Runhe Huang

Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing: The Review of an Emerging Human-Powered Sensing Paradigm

With the surging of smartphone sensing, wireless networking, and mobile social networking techniques, Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing (MCSC) has become a promising paradigm for cross-space and large-scale sensing. MCSC extends the vision of participatory sensing by leveraging both participatory sensory data from mobile devices (offline) and user-contributed data from mobile social networking services (online). Further, it explores the complementary roles and presents the fusion/collaboration of machine and human intelligence in the crowd sensing and computing processes. This article characterizes the unique features and novel application areas of MCSC and proposes a reference framework for building human-in-the-loop MCSC systems. We further clarify the complementary nature of human and machine intelligence and envision the potential of deep-fused human--machine systems. We conclude by discussing the limitations, open issues, and research opportunities of MCSC.

Towards a smart world and ubiquitous intelligence: A walkthrough from smart things to smart hyperspaces and UbicKids

A cyber world (CW) is a digitized world created on cyberspaces inside computers interconnected by networks including the Internet. Following ubiquitous computers, sensors, e‐tags, networks, information, services, etc., is a road towards a smart world (SW) created on both cyberspaces and real spaces. It is mainly characterized by ubiquitous intelligence or computational intelligence pervasion in the physical world filled with smart things. In recent years, many novel and imaginative researches have been conducted to try and experiment a variety of smart things including characteristic smart objects and specific smart spaces or environments as well as smart systems. The next research phase to emerge, we believe, is to coordinate these diverse smart objects and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level of spaces known as smart hyperspace or hyper‐environments, and eventually create the smart world. In this paper, we discuss the potential trends and related challenges toward the smart world and ubiquitous intelligence from smart things to smart spaces and then to smart hyperspaces. Likewise, we show our efforts in developing a smart hyperspace of ubiquitous care for kids, called UbicKids.

Implementing the Genetic Algorithm on Transputer Based Parallel Processing Systems

The paper discusses the parallel implementation of the genetic algorithm on transputer based parallel processing systems. It considers the implementation of the batch version of the algorithm using a problem from the domain of real-time control. With the problem chosen the evaluation of a member of the population takes a relatively long time, compared with the generation of a member of the population, and so emphasis is laid on parallel evaluation. However, any distribution of processing over a number of processors will involve some communication overheads which are not present when the processing is done on one processor. This overhead will vary depending upon the communication network used. The paper will discuss the trade-offs between communication overheads involved and numbers of processors employed using various communication networks between processors.

Cyber-Individual Meets Brain Informatics

To help people live better in todays digitally explosive environment, the authors envision a Cyber-Individual (Cyber-I) that is the counterpart of a real individual in the physical world.

Cybermatics: Cyber–physical–social–thinking hyperspace based science and technology

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an attractive system paradigm, in which physical perceptions, cyber interactions, social correlations, and even cognitive thinking can be intertwined in the ubiquitous things’ interconnections. It realizes a perfect integration of a new cyber–physical–social–thinking (CPST) hyperspace, which has profound implications for the future IoT. In this article, a novel concept Cybermatics is put forward as a broader vision of the IoT (called hyper IoT) to address science and technology issues in the heterogeneous CPST hyperspace. This article covers a broaden research field and presents a preliminary study focusing on its three main features (i.e., interconnection, intelligence, and greenness). Concretely, interconnected Cybermatics refers to the variants of Internet of anything, such as physical objects, cyber services, social people, and human thinking; intelligent Cybermatics considers the cyber–physical–social–thinking computing to provide algorithmic support for system infrastructures; green Cybermatics addresses energy issues to ensure efficient communications and networking. Finally, open challenging science and technology issues are discussed in the field of Cybermatics.

A general purpose virtual collaboration room

The general purpose virtual collaboration room (VCR) is an Internet based desktop groupware system that enables a group of remote individuals to flexibly and naturally conduct their collaborative teaching/learning/working without constraints on collaboration types, working styles, group scales, and system platforms. To cope with the complexity, a room metaphor, i.e., emulating a physical room and objects in it, is used as a framework of the system. System implementation becomes no more complex than the case of using one object by identifying associated objects in communication messages between a room server and clients. The VCR provides rich and effective support of awareness of the user, object, space, and their mutual relations. With the use of Java applets for system implementations, users can enter and use a VCR from any standard Java enabled Web browser.

