Simon G. M. Koo

Internet of Things: Services and Applications Categorization

In this paper we attempt to categorize the services provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to help application developers build upon a base service. First we introduce the four main categories of services, and then follow by providing a number of examples of each of the service categories so as to provide an example of how each type of service might be implemented, and how it can be used to build an IoT application.

Addressing Context Awareness Techniques in Body Sensor Networks

Context awareness in Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) has the significance of associating physiological user activity and environment to the sensed signals of the user. The context information derived in a BSN can be used in pervasive healthcare monitoring for relating importance to events and specifically for accurate episode detection. In this paper, we address the issues of context-aware sensing in BSNs, along with a comparison of different techniques for deducing context awareness, namely, Artificial Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks, and Hidden Markov Models.

A Survey on Context-Aware Sensing for Body Sensor Networks

Context awareness in Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) has the significance of associating physiological user activity and the environment to the sensed signals of the user. The context information derived from a BSN can be used in pervasive healthcare monitoring for relating importance to events and specifically for accurate episode detection. In this paper, we address the issue of context-aware sensing in BSNs, and survey different techniques for deducing context awareness.

An incentive-compatible mechanism for efficient distribution of bulk contents on peer-to-peer networks

In recent years, the rapid growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has provided a new paradigm for content distribution. To improve the efficiency of a P2P system, it is important to provide incentives for the peers to participate and contribute their resources. Various attempts have been made to reward/penalize peers by providing service differentiation based on a requesting peer’s history or reputation. However, in a truly distributed, non-cooperative environment, maintaining and preventing the untruthful revealing of such information within the community impose larger computation and communication overheads to the system. These problems are further magnified when large-volume contents are being distributed because of the length distribution processes and the update of history or reputation has to keep up with the distribution process. In this paper, we address the incentive provisioning problem for distribution of large-volume content in P2P networks, and present a “seeing-is-believing” incentive-compatible mechanism (protocol) in which a peer will decide how much resources will be assigned to which neighbors based on what it has experienced. The protocol applies a utility-based resource-trading concept where peers will maximize their contributions for a fair or better return, and we show that by adopting this protocol, the system will achieve Cournot Equilibrium. Furthermore, our protocol is lightweight, completely decentralized, and cheat-proof. Experimental results illustrate significant improvements on the distribution efficiency of our protocol over other adopted alternatives.

A Comparative Study of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major constraints in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is power consumption. In recent years, a lot of efforts have been put into the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSN, in order to reduce energy consumption and enhance the network’s lifetime. In this paper, we surveyed some MAC protocols for WSN and compared their design tradeoffs. The goal is to provide a foundation for future MAC design, and to identify important design issues that allow us to improve the overall performances.

Computer science curriculum in a liberal arts setting: Case studies at the University of San Diego

The Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the University of San Diego recently revised the curriculum for its B.A. in Computer Science program to make it more compatible with a liberal arts college setting. In this paper, we present our process of revision, including a discussion on the LACS 2007 model we adopted and how to reflect accreditation requirement at the same time. We also discussed how the revised curriculum can incorporate high impact educational practices.

Human-machine interaction in ubiquitous application design

With the proliferation of communication technologies and mobile electronic devices, there is a fast growing need of ubiquitous applications. However, designing ubiquitous applications faces a lot of challenges, and many of them actually comes from human rather than from computers. Furthermore, the primary focus in ubiquitous application development has been application-centric and on specialized applications over a specific systems, such as the iPhone apps. Very often the designers have ignore the human-centric perspective of these applications, as well as the interactions among applications. We envision that an urban-scale ubiquitous network will take place, and connect many daily applications together. Most importantly, the new paradigm is human-centric, as opposed to people being bystanders of the system. In order for these applications to be sustainable, they must provide a human-centric protocol that specifies the rules of the system. However, the process of designing such protocols is not an easy task, especially in a distributed environment where there are a large variety of devices with different capabilities, or when users have disparate interests on their own. In this paper, we present the challenges in this new area, and argue the need to develop a theory for providing fundamental methodologies in designing human-centric ubiquitous systems and applications.

Grey-box mechanism design in peer-to-peer cooperative networking

We have presented the need and our position on human-centric mechanism design. In the design, we identified situations where human intervention impact social welfare, and incorporated the design framework for peer-to-peer grey-box systems.

Cooperative resource bartering on internet overlay for urban-scale smart sensing applications

The majority of advancements in wireless sensor network research have been focusing on the development of a series of specialized application over a small-scaled testbed. We envision that an urban-scale sensing network will take place, and connect many daily applications together. Most importantly, the new paradigm is people-centric, as opposed to people being bystanders of the system. We present the challenges in this new area, particularly, the information relay over ad-hoc connections, and proposed solutions to our ongoing design. We adopted the ideas from peer-to-peer networks, where contribution from individual users determine the overall performance of the whole network, and proposed a bartering-based, incentive-provisioning middleware for this new paradigm.

Is cloud gaming the future of the gaming industry

Cloud gaming is a system that has the potential to make virtually any video game, regardless of system requirements, to be played on almost any client. Put simply, this is accomplished by having servers that do all the graphic intensive computations normally done on a local machine, whether a game console or gaming computer, and sending the visual game frames to a thin client. This thin client is only responsible for displaying the received frames and subsequently sending back to the server the user commands. A system like this has the potential to remove costs from consumers and widen the range of people willing and able to play games that traditionally have required an expensive piece of hardware in-home to play. This paper provides an in-depth look into how cloud gaming works as a whole currently and also how it could work in the future. Many who believe that cloud gaming could essentially change the gaming industry have begun to propose improvements and even totally different approaches to the issues surrounding client gaming and this paper will discuss some of these proposals. This paper will also examine the games themselves and how developers may have to change the way they create and execute games to accommodate a growing cloud gaming market.