A user study of accessing web applications via voice cellular phone: a model comparison approach

Although most users currently receive web services from web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device, any time and anywhere. It is not only a technological change, but a philosophical and psychological one. Our research project investigated the theoretical concepts of pervasive computing as well as their practical applications, by using cellular phones as the pervasive device to access a web application prototype, the voice-enabled web system (VWS), through the voice user interface technology. The acceptance rate of consumers on new pervasive interfaces was studied using factors (including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and fun) adapted from technology acceptance theories. Although our empirical findings were in general consistent with the findings from several prior studies on various information technologies, there were still some discrepancies. Our overall research results, including the implications derived from the user study, may be useful for the purpose of designing and developing successful business applications based on VWS.     

Bringing network effects to pervasive spaces

We developed the Obje interoperability framework, a middleware technology that lets networked applications and services coordinate with each another-even when they know almost nothing about one other. We've implemented the current version of the Obje framework (version 4) in Java. It supports both Java and native mobile code and can be implemented in a variety of languages and platforms. It also runs on several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows PocketPC. Leveraging the Obje framework, we have been able to return to our focus of developing pervasive spaces to explore the human experience of pervasive computing.     

Smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing

Applications and services for pervasive computing have been dramatically grown and have contributed extensively to our daily experiences in recent years. Smart systems, devices, and spaces are proactive for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Smart information technology (IT) is also an outcome of the state of the art and novel mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies that include highly capable handheld device, pervasive and personal device, etc. This special issue will be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in pervasive and ubiquitous computing using smart devices and services. This special issue called for original papers describing the latest developments, trends, and solutions of smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing including real-time operating systems (OS), tiny OS and middleware supports, mobile system performance, trustworthy Internet and communications, agents and mobile and pervasive services, among others. In particular, this special issue focuses on a remote control and media-sharing system, flash storage-based smart system, heterogeneous mobile OS, and prediction and auto-execution system for pervasive computing.     

Pervasive speech recognition

As mobile computing devices grow smaller and as in-car computing platforms become more common, we must augment traditional methods of human-computer interaction. Although speech interfaces have existed for years, the constrained system resources of pervasive devices, such as limited memory and processing capabilities, present new challenges. We provide an overview of embedded automatic speech recognition (ASR) on the pervasive device and discuss its ability to help us develop pervasive applications that meet today's marketplace needs. ASR recognizes spoken words and phrases. State-of-the-art ASR uses a phoneme-based approach for speech modeling: it gives each phoneme (or elementary speech sound) in the language under consideration a statistical representation expressing its acoustic properties.     

Scheduling and development support in the Scavenger cyber foraging system

Cyber foraging is a pervasive computing technique where small mobile devices offload resource intensive tasks to stronger computing machinery in the vicinity.One of the main challenges within cyber foraging is that it is very difficult to develop cyber foraging enabled applications. An application using cyber foraging is working with mobile, distributed and, possibly, parallel computing; fields within computer science notoriously hard for programmers to grasp.This paper presents Scavenger—a cyber foraging system supporting easy development of mobile cyber foraging applications, while still delivering efficient, mobile use of remote computing resources through the use of a custom built mobile code execution environment and a new adaptive, dual-profiling scheduler.     

Migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms: a systematic mapping study

Mobile computing has fast emerged as a pervasive technology to replace the old computing paradigms with portable computation and context-aware communication. Existing software systems can be migrated (while preserving their data and logic) to mobile computing platforms that support portability, context-sensitivity, and enhanced usability. In recent years, some research and development efforts have focused on a systematic migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms.To investigate the research state-of-the-art on the migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms. We aim to analyze the progression and impacts of existing research, highlight challenges and solutions that reflect dimensions of emerging and futuristic research.We followed evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) method to conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) of the existing research that has progressed over more than a decade (25 studies published from 1996–2017).We have derived a taxonomical classification and a holistic mapping of the existing research to investigate its progress, impacts, and potential areas of futuristic research and development.The SMS has identified three types of migration namely Static, Dynamic, and State-based Migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms.Migration to mobile computing platforms enables existing software systems to achieve portability, context-sensitivity, and high connectivity. However, mobile systems may face some challenges such as resource poverty, data security, and privacy. The emerging and futuristic research aims to support patterns and tool support to automate the migration process. The results of this SMS can benefit researchers and practitioners–by highlighting challenges, solutions, and tools, etc., –to conceptualize the state-ofthe- art and futuristic trends that support migration of existing software to mobile computing.     