Hierarchic shape description via singularity and multiscaling

We introduce a new concept of ridges, ravines and related structures (skeletons) associated with surfaces in three-dimensional space that generalizes the medial axis transformation approach. The concept is based on singularity theory and involves both local and global geometric properties of the surface; it is invariant with respect to translations and rotations of the surface. It leads to a method of hierarchic description of surfaces that yields new approaches to shape coding, rendering and design. The extraction of the features is based on differential geometry of surfaces with consequent segregation via multiscale analysis. Terrain feature recognition, dental shape reconstruction and medical imagery are a partial list of applications.<<ETX>>

A walkthrough from smart spaces to smart hyperspaces towards a smart world with ubiquitous intelligence

In the ubicomp/percomp era, more ubiquitous computation/information/service would be the main driving force, and the corresponding essential element would be the various smart/intelligent ubiquitous things or u-things with attached/embedded/blended computers. Based on the soon available ubiquitous networking infrastructures and services, such ordinary u-things surrounding us are capable of computing, communicating, connecting or being connected, and behaving smartly with some intelligence. Our world would evolve towards a smart world mainly characterized by ubiquitous intelligence and filled with these smart u-things falling into three categories; smart object, smart space and smart system. The next research phase to emerge, we believe, is to coordinate these diverse smart objects and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level of spaces known as smart hyperspace or hyper-environments, and eventually create the smart world. In this paper, we discuss the potential trends and related challenges from smart things, smart spaces to smart hyperspaces toward the smart world with ubiquitous intelligence.

Modeling and Analyzing Individual's Daily Activities using Lifelog

Lifelog is a data set composed of one or more media forms that record the same individualpsilas daily activities. One of the main challenging issues is how to extract meaningful information from the huge and complex lifelog data which is continuously captured and accumulated from multiple sensors. This study is focused on the activity models and analysis techniques to process lifelog data in order: to find what events/states are interesting or important, to summarize the useful records in some structured and semantic ways for efficient retrievals and presentations of past life experiences, and to use these experiences to further improve the individualpsilas quality of life. We propose an integrated technique to process the lifelog data using the correlations between different kinds of captured data from multiple sensors, instead of dealing with them separately. To use and test the proposed models and the analysis techniques, several prototype systems have been implemented and applied to some domain-specific lifelog data; such as in improving a grouppsilas collaborative efforts in revising a software, in managing kidpsilas outdoor safety care, in providing a runnerpsilas workout assistance, and in structuring lifelog image generation, respectively.

Ubisafe computing: vision and challenges (I)

In recent years, a variety of new computing paradigms have been proposed for various purposes. It is true that many of them intend to and really can gratify some of the people sometime, somewhere; a few of them can even gratify some of the people anytime, anywhere. However, at present, none of the computing paradigms intend to gratify all the people anytime, anywhere. With the rapid advance of information technology and the spread of information services, the IT disparity in age, social standing, and race of the people has been expanding and has become a critical social problem of the 21st century. Thus, we have a fundamental question: Can we construct, in a unified methodology, a computing environment that can gratify all the people in all situations, all places and all the time? We propose a novel and inclusive computing paradigm, named ubisafe computing, for studying and providing possible solutions to the above problem. The ultimate goal of ubisafe computing is to build a computing environment in which all people and organizations can benefit from ubiquitous services anytime anywhere with assured and desired satisfaction without worrying or thinking about safety. That is, the ubisafe computing vision emphasizes two basic aspects: ubiquitous safety and ubiquitous satisfaction to all people in all situations. This paper presents the motivations for the ubisafe computing vision but focuses on one basic aspect of ubiquitous safety that covers reliability, security, privacy, persistency, trust, risk, out of control, and other watchfulness while considering novel, essential ubicomp or percomp features of unobtrusive computers, diverse users/people and life-like systems.