Context Aware Middleware Architectures: Survey and Challenges
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paper_title: Middleware Support for Context-awareness in Asynchronous Pervasive Computing Environments

paper_content:

Context-awareness is an essential feature of pervasive applications, and runtime detection of contextual properties is one of the primary approaches to enabling context awareness. However, existing context-aware middleware does not provide sufficient support for detection of contextual properties in asynchronous environments. We argue that in asynchronous environments, the concept of time needs to be reexamined. Instead of assuming the availability of global time or synchronous interaction, we should rely on logical time. To this end, we present the Middleware Infrastructure for Predicate detection in Asynchronous environments (MIPA), which supports context-awareness based on logical time. Design and operation of MIPA are explained in detail. We also evaluate MIPA with a comprehensive case study. The evaluation results show the cost-effectiveness and scalability of MIPA.
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paper_title: Designing context awareness middleware architecture for personal healthcare information system

paper_content:

Ubiquitous Healthcare system is one of the emerging areas of research where user interference is apprenticed with the detection of various environmental conditions and user response in order to maximize user Interaction. Ubiquitous computing is to build in that environment where different ubiquitous application can communicate with each other and each of them can provide seem-less service to different user by strengthen different daily objects and information. Context-awareness plays indispensable role in achieving such user-centred pervasiveness. In this paper we applied context awareness for personal healthcare information system named MUHIS (Middleware for Ubiquitous Healthcare Information System) which gather sensor data from personal healthcare devices and sensors, process that data into useful information. Our proposed architecture will also provide diagnoses report to the doctors for further instructions.
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paper_title: Context-aware applications: from the laboratory to the marketplace

paper_content:

Current hardware developments are making mobile computing increasingly attractive. An important class of mobile applications are context-aware applications: applications that change their behaviour according to the user's present context-their location, who they are with, what the time of day is, and so on. This article is about software design for context-aware applications. Currently most such applications have been crafted by experts in research laboratories. Our aim is to factor out a simple class of context-aware applications and make the creation of these as easy as, say, creating Web pages.
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paper_title: Human Computer Giraffe Interaction: HCI in the Field

paper_content:

This paper presents some findings and proposals for new research that have arisen from our work on the ''Mobile Computing in Fieldwork Environments'' project at the University of Kent at Canterbury [1]: a project that is sponsored by JTAP (JISC Technology Applications Programme) [2]. Our main research interest is in the development of novel software tools for the mobile fieldworker that exploit existing handheld computing and sensor technology. The work described in this paper concentrates on examining the special needs and environment of the fieldworker, reflecting on the HCI features required for a successful PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) for use in the field.
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paper_title: All gadget and no representation makes Jack a dull environment

paper_content:

In an Intelligent Environment, the user and the environment work together in a unique manner; the user expresses what he wishes to do, and the environment recognizes his intentions and helps out however it can. If well-implemented, such an environment allows the user to interact with it in the manner that is most natural for him personally. He should need virtually no time to learn to use it and should be more productive once he has. But to implement a useful and natural Intelligent Environment, the designers are faced with a daunting task: they must design a software system that senses what its users do, understands their intentions, and then responds appropriately. In this paper we argue that, in order to function reasonably in any of these ways, an Intelligent Environment must make use of declarative representations of what the user might do. We present our evidence in the context of the Intelligent Classroom, a facility that aids a speaker in this way and uses its understanding to produce a video of his presentation.
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paper_title: Towards situated computing

paper_content:

Situated computing concerns the ability of computing devices to detect, interpret and respond to aspects of the user's local environment. In this paper, we use our recent prototyping experience to identify a number of challenging issues that must be resolved in building wearable computers that support situated applications. The paper is organized into three areas: Sensing the local environment, interpreting sensor data, and realizing the value of situated applications. We conclude that while it is feasible to develop interesting prototypes, there remain many difficulties to overcome before robust systems may be widely deployed.
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paper_title: An Intelligent Broker for Context-Aware Systems

paper_content:

We describe Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) – a new architecture for supporting context-aware systems in smart spaces. Our architecture explores the use of Semantic Web languages for defining and publishing a context ontology, for sharing information about a context and for reasoning over such information. Central to our architecture is a broker agent that maintains a shared model of the context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users and devices. We also describe the use of CoBrA in prototyping an intelligent meeting room.
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paper_title: A System Architecture for Context-Aware Mobile Computing

paper_content:

Computer applications traditionally expect a static execution environment. However, this precondition is generally not possible for mobile systems, where the world around an application is constantly changing. This thesis explores how to support and also exploit the dynamic configurations and social settings characteristic of mobile systems. More specifically, it advances the following goals: (1) enabling seamless interaction across devices; (2) creating physical spaces that are responsive to users; and (3) and building applications that are aware of the context of their use. Examples of these goals are: continuing in your office a program started at home; using a PDA to control someone else's windowing UI; automatically canceling phone forwarding upon return to your office; having an airport overhead-display highlight the flight information viewers are likely to be interested in; easily locating and using the nearest printer or fax machine; and automatically turning off a PDA's audible e-mail notification when in a meeting. ::: The contribution of this thesis is an architecture to support context-aware computing; that is, application adaptation triggered by such things as the location of use, the collection of nearby people, the presence of accessible devices and other kinds of objects, as well as changes to all these things over time. Three key issues are addressed: (1) the information needs of applications, (2) where applications get various pieces of information and (3) how information can be efficiently distributed. ::: A dynamic environment communication model is introduced as a general mechanism for quickly and efficiently learning about changes occurring in the environment in a fault tolerant manner. For purposes of scalability, multiple dynamic environment servers store user, device, and, for each geographic region, context information. In order to efficiently disseminate information from these components to applications, a dynamic collection of multicast groups is employed. The thesis also describes a demonstration system based on the Xerox PARCTAB, a wireless palmtop computer.
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paper_title: A New Location Technique for the Active Office

paper_content:

Configuration of the computing and communications systems found at home and in the workplace is a complex task that currently requires the attention of the user. Researchers have begun to examine computers that would autonomously change their functionality based on observations of who or what was around them. By determining their context, using input from sensor systems distributed throughout the environment, computing devices could personalize themselves to their current user, adapt their behaviour according to their location, or react to their surroundings. The authors present a novel sensor system, suitable for large-scale deployment in indoor environments, which allows the locations of people and equipment to be accurately determined. We also describe some of the context-aware applications that might make use of this fine-grained location information.
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paper_title: Implementation of Ontology Based Context-Awareness Framework for Ubiquitous Environment

paper_content:

The ontology has many merits, of which the most notable are the excellent extensibility, and high expression power. Thus, many systems in the Ubiquitous environment are developed using ontologies. Usually, ontologies are used for modeling context that the systems should collect and analyze. Also, they use only OWL and other ontology languages based on Description Logic, so can not properly handle rules expressed in Horn-Logic. We define the context-type for establishing a context model that is adequate for inference and learning services. Second, we develop the context model using OWL and SWRL. SWRL is a rule language submitted by the W3C(World Wide Web Consortium), used for expressing rules. Finally, a framework is developed to handle context information with the developed ontology and learning algorithm, like the DT(decision-tree) or NN(neural-network).
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paper_title: Survey on context-awareness in ubiquitous media

paper_content:

Context-awareness assists ubiquitous media applications in discovering the changeable contextual information and adapting their behaviors accordingly. A wide spectrum of context-aware schemes have been proposed over the last decade. However, most of them provide partial functionalities of context-awareness in ubiquitous media applications. They are specified to a certain task and lack of systematic research on context-awareness. To this end, this survey aims at answering how close we are to developing context-aware applications in ubiquitous media in a systematic manner. This survey proposes a reference framework to identify key functionalities of context-awareness. Then, it investigates the state-of-the-art advances in every functionality of context-awareness. Finally, it points out potential directions in context-awareness research and tools for building and measuring context-aware ubiquitous media systems.
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paper_title: Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

paper_content:

When humans talk with humans, they are able to use implicit situational information, or context, to increase the conversational bandwidth. Unfortunately, this ability to convey ideas does not transfer well to humans interacting with computers. In traditional interactive computing, users have an impoverished mechanism for providing input to computers. By improving the computer’s access to context, we increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction and make it possible to produce more useful computational services. The use of context is increasingly important in the fields of handheld and ubiquitous computing, where the user?s context is changing rapidly. In this panel, we want to discuss some of the research challenges in understanding context and in developing context-aware applications.
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paper_title: Comparison of exact static and dynamic Bayesian context inference methods for activity recognition

paper_content:

This paper compares the performance of inference in static and dynamic Bayesian Networks. For the comparison both kinds of Bayesian networks are created for the exemplary application activity recognition. Probability and structure of the Bayesian Networks have been learnt automatically from a recorded data set consisting of acceleration data observed from an inertial measurement unit. Whereas dynamic networks incorporate temporal dependencies which affect the quality of the activity recognition, inference is less complex for dynamic networks. As performance indicators recall, precision and processing time of the activity recognition are studied in detail. The results show that dynamic Bayesian Networks provide considerably higher quality in the recognition but entail longer processing times.
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paper_title: CA 5W1H Onto: Ontological Context-Aware Model Based on 5W1H

paper_content:

Ubiquitous computing is necessary to define models for broad contextual information arising out of surrounding environment. It also helps comprehend how to model a mechanism of selectively collecting useful pieces of contextual information and of providing relevant intelligent services. Further, studies are also required on how to process contextual information, its maintenance, and reasoning. However, current context-aware researches are still in need of modeling techniques reflecting ontological characteristics. As a result, it is impossible to effectively provide relevant intelligent services. They are limited as well in terms of contextual reasoning and interoperability across different pieces of contextual information. Aware of the issues, this study proposes an ontology-based context-aware modeling technique, along with a relevant framework, in order to enable efficient specification of contextual information and, thereby, further to provide intelligent context-aware services for context management and reasoning. Moreover, we mobilize the maxim of “five Ws and one H” to process physical and logical contextual information and to support our proposed technique. The maxim-applied modeling technique sets forth an intuitive context-aware schema and demonstrates high applicability to sharing and integration of contextual information. Meanwhile, the ontology-based modeling supports reasoning on contextual information and facilitates more intelligent and reliable services.
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paper_title: Context-aware applications: from the laboratory to the marketplace

paper_content:

Current hardware developments are making mobile computing increasingly attractive. An important class of mobile applications are context-aware applications: applications that change their behaviour according to the user's present context-their location, who they are with, what the time of day is, and so on. This article is about software design for context-aware applications. Currently most such applications have been crafted by experts in research laboratories. Our aim is to factor out a simple class of context-aware applications and make the creation of these as easy as, say, creating Web pages.
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paper_title: Context for ubiquitous data management

paper_content:

In response to the advance of ubiquitous computing technologies, we believe that for computer systems to be ubiquitous, they must be context-aware. In this paper, we address the impact of context-awareness on ubiquitous data management. To do this, we overview different characteristics of context in order to develop a clear understanding of context, as well as its implications and requirements for context-aware data management. References to recent research activities and applicable techniques are also provided.
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paper_title: Modeling Context Information in Pervasive Compututing Systems

paper_content:

As computing becomes more pervasive, the nature of applications must change accordingly. In particular, applications must become more flexible in order to respond to highly dynamic computing environments, and more autonomous, to reflect the growing ratio of applications to users and the corresponding decline in the attention a user can devote ::: to each. That is, applications must become more context-aware. To facilitate the programming of such applications, infrastructure is required to gather, manage, and disseminate context information to applications. This paper is concerned with the development of appropriate context modeling concepts for pervasive computing, which can form the basis for such a context management infrastructure. This model overcomes prob- ::: lems associated with previous context models, including their lack of formality and generality, and also tackles issues such as wide variations in information quality, the existence of complex relationships amongst context information and temporal aspects of context.
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paper_title: Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

paper_content:

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.
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paper_title: Adding generic contextual capabilities to wearable computers

paper_content:

Context-awareness has an increasingly important role to play in the development of wearable computing systems. In order to better define this role we have identified four generic contextual capabilities: sensing, adaptation, resource discovery, and augmentation. A prototype application has been constructed to explore how some of these capabilities could be deployed in a wearable system designed to aid an ecologist's observations of giraffe in a Kenyan game reserve. However, despite the benefits of context-awareness demonstrated in this prototype, widespread innovation of these capabilities is currently stifled by the difficulty in obtaining the contextual data. To remedy this situation the Contextual Information Service (CIS) is introduced. Installed on the user's wearable computer, the CIS provides a common point of access for clients to obtain, manipulate and model contextual information independently of the underlying plethora of data formats and sensor interface mechanisms.
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paper_title: The active badge location system

paper_content:

A novel system for the location of people in an office environment is described. Members of staff wear badges that transmit signals providing information about their location to a centralized location service, through a network of sensors. The paper also examines alternative location techniques, system design issues and applications, particularly relating to telephone call routing. Location systems raise concerns about the privacy of an individual and these issues are also addressed.
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paper_title: A Survey on Context-aware systems

paper_content:

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.
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paper_title: Triggering information by context

paper_content:

With the increased availability of personal computers with attached sensors to capture their environment, there is a big opportunity forcontext-aware applications; these automatically provide information and/or take actions according to the user's present context, as detected by sensors. When well designed, these applications provide an opportunity to tailor the provision of information closely to the user's current needs. A sub-set of context-aware applications arediscrete applications, where discrete pieces of information are attached to individual contexts, to be triggered when the user enters those contexts. The advantage of discrete applications is that authoring them can be solely a creative process rather than a programming process: it can be a task akin to creating simple web pages. This paper looks at a general system that can be used in any discrete context-aware application. It propounds a general triggering rule, and investigates how this rule applies in practical applications.
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paper_title: CyberDesk: a framework for providing self-integrating context-aware services

paper_content:

