Stefan Niemczyk

Designing socio-technical applications for ubiquitous computing: results from a multidisciplinary case study

A major challenge for ubiquitous system design is creating applications that are legal-compatible and accepted by their intended users. Todays European data protection principles contradict the ideas of ubiquitous computing. Additionally, users have to deal with unconventional interaction concepts leading to a low amount of trust and acceptance in such systems. Current development approaches do not sufficiently cover these concerns, as they do not systematically incorporate expertise from the relevant disciplines. We present a novel development approach for ubiquitous systems that explicitly addresses these concerns. Our primary task was to manage the increased number of stakeholders and dependencies, respectively conflicts between requirements of the particular disciplines. The approach incorporates predefined artifacts and a defined workflow with responsibilities, as well as suggesting how to develop mutual understanding. We apply this multidisciplinary approach to develop the ubiquitous application Meet-U.

A tunable model for multi-objective, epistatic, rugged, and neutral fitness landscapes

The fitness landscape of a problem is the relation between the solution candidates and their reproduction probability. In order to understand optimization problems, it is essential to also understand the features of fitness landscapes and their interaction. In this paper we introduce a model problem that allows us to investigate many characteristics of fitness landscapes. Specifically noise, affinity for overfitting, neutrality, epistasis, multi-objectivity, and ruggedness can be independently added, removed, and fine-tuned. With this model, we contribute a useful tool for assessing optimization algorithms and parameter settings.

Adaptive task-oriented message template for in-network processing

In disaster situations or on emergency terrains, Internet and Cloud access may be restricted; it may still be important to process complex resource-intensive tasks and to acquire distributed information for emergency response, using ad-hoc networks among, e.g., first responder mobile devices. Corresponding approaches towards coordination, resource utilization, and interoperability are still challenging. This paper introduces the concept of adaptive task-oriented message templates (ATMT) as a basis for overcoming these issues and for enabling cooperative in-network processing without additional synchronization overhead for mobile devices. An ATMT serves as a self-encapsulated message containing the operation chains that need to be executed as well as the required data. In order to address heterogeneity and interoperability issues, we integrate a lightweight ontology. Depending on the current utilization, devices can autonomously decide whether to participate in the network or not. We evaluate our approach in an indoor testbed with 8 wireless mesh nodes. The results confirm that our approach efficiently supports cooperation among heterogeneous devices towards utilizing available in-network resources while reducing network traffic.

Adaptive run-time models for groups of autonomous robots

Autonomous robots have a great potential to help in disaster scenarios. Nevertheless, each robot is faced with the variety of these scenarios and the difficulties of cooperation with heterogeneous robots and human actors of other rescue forces. Furthermore, approaches using predefined adaptation models are not flexible enough for these scenarios. Therefore, we propose an adaptive configuration of the information processing to enable the collaboration of heterogeneous groups. We present two contributions in this paper: a) An ontology to describe the semantics of information processing components and the structure of information, b) The composition of these components to an adaptation model at run-time. To coordinate the information sharing and integration of new discovered information sources at run-time, we further provide a general framework. Finally, we describe how to apply our approach in a fictitious scenario.

NICER911: Ad-hoc Communication and Emergency Services Using Networking Smartphones and Wireless Home Routers

Reliable communication and emergency services are crucial for the success of crisis response and management. However, todays emergency technologies used by rescuers and civilians mainly rely on either centralized or specialized approaches, which reveal individual issues in infrastructure-less crisis scenarios. In this paper, we propose an emergency communication system called NICER911 that uses ad-hoc device-to-device communications enabling efficient data exchanges and delay-tolerant networking. On top of that, we integrate three types of emergency services allowing cooperations between rescuers and civilians: a social network, rescue instructions, and a self-rescue system. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype to show the feasibility, resource efficiency, and ease of use by preliminary quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

On the socially aware development of self-adaptive ubiquitous computing applications

Abstract Ubiquitous computing applications provide pervasive support to users in a self-adaptive and non-obtrusive way. Applications reason about the user situation and adapt dynamically, often without explicit user interaction. Such applications exploit technical features such as context awareness, context reasoning, adaptation models, dynamic resource discovery/binding, and self-configuration. The engineering of ubiquitous computing applications is a challenge because the user acceptance depends not only on functional features but at least as much on non-functional and user-related features that we address under the term “social awareness”. In this paper we present an interdisciplinary development approach for self-adaptive applications that takes into account social awareness requirements in a systematic and integrated manner. Our focus is on usability, trust, and legality. We present the ingredients of our new methodology and its evaluation based on application prototypes. Our approach is compatible with existing software engineering process models and practices.

A framework for multi-model EDAs with model recombination

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are evolutionary optimization methods that build models which estimate the distribution of promising regions in the search space. Conventional EDAs use only one single model at a time. One way to efficiently explore multiple areas of the search space is to use multiple models in parallel. In this paper, we present a general framework for both single- and multimodel EDAs. We propose the use of clustering to divide selected individuals into different groups, which are then utilized to build separate models. For the multi-model case, we introduce the concept of model recombination. This novel framework has great generality, encompassing the traditional Evolutionary Algorithm and the EDA as its extreme cases. We instantiate our framework in the form of a real-valued algorithm and apply this algorithm to some well-known benchmark functions. Numerical results show that both single- and multi-model EDAs have their own strengths and weaknesses, and that the multi-model EDA is able to prevent premature convergence.

Upgrading Wireless Home Routers as Emergency Cloudlet and Secure DTN Communication Bridge

Reliable communications are crucial for the success of emergency response and management. However, todays technologies used by rescuers and civilians mainly rely on either centralized or specialized emergency approaches, which reveal individual issues especially in infrastructure- less emergency situations (e.g., blackout). In this paper, we present a customary home router upgraded as self- sustaining emergency device which can ad hoc network with nearby devices (e.g., other upgraded routers, smartphones) using wireless communication technologies. On top of the ad-hoc networking, an upgraded router provides (1) personal computing capacities for low-latency offloading from mobile devices (aka cloudlet) using isolated lightweight containers; and (2) store-and-forward delay-tolerant data exchanges to serve as secure communication bridge for cooperation between involved or affected people (e.g., rescuers, civilians). We believe that upgrading ubiquitous routers is a very promising concept for a scalable ad-hoc networking and energy-efficient computing infrastructure in urban emergency situations.

Multi-Agent Plan Verification with Answer Set Programming

Reasoning about multi-agent plans allows to detect modelling failures and to improve the efficiency of the modelling process. Therefore, we evaluate the applicability of an answer set programming based reasoning support for the multiagent modelling language ALICA. For a proper judgement several reasoning tasks of different complexity are investigated. The overall architecture is highlighted and encountered problems are discussed. Finally it is concluded that answer set programming is a promising approach for reasoning about multi-agent plans.

RoSHA: A Multi-robot Self-healing Architecture

Reliability is one of the key challenges in multi-robot systems to increase practicable applicability and hence the commercial usage. This paper presents RoSHA, a self-healing architecture for multi-robot systems. RoSHA is based on the established robot middleware ROS and provides components for application independent analysis and repair. A plug-in architecture enables the developer to simply add new components for repair and analysis. Bayesian networks are used to diagnose failures and their root causes. ALICA, a domain specific language for multi-robot systems, is applied to coordinate recovery plans in multi-robot systems.