Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • 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
    Just-in-time multimedia distribution in a mobile computing environment
    Disseminating multimedia content to users in a mobile computing environment such that they receive it in an appropriate and timely manner is fundamental to the success of mobile information systems. Too often, however, this endeavour is hindered by the poor data rates supported by wireless telecommunications networks and by the limited computational resources available on mobile devices. We describe an approach to overcome these limitations, which is based on extremely dynamic and proactive precaching. This approach, which we have termed intelligent precaching, is realised through the innovative deployment of intelligent agents on mobile devices. To illustrate this concept, the design and implementation of an archetypical mobile computing application is provided, namely that of an electronic tourist guide. This is augmented with a description of the salient points derived from a user evaluation, from which emerging avenues for further research are identified.
      583Scopus© Citations 27
  • Publication
    Fuzzy decision making through energy-aware and utility agents within wireless sensor networks
    Multi-agent systems (MAS) through their intrinsically distributed nature offer a promising software modelling and implementation framework for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. WSNs are characterised by limited resources from a computational and energy perspective; in addition, the integrity of the WSN coverage area may be compromised over the duration of the network's operational lifetime, as environmental effects amongst others take their toll. Thus a significant problem arises--how can an agent construct an accurate model of the prevailing situation in order that it can make effective decisions about future courses of action within these constraints? In this paper, one popular agent architecture, the BDI architecture, is examined from this perspective. In particular, the fundamental issue of belief generation within WSN constraints using classical reasoning augmented with a fuzzy component in a hybrid fashion is explored in terms of energy-awareness and utility.
    Scopus© Citations 11  2001
  • Publication
    Distributed network intelligence : a prerequisite for adaptive & personalised service delivery
    Mobile computing is undoubtedly one of the predominant computer usage paradigms in operation today. The implications of what might be cautiously termed a usage paradigm shift have still not crystallised fully, either for society, or those envisaging a new raft of applications and services for mobile users. However, fundamental to the current and future success of mobile computing are mobile telecommunications networks. Such networks have been a success story in their own right in recent years, both as traditional voice carriers and, increasingly importantly, as a conduit of mobile data. The potential for new mobile data applications is immense, but, crucially, this potential is severely compromised by two factors inherent in mobile computing: limited bandwidth and computationally restricted devices. Hence, the academic and commercial interest in harnessing intelligent techniques as a means of mitigating these concerns, and ensuring the user experience is a satisfactory one. In this paper, the broad area of intelligence in telecommunications networks is examined, and issues relating to the deployment of intelligent technologies are explored. In particular, the potential of intelligent agents is identified as a viable mechanism for realising a full end-to-end deployment of intelligence throughout the network, including possibly the most crucial component: the end user's device. As an illustration of the viability of this approach, a brief description of a mobile blogging application is presented.
    Scopus© Citations 13  1825
  • Publication
    Embedding intelligent decision making within complex dynamic environments
    Decision-making is a complex and demanding process often constrained in a number of possibly conflicting dimensions including quality, responsiveness and cost. This paper considers in situ decision making whereby decisions are effected based upon inferences made from both locally sensed data and data aggregated from a sensor network. Such sensing devices that comprise a sensor network are often computationally challenged and present an additional constraint upon the reasoning process. This paper describes a hybrid reasoning approach to deliver in situ decision making which combines stream based computing with multi-agent system techniques. This approach is illustrated and exercised through an environmental demonstrator project entitled SmartBay which seeks to deliver in situ real time environmental monitoring.
      1372Scopus© Citations 12
  • 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
    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