Sujith Samuel Mathew

The Web of Things - Challenges and Enabling Technologies

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an active research area, focusing on connecting real-world things over TCP/IP. This trend has recently triggered the research community to adopt the interoperability of the Web (HTTP) as an application platform for integrating ‘things’ on the Internet. Harnessing physical things into the virtual world using Web standards is also enriching the arena of conventional Web services to unleash data and functions of real-world things as service providers and consumers on the Internet. This evolution of the Web as a highly interoperable application platform for connecting real-world things has raised many research challenges and problems, leading to the fast growing research area called the Web of Things (WoT). Current research on WoT is a catalyst for the realization of IoT, opening up the possibilities of creating ambient spaces (AS), where people and things seamlessly communicate over the Web. In this chapter we discuss the state of the art in WoT research, focusing on the various challenges, and enabling technologies that are driving this research. We discuss architectural frameworks, models and technologies to build applications for future ambient spaces with the WoT. We present case studies that reflect the feasibility and applicability of the WoT technology. We also discuss future trends and research directions within this domain to throw light on existing problems and challenges.

A Social Web of Things Approach to a Smart Campus Model

New technological advances in user mobility and context immersion are enabling novel adaptive and pervasive learning models in ambient environments. In this paper, we aim at developing a novel ubiquitous learning model within a pervasive smart campus environment. We define a model of a smart campus, and advocate learning practices in the light of new paradigms such as context-awareness, ubiquitous learning, pervasive environment, resource virtualization, autnomic computing and adaptive learning. In this environment, we profile learners and augment physical campus structures to advocate contextaware learning processes. We also suggest a social community platform for knowledge sharing which involves peer learners, domain experts as well as campus physical resources.

Managing things in an ambient space

We are surrounded by inanimate things that have inherent information. Unfortunately, the vast majority of applications built to use this information are built in ad-hoc manner, introducing issues with maintainability, share-ability and reusability. We discuss the architecture of Ambient Space Manager (ASM), a system to explore and control things within a context-aware ambient space. We define the context variables of such things to be the Capability, Location, Operations and QoS. Here we also elaborate the Capability context based on the atomic capabilities of things that enable them to offer contextual services.

From the Internet of Things to the web of things — enabling by sensing as-a service

Sensing as a Service (SenaaS) is emerging as a prominent element in the middleware linking together the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT) layers of future ubiquitous systems. An architecture framework is discussed in this paper whereby things are abstracted into services via embedded sensors which expose a thing as a service. The architecture acts as a blueprint to guide software architects realizing WoT applications. Web-enabled things are eventually appended into Web platforms such as Social Web platforms to drive data and services that are exposed by these things to interact with both other things and people, in order to materialize further the future social Web of Things. Research directions are discussed to illustrate the integration of SenaaS into the proposed WoT architectural framework.

Towards an Approach for Weaving Preferences into Web Services Operation

Existing approaches on Web services privacy dominate solutions from a users’ perspective, giving little consideration to the preferences of Web service providers. The integration of service providers’ preferences into Web services’ operations is discussed in this paper. A Web service provider indicates peer Web services that it could interact with as well as the data that they could exchange with. We focus on Privacy and (trust) Partnership preferences based on which, we develop a Specification for Privacy and Partnership Preferences (S3P). This specification suggests a list of exceptional actions to deploy at run-time when these preferences are not met. An integration model of these preferences into Web services design is illustrated throughout a running scenario, and an implementation framework proves the S3P concept. Index Terms—Composition, Partnership, Privacy, Preference, Web service.

Collect, Scope, and Verify Big Data -- A Framework for Institution Accreditation

Institutions in higher education generate terabytesof data that has great value to shape future of nations. This Big Data is in heterogeneous formats, very current, and in large volumes. We propose a framework to collect, scope and verify this large amount of data. Although the framework is explained in the context of institution accreditation in higher education, the framework can be applied in the fields of health-care, finance, marketing etc. Our framework is used to reduce human involvement in the collection and analysis of data, for the purpose of accreditation. The framework extends the scope of data collected to target the heterogeneous nature of the data. Finally, our framework helps to verify the data against a standard set by an accreditation body.

A novel approach for analyzing student interaction with educational systems

The data in higher educational institutions come from the interaction of students with the various online systems, such as learning management, registration, advising and email. Research in the field of educational data mining is concerned with the collection and analysis of such data to discover new insights about student behavior, learning style and success factors. Since different departments in an institution manage different IT systems, collecting data from all of these departments requires collaboration. The data has to be extracted from many systems, which uses different data formats. Therefore, a typical research work in this field analyzes data extracted from one system. This paper, on the other hand, analyzes the network traffic that students generate while on-campus. This approach provides us with a better view of the student interaction with the educational systems, compared to the single view achieved by analyzing data from one system. We anonymize student personally identifiable information to protect student privacy. Further, we propose the use of fog computing to enhance student privacy and reduce network load.

Securing the Internet of Things: A Worst-Case Analysis of Trade-Off between Query-Anonymity and Communication-Cost

Cloud services are widely used to virtualize themanagement and actuation of the real-world the Internet ofThings (IoT). Due to the increasing privacy concerns regardingquerying untrusted cloud servers, query anonymity has becomea critical issue to all the stakeholders which are related toassessment of the dependability and security of the IoT system. The paper presents our study on the problem of query receiver-anonymityin the cloud-based IoT system, where the trade-offbetween the offered query-anonymity and the incurred communicationis considered. The paper will investigate whether theaccepted worst-case communication cost is sufficient to achieve aspecific query anonymity or not. By way of extensive theoreticalanalysis, it shows that the bounds of worst-case communicationcost is quadratically increased as the offered level of anonymityis increased, and they are quadratic in the network diameter forthe opposite range. Extensive simulation is conducted to verifythe analytical assertions.

Continuous health monitoring using smartphones — A case-study for monitoring diabetic patients in UAE

With diabetes patients doubling every year especially in the UAE there is a need to curb this epidemic and help those who are affected to live an active life. Continuous monitoring of health indicators ensures prompt medical attention and reduction in fatalities. The primary challenge to continuously monitor diabetes is that glucose level measurement requires invasive methods. Moreover, continuous monitoring must happen remotely and therefore would require computing and networking technologies that is seamless, real-time, high speed, and with large storage capacities. With the increasing penetration of smartphones, especially in the UAE, we propose a framework for continuous monitoring of diabetes on the smartphone platform. We also survey the state-of-the-art in continuous health monitoring.