Pervasive computing.

Computing and communication technology is widely used and integrated in devices, environments, and everyday objects. Even with major advances in technology the vision of ubiquitous computing - from a user perspective - is not yet achieved. In this paper we look at new forms of interaction that will help to interact with the ubiquitous computer. In particular we introduce the concept of embedded interaction, and implicit use. The focus of the research is on embedding information into people's environments. Currently massive amounts of information are available. However, delivering it to the user in a way that is pleasant and not annoying is still a challenge. Observing mobile phone information push services, it appears that endless information is available; however, much of the information is interesting only in a very specific context of use. We investigate how information can be provided to users - exactly when and where it is needed. Our approach is based on a variety of information displays unobtrusively embedded into the user's everyday environment. We place the information displays in context. In contrast to the traditional approach on context-awareness where a context is recognized and then the appropriate information is delivered, we look at providing information already in context. It is up to the user to make use of the provided information or not.

The Internet of Things designates a vision of an informationalized world, in which everyday objects are modified through computer technology such as RFID, sensors and sensor systems, tracking systems, or small computer units, giving them additional information or functions and integrating them with their environment. This paper explores the phenomenon of Internet of Things by applying some of the key concepts found in the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger and conducts a critical analysis using Martin Heidegger’s reflections on “world” and “technology” from Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) of 1957, and from the paper “Die Frage nach der Technik” (“The Question Concerning Technology”). The concept of “Ge-stell” introduced by Martin Heidegger to the philosophy of technology describes the situation of mankind and technology in a world shaped by modern technology. Both, mankind and technology, are tied to one dimension and share the same world. The world has been shaped and redesigned by technology, and the individual is completely tied into the technologized world. The basis for all Internet of Things concepts and installations is the expression of real-world things and processes as mathematical quantities and concepts, and the connecting of individual values and concepts with each other. The basis for all information technology is the reduction of reality to figures and calculable structures. Mathematics is the foundation of computer science, and thus the foundation of ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing is leading to ubiquitous sensing. Sensor components such as motion, proximity, and biometric sensors are increasingly common features in everyday objects. However, the presence and full capabilities of these components are often not clear to users. Sensor-enhanced objects have the ability to perceive without being perceived. This reduces the ability of users to control how and when they are being sensed. To address this imbalance, this project identifies the need to be able to deceive 'smart' objects, and proposes a number of practical interventions to increase user awareness of sensors, and encourage agency over digital sensing through acts of dishonesty to objects.

Nowadays, an increasing number of sensors are becoming embedded in the everyday objects or in the environment at a low cost. Accordingly, our living environments are populated by an increasing number of artefacts, i.e., objects enhanced with sensing, computation and networking abilities. In addition, people are increasingly using mobile devices as intermediaries between themselves and the artefacts. As a result of this continuing trend, an elementary Ambient Intelligence (AmI) infrastructure has become installed, though still fragmented, information appliances are commercially available, and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) applications are being deployed. This paper discusses the course of UbiComp evolution since its inception and the inevitable criticality of interdisciplinary approaches in UbiComp. We conclude by highlighting the impact of UbiComp introduction in society and future opportunities that may rise in this exciting field of science.

One of the key challenges in developing effective and scalable technologies necessary to realise future pervasive systems and ubiquitous computing is implementing a methodology that genuinely integrates embedded sensing and processing capabilities with everyday materials and objects. Embedding intelligent systems into polymer materials and using such for constructing smart objects is a promising way to achieve the above. This work provides new solutions to challenges of realising a functional system, comprising sensing, processing and actuating components, fully encapsulated in a block of polymer material. The paper also investigates the possibilities of connecting arrays of such smart blocks in 1.5-D and 2.5-D arrangements to form a modular smart object. Experimental and numerical studies were conducted to establish a level of degradation in mechanical properties and strength of the plastic materials embedded with inserts. In current work, a bare cubic system and the system in a capsule-like package were realised and tested. The results of a full physical characterisation of both individual smart blocks and smart block arrays are presented.

In pervasive computing vision, everyday objects aremerged with small computers. They are immersed in heterogeneousand dynamic environments. As independent systems can interact with the same environment, it is hard to avoid conflicts. By identifying systems' objectives, capabilities and influences, andby reasoning about it, self-awareness may be the key to enable their collaboration. We aim to clarify definitions of self-awareness and related notions within pervasive computing, and to design one way to use it for pervasive systems collaboration. Different types of models and actual use cases will be implemented on iCasa pervasive platform to evaluate the relevance of the approach.