Rapid prototyping of computing systems

Pervasive or ubiquitous computing requires the integration of multiple technologies, including software, hardware and human-computer interaction (HCI). To prepare students for this new paradigm in computing, we need multi-disciplinary academic programs and courses. Furthermore, real-world design projects, design processes and team experiences must play a primary role. The course "Rapid Prototyping of Computing Systems" at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) combines all these elements in a single innovative course offered in multiple departments at CMU. Students learn topics in multiple disciplines and complete an industry-driven, team-based project using a well-defined design process. Although the course prepares students for a wide range of computing applications, the topics and projects focus on pervasive computing.     

PerCom 2004: Promoting the Pervasive Computing Paradigm

PerCom 2004's theme was the emergence of the pervasive computing and communications paradigm with the goal of providing computing and communication services all the time, everywhere. The featured research represented the advances in pervasive computing and communications, including wireless networks, mobile computing, distributed computing, and agent technologies that will help realize this goal.     

普适计算环境下的设备动态更新机制

普适计算应用中的设备是情境感知的载体和情境感知行为的执行者,起着关键性的作用。在一个持续运行的普适计算系统中,设备的损坏和更新是时有发生的,如何让用户以最小的代价完成设备的更新是该系统得以广泛应用的基础。本文在前期给出的基于OSGi/R-OSGi的普适计算框架基础上,提出了一种不需要系统开发人员介入的设备动态更新机制,以解决设备更新时存在的异构性问题。     

普适计算环境下的虚拟机技术研究

普适计算环境中资源和服务利用率较低,传统应用程序在该环境下无法兼容。为此,提出一种适用于普适计算环境的虚拟机技术。使用设备请求代理屏蔽复杂的普适计算网络环境,对上层应用提供统一硬件平台,支持多个普适计算应用同时运行。实验结果表明,该虚拟化技术能兼容传统应用,提高普适计算资源和服务的利用率。     

The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space

Research groups in both academia and industry have developed prototype systems to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive computing in various application domains. Unfortunately, many first-generation pervasive computing systems lack the ability to evolve as new technologies emerge or as an application domain matures. To address this limitation, the University of Florida's Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory is developing programmable pervasive spaces in which a smart space exists as both a runtime environment and a software library. Service discovery and gateway protocols automatically integrate system components using generic middleware that maintains a service definition for each sensor and actuator in the space. The Gator Tech Smart House in Gainesville, Florida, is the culmination of more than five years of research in pervasive and mobile computing. The project's goal is to create assistive environments such as homes that can sense themselves and their residents and enact mappings between the physical world and remote monitoring and intervention services.     

普适计算中基于移动代理的应用follow me迁移技术*

为了更好地利用普适计算环境中的计算资源、减少人为干预、提高工作效率,提出了应用的follow-me迁移需求,即计算可以随着用户的移动在异构设备和计算环境中移动,让移动中的用户能够体验到不间断的计算。提出了基于移动代理的普适计算中间件FollowMeAgent。结合情境感知技术,利用软件代理所具备的移动性实现应用的自主迁移,并根据应用特点对迁移策略进行了细分。在此平台上开发了若干应用,通过性能测试证明其可行性和有效性。     

Formal analysis of seamless application execution in mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing augments the resource-constrained mobile devices to run rich mobile applications by leveraging the cloud resources and services. Compute-intensive mobile apps require significant communication resources for migrating the code from mobile devices to the cloud. For such apps, distributed application execution frameworks (DAEF) have been proposed in the literature. These frameworks either migrate the mobile app code during runtime or keep the app synchronized with another remotely executed app on the cloud. Frameworks also support mobile app live migration to cater for compute node mobility. One key research question arises is how successful are these DAEFs in achieving the seamless application execution under various network conditions? The answer to this question entails formal analysis of the DAEFs to determine the realistic bounds on propagation delay, bandwidth and application interaction with mobile device for various types and sizes of apps. In this research, we apply formal analysis techniques to define the execution time of the app and the time required for code migration. We also define three conditions for seamless application execution. Given realistic values for processor speed, application executable size, possible number of executed instructions, network propagation delay and transmission delay, we show what components of the mobile app need to be migrated during execution to the cloud. Finally, we compute realistic bounds for the app size (that can be executed seamlessly) based on important features which include cloud and device resources, bandwidth and latency profile.     

