increasing number of devices which can be accessed wirelessly as well as the vast range of services at her disposal. The aim of the Persist project was to develop a pervasive system that would bridge the gap between fixed smart spaces (e.g. smart homes) and systems created for mobile users. Using the concept of Personal Smart Spaces the Persist project has built a prototype system to demonstrate some of the capabilities that this can provide. The Societies project is currently building on these ideas to develop a new type of system that combines pervasive with social networking functionality. Personalisation is an essential feature of any pervasive system and plays a key role in the prototype implemented in Persist. This will also play a key role in the new platform being developed in the Societies project. This paper describes how personalisation is handled within the Persist system and some ideas for the new platform.

Optimising context data dissemination and storage in distributed pervasive computing systems

Context management systems are expected to administrate large volumes of spatial and non-spatial information in geographical disperse domains. In particular, when these systems cover wide areas such as cities, countries or even the entire planet, the design of scalable storage, retrieval and propagation mechanisms is paramount. This paper elaborates on mechanisms that address advanced requirements, including support for distributed context databases management; efficient query handling; innovative management of mobile physical objects and optimization strategies for distributed context data dissemination. These mechanisms establish a robust spatially-enhanced distributed context management framework that has already been designed and carefully implemented and thoroughly evaluated.

Challenges for context management systems imposed by context inference

This work gives an overview over the challenges for context management systems in Ubiquitous Computing frameworks or Personal Smart Spaces. Focused on the integration of context inference in todays context management systems (CMSs) we address important design decisions for future frameworks. The inference system we have in mind is probabilistic and relies on the concept of Bayeslets, special inference rules extending Bayesian networks. We show that for inference rule creation, storage, inference scheduling and update frequency the best solutions are hybrid, allowing for high flexibility and performance while reducing resource costs. We also see that human expert knowledge cannot be substituted completely in an efficient context-aware system.

Architecture for the creation of service level agreements and activation of IP added value services

The pervasive influence of the Internet as long as the insatiable desire for bandwidth have led the researchers to promote massive and disruptive changes within the Internet technology. The end goal is to enable the rapid development of a wide variety of services and support them in a unified and consistent manner. As far as the customer view is concerned, means for specifying dynamically the services each customer wishes to be subscribed offered by an ISP are needed. Moreover an IP QoS signaling protocol is required in order for the customer to activate added value services. We propose system architecture for dynamic service subscription based on a negotiation strategy and an approach for explicit activation of services. These models offer the customer an automated manner to specify, select, negotiate, activate and make use of added value services with specific characteristics. The novelty of the proposed approach is the reduction of the operational cost of an ISP and the time needed for a customer to request and access services.

Enhancing Social Media with Pervasive Features

During the last decade, social media have enjoyed meteoric success in bringing people together online. On the other hand, pervasive computing assists users in their everyday tasks, in a seamless unobtrusive manner exploiting the resources available in the users environments focusing on the needs of individuals. The time is ripe for the two paradigms to converge. This paper presents research work undertaken to integrate pervasive computing with various social computing systems, including enterprise social media, aiming to contribute to the emergence of the next generation of social media systems.

Context and Community Awareness in Support of User Intent Prediction

Proactive behaviour of pervasive computing systems cannot be realised without the establishment of suitable and reliable user intent prediction facilities. Most of the existing approaches focus on an individual end-user’s history of interactions and context in order to estimate future user behaviour. Recent trends in pervasive systems allow users to form communities with other individuals that share similar profiles, habits, and behaviours. Pervasive Communities set new challenges and opportunities regarding proactivity and context management. This chapter presents a context aware user intent learning and prediction framework that is able to exploit the knowledge available at the community level. Community knowledge, if appropriately managed, can significantly improve proactivity behaviour of individual users’ systems.