Connecting our world with accessible networks is scaling to trillions of everyday objects. The Internet of Things, Pervasive Computing, Sensor Web are research names for this development. Planetary Skin, Smarter Planet and CeNSE are several corporate names. The Internet will be augmented with mobile machine-to-machine communications and ad-hoc local network technologies. At the network nodes, information about objects will come from barcodes, RFIDs, and sensors. The location of all objects will be known.This workshop seeks to explore the role of location in expanding GeoWeb to an Internet of Things. The workshop seeks presentations on functions enabled by geographic location and to location relative to surrounding objects. Most of the objects will be indoor in a 3D setting. The workshop also seeks presentations on relevant technologies such as location determination, geocoding, schemas for points of interest, ad-hoc network formation based on location, processing of information of the objects to detect phenomena of interest and location based services. Technology standards will be important for interoperability at this scale, e.g., OpenLS, CityGML, and Sensor Web Enablement standards from the OGC.

The vision of Pervasive Computing is built on the assumption that computers will become part of everyday objects, augmenting them with information services and enhanced functionality. This article reports on the approach we have used to assess potential side effects of this development on human health and the environment, and the major risks we identified. Social risks such as the risk of conflicts between users and non-users of the technology were also included because of their potential indirect adverse health effects. Assessing a technological vision before it has materialized makes it necessary to deal with two types of uncertainty: first, the uncertainty of how fast and to what extent the technology will be taken up and how it will be used; second, the uncertainty of causal models connecting technology-related causes with potential health or environmental effects. Due to these uncertainties, quantitative methods to evaluate expected risks are inadequate. Instead, we developed a “risk filter” that makes it possible to rank risks according to a set of qualitative criteria based on the Precautionary Principle. As the overall result, it turned out that Pervasive Computing bears potential risks to health, society, and/or the environment in the following fields: Non-ionizing radiation, stress imposed on the user, restriction of consumers' and patients' freedom of choice, threats to ecological sustainability, and dissipation of responsibility in computer-controlled environments.

One proposed way to realize the AmI vision is to turn everyday objects into artifacts (by adding sensing, computation and communication abilities) and then use them as components of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) applications within an Ami environment. The (re)configuration of associations among these artifacts will enable people to set up their living spaces in a way that will serve them best minimizing at the same time the required human intervention. During the development and deployment of UbiComp applications, a number of key issues arise such as semantic interoperability and service discovery. The target of this paper is to show how ontologies can be used into UbiComp systems so that to address such issues. We support our approach by presenting the ontology that we developed and integrated into a framework that supports the composition of UbiComp applications.

The Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) offers an ever-present computing environment. It is characterized by ever-growing small, networked, and portable everyday objects having computational capability along with conventional computers. Dynamic usage scenarios of several devices generate new associations. These devices may not have past information of each other and a common trusted third party may be absent. Traditional access control mechanisms rely on a previous knowledge of devices to grant or deny access to resources making them unsuitable in a UbiComp environment where entities are not foreknown to each other. This set up new challenges for resource security. In this paper, a decentralized access control mechanism is proposed for UbiComp to secure its resources. The proposed access control mechanism incorporates the high-level context and the trust level of the device requesting a resource. We also suggest the use of a machine learning approach to derive high-level context. Proposed mechanism considers device type as a high-level context derived through clustering.KeywordsAccess controlAuthorizationContext-aware access controlTrust modelUbiquitous computing

Ubiquitous Computing is the idea of embedding computation onto everyday objects of the environment we live in. It’s the approach towards making technology and computation available everywhere thereby making people interact with abundant information around them in a more natural and friendly manner. Our project, the palm display system is one such approach of using one’s palm as the graphical user interface enabling the user to interact with it using his/her fingertip. We have implemented this project using computer vision techniques. In this study, we describe the details of the palm display system and explain several issues regarding the challenges in implementation and show the result using a sample photo viewer application. The main idea behind the project is to detect the interaction using shadow based techniques without the use of a fingertip marker.