普适计算环境中移动电话一种新的应用模式

随着计算技术和通信技术的发展,各种兼有通信和计算能力的手持信息设备将变得无处不在。它将为人们提供各种方便的服务,但它们的资源和能力又严重受限。因此如何通过利用环境拥有的资源来增强用户手持设备的能力是一个尚待解决的热点问题。该文针对移动电话,讨论了它在普适计算环境下一种新的应用模式,然后论述了实现该应用模式需要解决的一些关键技术,并描述了支持该应用模式的体系结构。文章最后给出了该应用模式的一个实例———利用移动电话个性化使用公共显示设备。     

Middleware for pervasive computing: A survey

The rapidly emerging area of pervasive computing faces many challenging research issues critical to application developers. Wide heterogeneity of hardware, software, and network resources pose veritable coordination problems and demand thorough knowledge of individual elements and technologies. In order to ease this problem and to aid application developers, different middleware platforms have been proposed by researchers. Though the existing middleware solutions are useful, they themselves have varied features and contribute partially, for context, data, or service management related application developments. There is no single middleware solution that can address a majority of pervasive computing application development issues, due to the diverse underlying challenges. In this survey paper, we identify different design dimensions of pervasive computing middleware and investigate their use in providing various system services. In-depth analysis of the system services have been carried out and middleware systems have been carefully studied. With a view to aid future middleware developers, we also identify some challenging open research issues that have received little or no attention in existing middleware solutions.     

An Empirical Study on Voice-Enabled Web Applications

Although most users access Web applications using Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing offers new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location. Pervasive computing technology impacts consumer attitudes, and the authors studied consumers' acceptance rate toward new pervasive interfaces using various attributes and factors. The study was undertaken in Taiwan, with the cellular phone chosen as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype--a voice-enabled Web system--through voice user interface technology. The study result showed that Handling was the most important factor in using a voice-enabled Web system. The article's findings can help with the design and     

Executing mobile applications on the cloud: Framework and issues

Modern mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have made many pervasive computing dreams come true. Still, many mobile applications do not perform well due to the shortage of resources for computation, data storage, network bandwidth, and battery capacity. While such applications can be re-designed with client–server models to benefit from cloud services, the users are no longer in full control of the application, which has become a serious concern for data security and privacy. In addition, the collaboration between a mobile device and a cloud server poses complex performance issues associated with the exchange of application state, synchronization of data, network condition, etc. In this work, a novel mobile cloud execution framework is proposed to execute mobile applications in a cloud-based virtualized execution environment controlled by mobile applications and users, with encryption and isolation to protect against eavesdropping from cloud providers. Under this framework, several efficient schemes have been developed to deal with technical issues for migrating applications and synchronizing data between execution environments. The communication issues are also addressed in the virtualization execution environment with probabilistic communication Quality-of-Service (QoS) technique to support timely application migration.     

基于无线传感器网络的普适计算模型研究

随着信息技术的飞速发展,无线传感器网络正成为传感器领域内一个新兴的研究方向,它是一种全新的信息获取和处理技术。同时,随着无线传感器网络技术的成熟,普适计算也渐渐成为现实。通过普适计算,人们可以随时随地获得所需要的各种信息。这些技术的应用,将给人们的生活带来前所未有的便利。文中以此为研究背景,分别介绍了无线传感器网络的起源、发展和特色,以及普适计算的出现、概念和具体构建。     

面向普适计算的动态自适应中间件模型

为了提高普适计算系统的开发效率, 设计了一个基于OSGi框架的动态普适计算中间件模型. 该中间件模型以OSGi框架为基础, 建立移动管理器管理用户和服务的移动, 利用上下文管理器来管理上下文, 动态调整自己的行为, 支持上下文感知应用. 通过标准的接口实现各种异构普适设备间的互操作性. 实验结果表明该中间件能够满足通用普适计算环境的要求, 对于普适计算系统的开发具有一定的借鉴意义.     

Developing the distributed-computing OS

Researchers are exploring the world of distributed computing, in which users in various locations can work with the same set of geographically dispersed resources. These efforts have led to such high-profile technologies as peer-to-peer (P2P), pervasive, and nomadic computing. A critical part of this research is developing consistent approaches to distributed-computing operating environments, which must work consistently across many platforms and technologies. Major efforts in this area include Globe, Opus, and Project Oxygen. None of the three represents radically new technologies, but instead each applies existing technologies in a novel way.