Applications are often designed to take advantage of the potential for integration with each other via shared information. Current approaches for integration are limited, affecting both the programmer and end-user. In this paper, we present CyberDesk, a framework for self-integrating software in which integration is driven by user context. It relieves the burden on programmers by removing the necessity to predict how software should be integrated. It also relieves the burden from users by removing the need to understand how to make different software components work together.
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paper_title: Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

paper_content:

When humans talk with humans, they are able to use implicit situational information, or context, to increase the conversational bandwidth. Unfortunately, this ability to convey ideas does not transfer well to humans interacting with computers. In traditional interactive computing, users have an impoverished mechanism for providing input to computers. By improving the computer’s access to context, we increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction and make it possible to produce more useful computational services. The use of context is increasingly important in the fields of handheld and ubiquitous computing, where the user?s context is changing rapidly. In this panel, we want to discuss some of the research challenges in understanding context and in developing context-aware applications.
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paper_title: Context-Aware Computing : The CyberDesk Project

paper_content:

The CyberDesk project is aimed at providing a software architecture that dynamically integrates software modules. This integration is driven by a user’s context, where context includes the user’s physical, social, emotional, and mental (focus-of-attention) environments. While a user’s context changes in all settings, it tends to change most frequently in a mobile setting. We have used the CyberDesk system in a desktop setting and are currently using it to build an intelligent home environment.
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paper_title: Ubiquitous Computing: Defining an HCI Research - Agenda for an Emerging Interaction Paradigm

paper_content:

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is an emerging paradigm for interaction between people and computers. A guiding principle of ubicomp is to break away from desktop computing to provide computational services to a user when and where required. Although there has been a lot of experimental work in ubicomp, there has been little effort to define an agenda in ubicomp for HCI researchers. In this paper, we attempt to remedy that problem by defining the space of ubicomp applications in terms of the level of user mobility and transparency of interaction. Increases in user mobility will come with technological advances, but increased interaction transparency will come only with breakthroughs in HCI research. We conclude the paper with a discussion of two functional themes that we have found important across a number of ubicomp systems —context-awareness and automated capture, integration and access. Each of these themes raises special HCI issues and, together with the taxonomy for ubicomp applications, defines a clearer agenda for HCI research in ubiquitous computing.
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paper_title: CACH-FTL: A Cache-Aware Configurable Hybrid Flash Translation Layer

paper_content:

Many hybrid Flash Translation Layer (FTL) schemes have been proposed to leverage the erase-before-write and limited lifetime constraints of flash memories. Those schemes try to approach page mapping performance and flexibility while seeking block mapping memory usage. Furthermore, flash-specific cache systems were designed (1) to maximize lifetime by absorbing some erase operations, and (2) to reveal sequentiality from random write operations. Indeed, random writes represent the Achilles' heel of flash memories. Both cache systems and FTL schemes were designed independently from each other. This paper presents a scalable (in terms of mapping table size) and flexible (in terms of I/O workload support) Cache-Aware Configurable Hybrid (CACH) FTL. CACH-FTL uses a common feature of flash-specific cache systems that is flushing groups of pages from the same block. CACH-FTL partitions the flash memory space into two regions: (1) a data Block Mapped Region (BMR) collecting large groups of pages from the above cache (sequential I/Os), and (2) a small Page Mapped over-provisioning Region (PMR) which purpose is to collect/buffer small groups of pages coming from the cache (random I/Os) before moving them to BMR. CACH-FTL is flexible as it offers many configuration possibilities and can be adapted according to the I/O workload. CACH-FTL approaches the ideal page mapping FTL performance as it gives less than 15% performance difference in most cases.
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paper_title: Snap2Play: A Mixed-Reality Game based on Scene Identification

paper_content:

The ubiquity of camera phones provides a convenient platform to develop immersive mixed-reality games. In this paper we introduce such a game which is loosely based on the popular card game "Memory", where players are asked to match a pair of identical cards among a set of overturned cards by revealing only two cards at a time. In our game, the players are asked to match a "physical card", which is an image of a scene in the real world, to a "digital card", which corresponds to a scene in a virtual world. The objective is to convey a mixed-reality sensation. Cards are matched with a scene identification engine which consists of multiple classifiers trained on previously collected images. We present our comprehensive overall game design, as well as implementation details and results. Additionally, we also describe how we constructed our scene identification engine and its performance.
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paper_title: Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

paper_content:

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.
---
paper_title: Survey on context-awareness in ubiquitous media

paper_content:

Context-awareness assists ubiquitous media applications in discovering the changeable contextual information and adapting their behaviors accordingly. A wide spectrum of context-aware schemes have been proposed over the last decade. However, most of them provide partial functionalities of context-awareness in ubiquitous media applications. They are specified to a certain task and lack of systematic research on context-awareness. To this end, this survey aims at answering how close we are to developing context-aware applications in ubiquitous media in a systematic manner. This survey proposes a reference framework to identify key functionalities of context-awareness. Then, it investigates the state-of-the-art advances in every functionality of context-awareness. Finally, it points out potential directions in context-awareness research and tools for building and measuring context-aware ubiquitous media systems.
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paper_title: Context-aware computing applications

paper_content:

Describes systems that examine and react to an individual's changing context. Such systems can promote and mediate people's interactions with devices, computers and other people, and they can help navigate unfamiliar places. We believe that a limited amount of information covering a person's proximate environment is most important for this form of computing, since the interesting part of the world around us is what we can see, hear and touch. In this paper, we define context-aware computing and describe four categories of context-aware applications: proximate selection, automatic contextual reconfiguration, contextual information and commands, and content-triggered actions. Instances of these application types have been prototyped on the PARCTAB, a wireless palm-sized computer.
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paper_title: Design of an object model for a context sensitive tourist GUIDE

paper_content:

This paper describes work carried out as part of the GUIDE project at Lancaster University. The overall aim of the project is to develop a context-sensitive tourist guide for visitors to the city of Lancaster. Visitors are equipped with portable GUIDE units which in turn provide interactive services and dynamically tailored web-based information reflecting the visitor's preferences and environmental context. In contrast to existing tourist systems all information in GUIDE is obtained dynamically using a city-wide wireless network infrastructure. The paper presents an overview of the GUIDE system, with particular focus on our design of an appropriate object model, capable of handling the high degree of flexibility required by GUIDE. In addition, the paper includes the results of our requirements analysis, the web-based application that has been developed to meet these requirements and our approach towards communicating information to portable GUIDE units in a timely and scaleable manner.
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paper_title: Inconsistency detection and resolution for context-aware middleware support

paper_content:

Context-awareness is a key feature of pervasive computing whose environments keep evolving. The support of context-awareness requires comprehensive management including detection and resolution of context inconsistency, which occurs naturally in pervasive computing. In this paper we present a framework for realizing dynamic context consistency management. The framework supports inconsistency detection based on a semantic matching and inconsistency triggering model, and inconsistency resolution with proactive actions to context sources. We further present an implementation based on the Cabot middleware. The feasibility of the framework and its performance are evaluated through a case study and a simulated experiment, respectively.
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paper_title: Toward a Multidisciplinary Model of Context to Support Context-Aware Computing

paper_content:

Capturing, defining, and modeling the essence of context are challenging, compelling, and prominent issues for interdisciplinary research and discussion. The roots of its emergence lie in the inconsistencies and ambivalent definitions across and within different research specializations (e.g., philosophy, psychology, pragmatics, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence). Within the area of computer science, the advent of mobile context-aware computing has stimulated broad and contrasting interpretations due to the shift from traditional static desktop computing to heterogeneous mobile environments. This transition poses many challenging, complex, and largely unanswered research issues relating to contextual interactions and usability. To address those issues, many researchers strongly encourage a multidisciplinary approach. The primary aim of this article is to review and unify theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Summary models within each discipline are used to propose an outline and detailed multidisciplinary model of context involving (a) the differentiation of focal and contextual aspects of the user and application's world, (b) the separation of meaningful and incidental dimensions, and (c) important user and application processes. The models provide an important foundation in which complex mobile scenarios can be conceptualized and key human and social issues can be identified. The models were then applied to different applications of context-aware computing involving user communities and mobile tourist guides. The authors' future work involves developing a user-centered multidisciplinary design framework (based on their proposed models). This will be used to design a large-scale user study investigating the usability issues of a context-aware mobile computing navigation aid for visually impaired people.
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paper_title: A Simple Model and Infrastructure for Context-Aware Browsing of the World

paper_content:

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it
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paper_title: Linking Context Modelling and Contextual Reasoning ⋆

paper_content:

In this paper, we discuss a novel perspective on ontologybased context modelling that makes it easy to combine context models and contextual reasoning mechanisms. On the context modelling side, we outline our idea of a user-centric context model based on the six fundamental context parameters of who, when, where, what, how, and why (5W1H); on the contextual reasoning side, we introduce syntax and semantics for a simple logical language and sketch a tableau mechanism for reasoning. The model-theoretic semantics for this logical language is like the context model based on the parameters of 5W1H. With the common semantics, it is then easy to show the link between context modelling and contextual reasoning.
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paper_title: Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

paper_content:

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.
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paper_title: Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods

paper_content:

This paper gives an overview of the development of the field of Knowledge Engineering over the last 15 years. We discuss the paradigm shift from a transfer view to a modeling view and describe two approaches which considerably shaped research in Knowledge Engineering: Role-limiting Methods and Generic Tasks. To illustrate various concepts and methods which evolved in recent years we describe three modeling frameworks: CommonKADS, MIKE and PROTEGE-II. This description is supplemented by discussing some important methodological developments in more detail: specification languages for knowledge-based systems, problem-solving methods and ontologies. We conclude by outlining the relationship of Knowledge Engineering to Software Engineering, Information Integration and Knowledge Management.
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paper_title: Survey on context-awareness in ubiquitous media

paper_content:

Context-awareness assists ubiquitous media applications in discovering the changeable contextual information and adapting their behaviors accordingly. A wide spectrum of context-aware schemes have been proposed over the last decade. However, most of them provide partial functionalities of context-awareness in ubiquitous media applications. They are specified to a certain task and lack of systematic research on context-awareness. To this end, this survey aims at answering how close we are to developing context-aware applications in ubiquitous media in a systematic manner. This survey proposes a reference framework to identify key functionalities of context-awareness. Then, it investigates the state-of-the-art advances in every functionality of context-awareness. Finally, it points out potential directions in context-awareness research and tools for building and measuring context-aware ubiquitous media systems.
---
paper_title: Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

paper_content:

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.
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paper_title: Fuzzy Ontology Representation using OWL 2

paper_content:

The need to deal with vague information in Semantic Web languages is rising in importance and, thus, calls for a standard way to represent such information. We may address this issue by either extending current Semantic Web languages to cope with vagueness, or by providing a procedure to represent such information within current standard languages and tools. In this work, we follow the latter approach, by identifying the syntactic differences that a fuzzy ontology language has to cope with, and by proposing a concrete methodology to represent fuzzy ontologies using OWL 2 annotation properties. We also report on some prototypical implementations: a plug-in to edit fuzzy ontologies using OWL 2 annotations and some parsers that translate fuzzy ontologies represented using our methodology into the languages supported by some reasoners.
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paper_title: Towards Initiative Smart Space model

paper_content:

This paper presents an initiative model for building Open Smart Space (OpenSS) environment. OpenSS is the middle stage of Smart Space identified as the test-bed for pervasive computing research. The model is regarded as a three-layered model: (1) physical space layer, introducing an ontology-based model to represent the entities, the boundary and the fusion of physical space and cyber space; (2) agent layer, adopting the multi-agent architecture to specify the relationships between the entities in the physical space layer; (3) mechanism layer, aiming to manage the agents in agent layer to provide enhanced mechanism. This model is motivated and partially validated in the previous and ongoing scenarios, hopefully facilitating building the future OpenSS related projects.
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paper_title: An artificial chemistry based framework for personal and social context aware smart spaces

paper_content:

Supporting context-aware services and applications that are delivered to a user as they move through a smart space is a challenge. The complexity of awareness and interaction requires an efficient interaction and adaptation model. Most research prototypes comprise of many models and extensive middleware which seems excessive for simple context-aware applications involving pervasive devices. Part of the problem is finding a conceptual abstraction which is compact and concise yet can exclusively model all the dynamism and expressivity required for such a system. In this paper we propose a context aware architecture based on a smart space context model and a middleware inspired by chemical reactions.
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paper_title: Supporting smart space infrastructures: a dynamic context-model composition framework

paper_content:

Smart spaces are environments where intelligent devices can provide end-users with personalized and context-aware services. The biggest barriers against effective realization of smart spaces are the lack of interoperability between different ubiquitous computing infrastructures and standardized way of service operations. From this perspective, we present a framework for smart space interaction supporting interoperability and based on ongoing standardization efforts. The framework supports dynamic composition of context models based on multi-device and service interactions taking into account security and privacy issues. We show how we align ongoing W3C standardization efforts with key elements of the framework such as composition models and state-based mart space application development approaches. We conclude by providing our thoughts and plans about future extensions and interoperability needed between specifications for effective smart space realizations.
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paper_title: Managing Uncertainty and Vagueness in Description Logics for the Semantic Web

paper_content:

Ontologies play a crucial role in the development of the Semantic Web as a means for defining shared terms in web resources. They are formulated in web ontology languages, which are based on expressive description logics. Significant research efforts in the semantic web community are recently directed towards representing and reasoning with uncertainty and vagueness in ontologies for the Semantic Web. In this paper, we give an overview of approaches in this context to managing probabilistic uncertainty, possibilistic uncertainty, and vagueness in expressive description logics for the Semantic Web.
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paper_title: Macro Programming through Bayesian Networks: Distributed Inference and Anomaly Detection

paper_content:

Macro programming a distributed system, such as a sensor network, is the ability to specify application tasks at a global level while relying on compiler-like software to translate the global tasks into the individual component activities. Bayesian networks can be regarded as a powerful tool for macro programming a distributed system in a variety of data analysis applications. In this paper we present our architecture to program a sensor network by means of Bayesian networks. We also present some applications developed on a microphone-sensor network, that demonstrate calibration, classification and anomaly detection
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paper_title: A Middleware Infrastructure for Active Spaces

paper_content:

The paper discusses the Gaia metaoperating system which extends the reach of traditional operating systems to manage ubiquitous computing habitats and living spaces as integrated programmable environments. Gaia exports services to query, access, and use existing resources and context, and provides a framework to develop user-centric, resource-aware, multidevice, context-sensitive, and mobile applications.
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paper_title: Representing and Reasoning about Context in a Mobile Environment

paper_content:

Today the computer is changing from a big, grey, and noisy thing on our desk to a small, portable, and ever-networked item most of us are carrying around. This new found mobility imposes a shift in how we view computers and the way we work with them. When interaction can occur anywhere at any time it is imperative that the system adapts to the user in whatever situation the user is in. To facilitate this adaptivity we propose a two tier architecture. A middleware layer implementing a general mechanism for aggregating and maintaining contextual information. The second part offers automatic situation assessment through Case-Based Reasoning. We demonstrate a multi-agent system for supplying context-sensitive services in a mobile environment.
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paper_title: Situation Inference for Mobile Users: A Rule Based Approach

paper_content:

Mobile phones are being increasingly equipped with sensors that ease retrieval of context information about a user. Context data can be aggregated with information centrally available to mobile operators and service providers, to infer higher-level information such as user "situations", easier to integrate with services. We have been conducting an internal trial monitoring the context of different users in their business life and designing rules to infer high level situations: logical location, activity and social state. In this paper we present the infrastructure and the rule-based reasoning process used for this experiment.
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paper_title: Ontology based context modeling and reasoning using OWL

paper_content:

Here we propose an OWL encoded context ontology (CONON) for modeling context in pervasive computing environments, and for supporting logic-based context reasoning. CONON provides an upper context ontology that captures general concepts about basic context, and also provides extensibility for adding domain-specific ontology in a hierarchical manner. Based on this context ontology, we have studied the use of logic reasoning to check the consistency of context information, and to reason over low-level, explicit context to derive high-level, implicit context. By giving a performance study for our prototype, we quantitatively evaluate the feasibility of logic based context reasoning for nontime-critical applications in pervasive computing environments, where we always have to deal carefully with the limitation of computational resources.
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paper_title: A context management framework for supporting context-aware distributed applications

paper_content:

Service platform functions are enablers of adaptive communication services and applications that hide the heterogeneity of the infrastructure, manage personal reachability, manage implicit context, and adapt modality to the context. Furthermore, they can offer a diversity of services, whereby an optimal tradeoff can be made for end users in comfort, cost, security, and mobility. We consider the enablers of context-aware services in distributed environments and present a context management framework that is generic through its hierarchic ordering of context sources and extensible with multiple reasoning realizations. The article focuses on the architectural principles and reasoning methods of the framework
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paper_title: Ontology visualization methods—a survey

paper_content:

Ontologies, as sets of concepts and their interrelations in a specific domain, have proven to be a useful tool in the areas of digital libraries, the semantic web, and personalized information management. As a result, there is a growing need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing. There exist several ontology visualization methods and also a number of techniques used in other contexts that could be adapted for ontology representation. The purpose of this article is to present these techniques and categorize their characteristics and features in order to assist method selection and promote future research in the area of ontology visualization.
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paper_title: Project Aura: Toward Distraction-Free Pervasive Computing

paper_content:

The most precious resource in a computer system is no longer its processor, memory, disk, or network, but rather human attention. Aura aims to minimize distractions on a user's attention, creating an environment that adapts to the user's context and needs. Aura is specifically intended for pervasive computing environments involving wireless communication, wearable or handheld computers, and smart spaces. Human attention is an especially scarce resource in such environments, because the user is often preoccupied with walking, driving, or other real-world interactions. In addition, mobile computing poses difficult challenges such as intermittent and variable-bandwidth connectivity, concern for battery life, and the client resource constraints that weight and size considerations impose. To accomplish its ambitious goals, research in Aura spans every system level: from the hardware, through the operating system, to applications and end users. Underlying this diversity of concerns, Aura applies two broad concepts. First, it uses proactivity, which is a system layer's ability to anticipate requests from a higher layer. In today's systems, each layer merely reacts to the layer above it. Second, Aura is self-tuning: layers adapt by observing the demands made on them and adjusting their performance and resource usage characteristics accordingly. Currently, system-layer behavior is relatively static. Both of these techniques will help lower demand for human attention.
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paper_title: A service-oriented middleware for building context-aware

paper_content:

The advancement of wireless networks and mobile computing necessitates more advanced applications and services to be built with context-awareness enabled and adaptability to their changing contexts. Today, building context-aware services is a complex task due to the lack of an adequate infrastructure support in pervasive computing environments. In this article, we propose a Service-Oriented Context-Aware Middleware (SOCAM) architecture for the building and rapid prototyping of context-aware services. It provides efficient support for acquiring, discovering, interpreting and accessing various contexts to build context-aware services. We also propose a formal context model based on ontology using Web Ontology Language to address issues including semantic representation, context reasoning, context classification and dependency. We describe our context model and the middleware architecture, and present a performance study for our prototype in a smart home environment.
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paper_title: Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces

paper_content:

A new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting explores the use of multi-agent systems, Semantic Web ontologies, reasoning, and declarative policies for security and privacy. Building on an earlier pervasive computing system, EasyMeeting provides relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. The system also exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (Cobra). Cobra's intelligent broker agent maintains a shared context model for all computing entities in the space and enforces user-defined privacy policies.
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paper_title: The active badge location system

paper_content:

A novel system for the location of people in an office environment is described. Members of staff wear badges that transmit signals providing information about their location to a centralized location service, through a network of sensors. The paper also examines alternative location techniques, system design issues and applications, particularly relating to telephone call routing. Location systems raise concerns about the privacy of an individual and these issues are also addressed.
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paper_title: A context-aware middleware for applications in mobile Ad Hoc environments

paper_content:

Novel ubiquitous computing applications such as intelligent vehicles, smart buildings, and traffic management require special properties that traditional computing applications do not support, such as context-awareness, massive decentralisation, autonomous behaviour, adaptivity, proactivity, and innate collaboration. This paper presents a new computational model and middleware that reflect support for the required the properties. The sentient object model is proposed by the CORTEX1 project to support the construction of ubiquitous applications. A flexible, run-time reconfigurable component-based middleware has been built to provide run-time support to engineer the sentient object programming paradigm. An application infrastructure using sentient objects to enable cooperation between autonomous and proactive vehicles has been implemented to demonstrate the appropriateness of the computational model and the validity of the middleware for pervasive mobile ad hoc computing.
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paper_title: A Survey on Context-aware systems

paper_content:

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.
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paper_title: An extensive survey of context-aware middleware architectures

paper_content:

Context-awareness is a vital requirement in building valuable and capable adaptive systems. Context-aware ubiquitous computing focuses on the use of context of users, devices, environment, etc in order to offer services essential for a particular person, space and time. This paper provides a survey of context-aware middleware architectures. An overview of each middleware is provided, along with the description of the main features. Based on the conducted survey, this paper compares and contrasts the various characteristics of context-aware middleware architectures. We present the analysis of the middleware architectures based on several parameters including fault tolerance, adaptability, interoperability, architectural style, discoverability, location transparency and aspect oriented composition.
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paper_title: MobiPADS: A Reflective Middleware for Context-Aware Mobile Computing

paper_content:

Traditionally, middleware technologies, such as CORBA, Java RMI, and Microsoft's DCOM, have provided a set of distributed computing services that essentially abstract the underlying network services to a monolithic "black box." In a mobile operating environment, the fundamental assumption of middleware abstracting a unified distributed service for all types of applications operating over a static network infrastructure is no longer valid. In particular, mobile applications are not able to leverage the benefits of adaptive computing to optimize its computation based on current contextual situations. In this paper, we introduce the Mobile Platform for Actively Deployable Service (MobiPADS) system. MobiPADS is designed to support context-aware processing by providing an executing platform to enable active service deployment and reconfiguration of the service composition in response to environments of varying contexts. Unlike most mobile middleware, MobiPADS supports dynamic adaptation at both the middleware and application layers to provide flexible configuration of resources to optimize the operations of mobile applications. Within the MobiPADS system, services (known as mobilets) are configured as chained service objects to provide augmented services to the underlying mobile applications so as to alleviate the adverse conditions of a wireless environment.
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paper_title: Middleware Architectures for the Smart Grid: Survey and Challenges in the Foreseeable Future

paper_content:

The traditional power grid is just a one-way supplier that gets no feedback data about the energy delivered, what tariffs could be the most suitable ones for customers, the shifting daily needs of electricity in a facility, etc. Therefore, it is only natural that efforts are being invested in improving power grid behavior and turning it into a Smart Grid. However, to this end, several components have to be either upgraded or created from scratch. Among the new components required, middleware appears as a critical one, for it will abstract all the diversity of the used devices for power transmission (smart meters, embedded systems, etc.) and will provide the application layer with a homogeneous interface involving power production and consumption management data that were not able to be provided before. Additionally, middleware is expected to guarantee that updates to the current metering infrastructure (changes in service or hardware availability) or any added legacy measuring appliance will get acknowledged for any future request. Finally, semantic features are of major importance to tackle scalability and interoperability issues. A survey on the most prominent middleware architectures for Smart Grids is presented in this paper, along with an evaluation of their features and their strong points and weaknesses.
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paper_title: Reflective Middleware Solutions for Context-Aware Applications

paper_content:

In this paper, we argue that middleware for wired distributed systems cannot be used in a mobile setting, as the principle of transparency that has driven their design runs counter to the new degrees of awareness imposed by mobility. We propose the marriage of reflection and metadata as a means for middleware to give applications dynamic access to information about their execution context. Finally, we describe a conceptual model that provides the basis of our reflective middleware.
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paper_title: An extensive survey of context-aware middleware architectures

paper_content:

Context-awareness is a vital requirement in building valuable and capable adaptive systems. Context-aware ubiquitous computing focuses on the use of context of users, devices, environment, etc in order to offer services essential for a particular person, space and time. This paper provides a survey of context-aware middleware architectures. An overview of each middleware is provided, along with the description of the main features. Based on the conducted survey, this paper compares and contrasts the various characteristics of context-aware middleware architectures. We present the analysis of the middleware architectures based on several parameters including fault tolerance, adaptability, interoperability, architectural style, discoverability, location transparency and aspect oriented composition.
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paper_title: Characteristics of scalability and their impact on performance

paper_content:

is a desirable attribute of a network, system, or process. Poor scalability can result in poor system performance, necessitating the reengineering or duplication of systems. While scalability is valued, its characteristics and the characteristics that undermine it are usually only apparent from the context. Here, we attempt to define different aspects of scalability, such as structural scalability and load scalability. Structural scalability is the ability of a system to expand in a chosen dimension without major modifications to its architecture. Load scalability is the ability of a system to perform gracefully as the offered traffic increases. It is argued that systems with poor load scalability may exhibit it because they repeatedly engage in wasteful activity, because they are encumbered with poor scheduling algorithms, because they cannot fully take advantage of parallelism, or because they are algorithmically inefficient. We qualitatively illustrate these concepts with classical examples from the literature of operating systems and local area networks, as well as an example of our own. Some of these are accompanied by rudimentary delay analysis.
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paper_title: A Simple Service Discovery and Configuration Protocol for Embedded Devices

paper_content:

In this paper, a simple service discovery and configuration protocol (SSDCP) is presented. Because the IP-based embedded devices are passive, it is difficult to communicate with them for a host using these services of the devices not knowing their IP. SSDCP proposes a simple protocol of how to discover and configure these devices based on UDP broadcasting, and makes it possible to communicate between host computer and target devices which belong to different subnets. SSDCP is an application layer protocol. Its procedure is something like DHCP, but it allows a post started server to scan and reconfigure clients. Its simple structure and code tight are appropriate to embedded devices.
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paper_title: Context-aware middleware for pervasive elderly homecare

paper_content:

The growing aging population faces a number of challenges, including rising medical cost, inadequate number of medical doctors and healthcare professionals, as well as higher incidence of misdiagnosis. There is an increasing demand for a better healthcare support for the elderly and one promising solution is the development of a context-aware middleware infrastructure for pervasive health/wellness-care. This allows the accurate and timely delivery of health/medical information among the patients, doctors and healthcare workers through a widespread deployment of wireless sensor networks and mobile devices. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of such a context-aware middleware for pervasive homecare (CAMPH). The middleware offers several key-enabling system services that consist of P2P-based context query processing, context reasoning for activity recognition and context-aware service management. It can be used to support the development and deployment of various homecare services for the elderly such as patient monitoring, location-based emergency response, anomalous daily activity detection, pervasive access to medical data and social networking. We have developed a prototype of the middleware and demonstrated the concept of providing a continuing-care to an elderly with the collaborative interactions spanning multiple physical spaces: person, home, office and clinic. The results of the prototype show that our middleware approach achieves good efficiency of context query processing and good accuracy of activity recognition.
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paper_title: ARTS: Adaptive Rule Triggers on Sensors for Energy Conservation in Applications using Coarse-Granularity Data

paper_content:

Communicating extensive in-network data generated by resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes is an energy consuming process. To minimise the amount of data exchanged in sensor networks, several researchers have proposed novel and efficient protocols to perform data aggregations, clustering or regression on sensor nodes. Most of these approaches focus on optimising conventional mining techniques to work on resource-constrained sensor nodes. However, the application of association rules for sensor networks is an area of study that has not been investigated. This is due to the high computational cost of obtaining meaningful rules. Thus, in this paper, we propose adaptive rule triggers on sensors ARTS, to extract highly correlated rules from sensor data and apply them. The learnt rules are used to extend sensor lifetime by controlling sensor operations using triggers. Our approach is optimised to run on non-critical sensing applications/data-aggregation applications that can tolerate a coarse-granularity for sensed data. For this category of applications, our approach can derive meaningful rules efficiently to further conserve energy of wireless sensors. In this paper, these energy savings are evidenced in our experiments that adapt ARTS to a state-of-the-art clustering protocol.
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paper_title: Context-aware and resource efficient sensing infrastructure for context-aware applications

paper_content:

Middleware for wireless sensor networks and middleware for context-aware applications both provide information abstraction and programming support for gathering, pre-processing, and managing sensor data. However the former mostly concentrates on optimising the operations of the resource constrained hardware and simplifying access to the raw sensor data while the latter focuses on gathering sensor data, pre-processing it to the abstract context information required by the applications and providing reasoning on this data. In this paper, we explore the idea of enhancing middleware for context-aware applications with solutions from sensor networks middleware to allow resource efficient and context-aware management of sensing infrastructure. The decisions on which sensor data needs to be delivered to the middleware for evaluation are based on current contextual situations. The approach allows to trade the level of confidence in context information for resource efficiency in context provisioning without a detrimental effect on the functionality of context-aware applications.
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paper_title: Poster: Smart buildings, sensor networks, and the Internet of Things

paper_content:

In contrast to traditional sensor networks, the "Internet of Things" focuses on interactions between humans and physical objects rather than on sensing and reporting low level information. While several middle-ware systems have been created to simplify the task of managing and aggregating data from multiple sensor networks that use different hardware and software, management of the data is not sufficient to build an Internet of Things. To build a smart home or office application, information from sensors and existing infrastructure, such as networked power supplies and printers, need to be associated with physical objects. As low-level data is processed, it can be fed back into the system to support higher-level results. In this paper we introduce Octopus, an open-source, dynamically extensible system that supports data management and fusion for Internet of Things applications.
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paper_title: CA4IOT Context Awareness for Internet of Things

paper_content:

Internet of Things (IoT) will connect billions of sensors deployed around the world together. This will create an ideal opportunity to build a sensing-as-a-service platform. Due to large number of sensor deployments, there would be number of sensors that can be used to sense and collect similar information. Further, due to advances in sensor hardware technology, new methods and measurements will be introduced continuously. In the IoT paradigm, selecting the most appropriate sensors which can provide relevant sensor data to address the problems at hand among billions of possibilities would be a challenge for both technical and non-technical users. In this paper, we propose the Context Awareness for Internet of Things (CA4IOT) architecture to help users by automating the task of selecting the sensors according to the problems/tasks at hand. We focus on automated configuration of filtering, fusion and reasoning mechanisms that can be applied to the collected sensor data streams using selected sensors. Our objective is to allow the users to submit their problems, so our proposed architecture understands them and produces more comprehensive and meaningful information than the raw sensor data streams generated by individual sensors.
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paper_title: CAMPUS: A middleware for automated context-aware adaptation decision making at run time

paper_content:

At present, in most context-aware systems, decisions on when and how to adapt an application are made a priori by developers during the compile time. While such approaches empower developers with sufficient flexibility to specify what they want in terms of adaptation rules, they inevitably place an immense load on developers, especially in an extremely dynamic environment, to anticipate and formulate all potential run-time situations during development time. These challenges motivated us to explore an approach to automating context-aware adaptation decisions by a middleware layer at run time. The resulting middleware, CAMPUS, exploits technologies from semantic computing to dynamically derive adaptation decisions according to run-time contextual information. The CAMPUS implementation has been evaluated with a number of case applications to validate the operation of the system in a realistic environment and to provide us with an opportunity to obtain experimental results for further analysis. The results are significant in that they show that CAMPUS can effectively free developers from the need to predict, formulate, and maintain adaptation rules, thereby greatly reducing the efforts required to develop context-aware applications.
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paper_title: SeCoMan: A Semantic-Aware Policy Framework for Developing Privacy-Preserving and Context-Aware Smart Applications

paper_content:

This paper is intended to provide a solution for developing context-aware smart applications preserving the users' privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT). In this sense, we present a framework called Semantic Web-based Context Management (SeCoMan) aimed at offering a set of predefined queries to provide applications with information about indoor location of users and objects, as well as context-aware services. SeCoMan uses a semantic-oriented IoT vision where semantic technologies play a key role. In fact, SeCoMan uses Semantic Web for modeling description of things, reasoning over data to infer new knowledge, and defining context-aware policies. SeCoMan also defines a layered architecture, including functions related to the management of the users' privacy in a manner that accommodate IoT requirements, in addition to not affecting system performance nor introducing excessive overheads. A thorough discussion on other related works, together with some experiments to measure the throughput and scalability, confirm that SeCoMan is a solution that improves the most relevant proposals existing so far.
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paper_title: CoCaMAAL: A cloud-oriented context-aware middleware in ambient assisted living

paper_content:

Research into ambient assisted living (AAL) strives to ease the daily lives of people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions. AAL systems typically consist of multitudes of sensors and embedded devices, generating large amounts of medical and ambient data. However, these biomedical sensors lack the processing power to perform key monitoring and data-aggregation tasks, necessitating data transmission and computation at central locations. The focus here is on the development of a scalable and context-aware framework and easing the flow between data collection and data processing. The resource-constrained nature of typical wearable body sensors is factored into our proposed model, with cloud computing features utilized to provide a real-time assisted-living service. With the myriad of distributed AAL systems at play, each with unique requirements and eccentricities, the challenge lies in the need to service these disparate systems with a middleware layer that is both coherent and flexible. There is significant complexity in the management of sensor data and the derivation of contextual information, as well as in the monitoring of user activities and in locating appropriate situational services. The proposed CoCaMAAL model seeks to address such issues and implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for unified context generation. This is done by efficiently aggregating raw sensor data and the timely selection of appropriate services using a context management system (CMS). With a unified model that includes patients, devices, and computational servers in a single virtual community, AAL services are enhanced. We have prototyped the proposed model and implemented some case studies to demonstrate its effectiveness.
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paper_title: A decentralized approach for mining event correlations in distributed system monitoring

paper_content:

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand to monitor, analyze, and control large scale distributed systems. Events detected during monitoring are temporally correlated, which is helpful to resource allocation, job scheduling, and failure prediction. To discover the correlations among detected events, many existing approaches concentrate detected events into an event database and perform data mining on it. We argue that these approaches are not scalable to large scale distributed systems as monitored events grow so fast that event correlation discovering can hardly be done with the power of a single computer. In this paper, we present a decentralized approach to efficiently detect events, filter irrelative events, and discover their temporal correlations. We propose a MapReduce-based algorithm, MapReduce-Apriori, to data mining event association rules, which utilizes the computational resource of multiple dedicated nodes of the system. Experimental results show that our decentralized event correlation mining algorithm achieves nearly ideal speedup compared to centralized mining approaches.
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paper_title: BDCaM: Big Data for Context-Aware Monitoring—A Personalized Knowledge Discovery Framework for Assisted Healthcare

paper_content:

Context-aware monitoring is an emerging technology that provides real-time personalised health-care services and a rich area of big data application. In this paper, we propose a knowledge discovery-based approach that allows the context-aware system to adapt its behaviour in runtime by analysing large amounts of data generated in ambient assisted living (AAL) systems and stored in cloud repositories . The proposed BDCaM model facilitates analysis of big data inside a cloud environment. It first mines the trends and patterns in the data of an individual patient with associated probabilities and utilizes that knowledge to learn proper abnormal conditions. The outcomes of this learning method are then applied in context-aware decision-making processes for the patient. A use case is implemented to illustrate the applicability of the framework that discovers the knowledge of classification to identify the true abnormal conditions of patients having variations in blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR). The evaluation shows a much better estimate of detecting proper anomalous situations for different types of patients. The accuracy and efficiency obtained for the implemented case study demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
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paper_title: A policy-based middleware for context-aware pervasive computing

paper_content:

Purpose – This paper aims to demonstrate that a policy-based middleware solution which facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing targets the provision of seamless services and applications by providing an environment that involves a variety of devices having different capabilities. These applications help transforming the physical spaces into computationally active and smart environments. The design of applications in these environments needs to consider the heterogeneous devices, applications preferences and rapidly changing contexts. The applications, therefore, need to be context-aware so that they can adapt to different situations in real-time. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, we argue that a policy-based middleware solution that facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be pro...
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paper_title: Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces

paper_content:

A new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting explores the use of multi-agent systems, Semantic Web ontologies, reasoning, and declarative policies for security and privacy. Building on an earlier pervasive computing system, EasyMeeting provides relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. The system also exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (Cobra). Cobra's intelligent broker agent maintains a shared context model for all computing entities in the space and enforces user-defined privacy policies.
---
paper_title: CoCaMAAL: A cloud-oriented context-aware middleware in ambient assisted living

paper_content:

Research into ambient assisted living (AAL) strives to ease the daily lives of people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions. AAL systems typically consist of multitudes of sensors and embedded devices, generating large amounts of medical and ambient data. However, these biomedical sensors lack the processing power to perform key monitoring and data-aggregation tasks, necessitating data transmission and computation at central locations. The focus here is on the development of a scalable and context-aware framework and easing the flow between data collection and data processing. The resource-constrained nature of typical wearable body sensors is factored into our proposed model, with cloud computing features utilized to provide a real-time assisted-living service. With the myriad of distributed AAL systems at play, each with unique requirements and eccentricities, the challenge lies in the need to service these disparate systems with a middleware layer that is both coherent and flexible. There is significant complexity in the management of sensor data and the derivation of contextual information, as well as in the monitoring of user activities and in locating appropriate situational services. The proposed CoCaMAAL model seeks to address such issues and implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for unified context generation. This is done by efficiently aggregating raw sensor data and the timely selection of appropriate services using a context management system (CMS). With a unified model that includes patients, devices, and computational servers in a single virtual community, AAL services are enhanced. We have prototyped the proposed model and implemented some case studies to demonstrate its effectiveness.
---
paper_title: Challenges in middleware solutions for the internet of things

paper_content:

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect our everyday life items. It provides them with information processing capabilities to enable computers to sense, integrate, present, and react to all aspects of the physical world. This move from “interconnected computers” to “interconnected things” requires simplifying the development of new applications and services by supporting interoperability among heterogeneous devices; so that the programmer can focus on the development of applications enabled by the infrastructure of IoT. Middleware is a software layer interposed between the infrastructure and the applications using it [1] that basically aims to support important requirements for these applications. This paper surveys existing middleware designed for IoT and focuses on various technical challenges in this domain.
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paper_title: SMART SEMANTIC MIDDLEWARE FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS

paper_content:

As ubiquitous systems become increasingly complex, traditional solutions to manage and control them reach their limits and pose a need for self-manageability. Also, heterogeneity of the ubiquitous components, standards, data formats, etc, creates significant obstacles for interoperability in such complex systems. The promising technologies to tackle these problems are the Semantic technologies, for interoperability, and the Agent technologies for management of complex systems. This paper describes our vision of a middleware for the Internet of Things, which will allow creation of self-managed complex systems, in particular industrial ones, consisting of distributed and heterogeneous components of different nature. We also present an analysis of issues to be resolved to realize such a middleware.
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Title: Context Aware Middleware Architectures: Survey and Challenges

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the background and motivation for context aware middleware architectures, discussing the challenges and the importance of an efficient solution.

Section 2: Principles of Context Aware Environments
Description 2: Present the fundamental knowledge regarding context and context awareness as a basis before diving into middleware architectures.

Section 3: Context
Description 3: Define the concept of context and provide various definitions and perspectives from multiple researchers.

Section 4: Context Categorization
Description 4: Discuss different ways to categorize context and provide examples of each categorization type.

Section 5: Context Features
Description 5: Identify and describe the common features shared by different kinds of context.

Section 6: Context Awareness and Its Categorizations
Description 6: Define context awareness and present its different categorizations based on literature.

Section 7: Context Lifecycle
Description 7: Explain the general lifecycle of context, including phases such as acquisition, modelling, reasoning, distribution, repository, and visualization.

Section 8: Survey on Context Aware Middleware Architectures
Description 8: Conduct an extensive survey of recent context aware middleware architectures, presenting their components, functionalities, and technical considerations.

Section 9: Technical Considerations for Context Aware Middleware
Description 9: Identify and explain the crucial technical attributes for evaluating and designing context aware middleware architectures.

Section 10: Context Aware Middleware Architectures
Description 10: Provide detailed descriptions of eleven new and representative context aware middleware architectures proposed from 2009 to 2015.

Section 11: Comparisons
Description 11: Compare the eleven selected middleware architectures based on various evaluation factors such as architectural style, scalability, security, etc.

Section 12: Open Issues
Description 12: Highlight several technical challenges and open issues observed in the studied context aware middleware architectures.

Section 13: Conclusions
Description 13: Summarize the findings of the paper, stating the key contributions and suggesting future research directions.