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) – although developed in research laboratories in the late 1970s – is still the dominant interaction paradigm in Information Visualization. We propose a new interaction paradigm called Blended Interaction. It combines ideas of Embodied Cognition, Multimodal Interaction, Reality-Based Interaction & Ubiquitous Computing. This is intended to stress that a single increase in the reality aspect of the interaction cannot go far enough. The particular challenge – and from the user's standpoint, the key advantage – lies in a meaningful marriage between the tested real-world options and the digital world. As a minimum this marriage must exist on the levels of the interaction, communication, of the way we solve problems with conventional tools (workflows), and of the design of the space or the architecture of buildings and places. The digital world often offers entirely new possibilities and takes the form of interactive devices of various shapes but also of intelligent everyday objects (e.g. the 'Internet of things'). In our view, interaction concepts can indeed offer a new quality of interaction, but only when the design of the interaction includes all these domains at the same time and with equal weighting. We test the suitability of our ideas of Blended Interaction concepts by using specific application examples that are being worked on as part of current research projects. Our experiences show that this new interaction paradigm has also great potential for interacting with visualization. For example, we have developed multi-touch scatter plots & facet maps for tangible user interfaces supporting the searching & browsing in Digital Libraries. We have embedded different visualizations into a Zoomable Object-oriented Information Landscape (ZOIL), which supports our vision of using visualizations on different displays of different size at the same time. We have developed specific kind of search tokens that supports collaborative search activities. For example, we try to address the following research questions: * How can future interactive InfoVis tools look like, especially in the light of the idea Blended Interaction? * How can future interactive InfoVis tools benefit from Multi-Displays & Multimodal environments used by Multiple Users? * What are the specific design requirements for multi-touch visualizations? * How can we support the collaborative use visualization tools?

The number of various kinds of everyday objects that contain embedded computers is increasing due to the popularity of ubiquitous computing. While component-based software development becomes common in a variety of application domains, ubiquitous computing requires component frameworks that offer more advanced features than the current component frameworks. This paper explores a component framework in the context of a ubiquitous computing system. We design and implement a system coordinating various home appliances, called SENCHA. SENCHA is built on the OSGi component framework. Although the framework provides facilities for dynamically changing environments, this paper reveals several problems of the framework in our experience

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at connecting a large number of communication and information systems. With the further development of pervasive computing, these systems can be integrated into everyday objects, such as household devices and tools. When complex systems are interconnected, it is complicated to keep track of how secure a system or connection is and to distinguish which devices are connected within the IoT and which devices are not. As to the security, the IoT will be faced with more severe challenges. There are the following reasons: 1) the IoT extends the ‘internet' through the traditional internet, mobile network and sensor network and so on, 2) every ‘thing' will be connected to this ‘internet' and 3) these ‘things' will communicate with each other. Therefore, the new security and privacy problems will arise out of which authentication and access control are the most vital security issues that need to be taken care of. Therefore, we should pay more attention to the issues for confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of data in the IoT.

Today, networks, microprocessors, memory chips, smart sensors and actuators are faster, more powerful, cheaper and smaller than ever. Chips are all around, invading everyday objects. Wireless networks enable to easily connect them. Everyday objects can then propose innovative and unexpected interactions (Ullmer & Ishii, 2000). Clothes will transport one’s profile to reconfigure his environment according to his preferences (Abowd et al. 1997). Lamps will help people finding lost objects (Vergnes et al., 2005). Interactive portraits will reflect at distance the mood and health state of one’s beloved relatives (Mynatt et al., 2001). This new technologically enhanced environment will enable finding novel solutions to help people in their everyday life, such as elders that suffer from cognitive deficit and have many difficulties to carry out their activities of daily living (Pigot et al., 2003). Most of these people wish to stay at home, where they feel comfortable and safe, as long as possible. The governments aim to help them for social reasons as well as economical ones. However, keeping cognitively impaired people at home involves many risks that are necessary to control. In order to do that, the physical and human environment must be specifically designed to compensate the cognitive impairments and the loss of autonomy (Ramos et al., 2008). Combining pervasive computing with techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) greatly increases the acceptance of the pervasive assisted living and makes it more capable of providing a better quality of life in a non-intrusive way, where elderly people, with or without disabilities, could clearly benefit from this concept. From the computational perspective, there is a natural association between them. However, research addressing smart environments has in the past largely focused on network and hardware oriented solutions. AI-based techniques (planning and action theory, ontological and temporal reasoning, etc) that promote intelligent behaviour have not been examined to the same extent (Augusto & Nugent, 2006), although notable exceptions can been found in the domain of activity recognition for healthcare. Prior work has been done to use sensors to recognize the execution status of particular types of activities, such as hand washing (Mihailidis et al., 2007), meal preparation (Barger et al., 2002), and movements around town (Liao et al., 2004). Additionally, several projects have attempted to do more general activity 22