Reinhard Kronsteiner

Mobile recommendation systems for decision making 'on the go'

This paper discusses the functional and technological opportunities associated with mobile recommendation systems. These are systems that help a mobile user or a group of mobile users with decisions that they encounter on the go. Examples include consumers making purchasing decisions in retail stores, or students having ad hoc meetings to decide on assignment workload. We discuss key findings from behavioural decision theory to provide a set of functional requirements. This is followed by an exploration of technological options to implement mobile recommendation systems. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the user acceptance of these systems can be meaningfully measured and improved.

A semantic solution for data integration in mixed sensor networks

The number of sensor networks deployed for a manifold of applications is expected to increase dramatically in the coming few years. Advances in wireless communications and the growing interest in wireless networks are spurring this. This growth will not only simplify the access to sensor information but will also motivate the creation of numerous new information. Paradoxically, this growth will make the task of getting meaningful information from disparate sensor nodes not a trivial one. On the one hand, traffic overheads and the increased probabilities of hardware failures make it very difficult to maintain an always-on, ubiquitous service. On the other hand, the heterogeneity of the sensor nodes makes finding, extracting, and aggregating data at the processing elements and sink nodes much harder. These two issues (in addition to course to the distribution, dynamicity, accuracy, and reliability issues) impose the need for more efficient and reliable techniques for information integration of data collected from sensor nodes. In this paper, we first address the issues related to data integration in wireless sensor networks with respect to heterogeneity, dynamicity, and distribution at both the technology and application levels. Second, we present and discuss a query processing algorithm which make use of the semantic knowledge about sensor networks expressed in the form of integrity constraints to reduce network traffic overheads, improve scalability and extensibility of wireless networks and increase the stability and reliability of networks against hardware and software failures. Third, we discuss a uniform interface to data collected from sensor nodes that will map sensor-specific data to the global information source based on a context exported by the data integration system.

Substitution rules for the verification of norm-compliance in electronic institutions

Electronic institutions are the agents counterpart of human organizations, which are specifically designed for providing support, trust, and legitimacy in business applications. They function in the same way our human organizations function to create trust, prevent fraud and reduce deception by verifying rules, regulations which is as a result maintaining norms and insuring that all the participants are conforming to these norms. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for norm compliance checking in electronic institutions by introducing substitution rules that map the norms set for the electronic institution as values to normative rules that can be implemented in the protocols to govern agents interactions.

Collaborative decision support in mobile environments: a requirement analysis

Decision support systems can be categorized based on the complexity of the decision problem space and group composition. The combination of the dimensions of the problem space and group compositions in mobile environments in terms of time, spatial distribution and interaction will result in a set of requirements that need to be addressed in different phases of decision process. In this paper, we explore the different requirements for designing and implementing a collaborative decision support systems.

Norms enforcement as a coordination strategy in ubiquitous environments

Ubiquitous environments are characterized by their openness, dynamicity and autonomy. Electronic institutions are the agents’ counterpart of human organizations, which are specifically designed for providing support, trust, and legitimacy in ubiquitous applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for norms enforcement in electronic institutions as a coordination strategy in ubiquitous environments by introducing substitution rules that map the norms set for the electronic institution to normative rules that can be implemented in the protocols to govern agents’ interactions in ubiquitous environments.