Now showing 1 - 10 of 25
  • Publication
    Delivering Adaptivity through Context Awareness
    Developing applications and deploying services for mobile users raises a number of issues and challenges that must be successfully addressed before the era of truly ubiquitous computing will dawn. In particular, the desire to deploy rich multimedia applications and services is severely curtailed by the limited capabilities of the current range of mobile devices as well as the limited bandwidth of current wireless cellular networks. How best to overcome these limitations remains the focus of much research. Intelligent agents have been demonstrated as a promising solution for inherently complex and dynamic domains and their use is proposed as the basis of a solution for assembling and disseminating multimedia content to a mobile audience. Attention is particularly directed to issues concerning the adaptation of content according to the end-user physical context and their personal profile or model.
    Scopus© Citations 18  576
  • Publication
    Embedded agents: a paradigm for mobile services
    Mobile computing radically challenges some of the traditional assumptions associated with the software development lifecycle, and end-user behaviour. Successfully meeting these challenges is of fundamental importance if mobile computing is to fulfil its considerable potential. One approach to this concerns the prudent and selective adoption of intelligent techniques. However, reconciling the conflicting demands of deploying sophisticated resource-intensive computational algorithms on devices that are inherently resource-poor raises significant difficulties. Recent developments in intelligent agent technologies offer one viable approach to resolving this conflict. This paper explores the state-of-the-art in mobile computing and intelligent agents. In particular, issues pertinent to the deployment of agents on mobile devices are considered in detail. To illuminate this discussion, the implementation of one such framework is described
    Scopus© Citations 26  717
  • Publication
    The application of cluster analysis in geophysical data interpretation
    A clustering algorithm which is based on density and adaptive density-reachable is developed and presented for arbitrary data point distributions in some real world applications, especially in geophysical data interpretation. Through comparisons of the new algorithm and other algorithms, it is shown that the new algorithm can reduce the dependency of domain knowledge and the sensitivity of abnormal data points, that it can improve the effectiveness of clustering results in which data are distributed in different shapes and different density, and that it can get a better clustering efficiency. The application of the new clustering algorithm demonstrates that data mining techniques can be used in geophysical data interpretation and can get meaningful and useful results, and that the new clustering algorithm can be used in other real world applications.
    Scopus© Citations 24  4617
  • Publication
    How Smart Is Your City?
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2012-03-30) ;
    The idea of ambient intelligence implies an intrinsic link between individuals and their environment, enabling individuals to access and interact with computing artifacts in ways that are intuitive and do not disrupt everyday activities. Given the many different environments encountered as part of everyday life—within the home (1) as well as beyond it—enabling such interaction is a formidable technological challenge. The reward may be an environment that is safer, uses less energy, and responds to the needs of all individuals (see the figure). Recent advances in embedded systems, robotics, and sensor technology suggest that ambient intelligence may indeed be realized, particularly if crucial privacy and security concerns are addressed.
    Scopus© Citations 107  1897
  • Publication
    Coordinated intelligent power management and the heterogeneous sensing coverage problem
    One of the most important factors to be considered when developing an application for a wireless sensor network (WSN) is its power consumption. Intelligent power management (IPM) for a WSN is crucial in maximizing the operational longevity. An established regime for achieving this is through the opportunistic hibernation of redundant nodes. Redundancy, however, has various definitions within the field of WSNs and indeed multiple protocols, each operating using a different definition, coexist on the same node. In this paper, we advocate the use of an MAS as an appropriate mechanism by which different stake-holders, each desiring to hibernate a node in order to conserve power, can collaborate. The problem of node hibernation for the heterogeneous sensing coverage areas is introduced and the manner by which it can be solved using ADOPT, an algorithm for distributed constraint optimization, is described. We illustrate that the node hibernation strategy discussed here is more useful than the traditional stack-based approach and motivate our discussion using IPM as an exemplar.
    Scopus© Citations 11  853
  • Publication
    Gulliver's Genie : agency, mobility, adaptivity
    The challenge presented by ambient intelligence and pervasive computing is an environment within which computing artifacts become seamlessly merged into our surroundings, whereby interaction with such artifacts becomes intuitive and unobtrusive, where the devices become sensitive to the presence of people and are imbued with the ability to anticipate and service the individual needs of each and every user. In this paper, we present Gulliver's Genie, an archetypical ubiquitous computing application. Gulliver's Genie embraces three central constructs; those of agency, mobility and adaptivity. The architecture adopts a Multi-Agent Systems metaphor whereby agents manage and maintain a context within which mobile users exist and, based upon this context, seeks to adapt and personalize content based upon perceived individual user needs. Agents are mobile and may migrate to or from environmental artifacts reflecting their computational constraints.
      660Scopus© Citations 26
  • Publication
    Air quality monitoring for pervasive health
    Two monitoring projects relate to this issue's theme, "Hostile Environments": "Landslide Monitoring in the Emilia Romagna Apennines" and "Air Quality Monitoring for Pervasive Health." In addition, "Task-Driven Framework for Pervasive Computing" reports on TaskOS, a project to develop task-driven recommendation systems for pervasive computing environments.
      341Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Mobile multimedia : reflecting on dynamic service provision
    Delivering multimedia services to roaming subscribers raises significant challenges for content providers. There are a number of reasons for this; however,the principal difficulties arise from the inherent differences between the nature of mobile computing usage, and that of its static counterpart. The harnessing of appropriate contextual elements pertaining to a mobile subscriber at any given time offers significant opportunities for enhancing and customising service delivery. Dynamic content provision is a case in point. The versatile nature of the mobile subscriber offers opportunities for the delivery of content that is most appropriate to the subscriber's prevailing context, and hence is most likely to be welcomed. To succeed in this endeavour requires an innate understanding of the technologies, the mobile usage paradigm and the application domain in question, such that conflicting demands may be reconciled to the subscriber's benefit. In this paper, multimedia-augmented service provision for mobile subscribers is considered in light of the availability of contextual information. In particular, context-aware pre-caching is advocated as a means of maximising the possibilities for delivering context-aware services to mobile subscribers in scenarios of dynamic contexts.
    Scopus© Citations 1  212
  • Publication
    Coordinated intelligent power management and the heterogeneous sensing coverage problem
    One of the most important factors to be considered when developing an application for a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is its power consumption. Intelligent Power Management (IPM) for a WSN is crucial in maximising the operational longevity. An established regime for achieving this is through the opportunistic hibernation of redundant nodes. Redundancy, however, has various definitions within the field of WSNs and indeed multiple protocols, each operating using a different definition, coexist on the same node. In this paper, we advocate the use of a MAS as an appropriate mechanism by which different stake-holders, each desiring to hibernate a node in order to conserve power, can collaborate. The problem of node hibernation for the heterogeneous sensing coverage areas is introduced and the manner by which it can be solved using ADOPT, an algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, is described. We illustrate that the node hibernation strategy discussed here is more useful than the traditional stack-based approach and motivate our discussion using intelligent power management as an exemplar.
    Scopus© Citations 11  884
  • Publication
    Exploiting multi-agent systems in realizing adaptivity in the mobile tourist domain
    Ongoing developments in an array of mobile computing technologies have rendered the deployment of intelligent agents feasible on lightweight computational devices such as mobile phones. This development extends the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm to a new frontier, opening up significant avenues of research in intelligent mobile computing, amongst others. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, the practical realization of adaptivity in two classic agent-based mobile computing applications is considered. Though focusing on the tourist domain, it is contended that the approach adopted is generalisable to a broad category of mobile computing applications.
    Scopus© Citations 4  1388