Now showing 1 - 10 of 178
  • Publication
    Service fusion in mobile contexts
    Service provision for mobile users poses several challenges for those managing enterprise information systems. Some of these are ubiquitous, for example, privacy and security. Others give rise to integration and interoperability issues. The agent paradigm, though offering potential in fixed networked scenarios, has not been seriously considered as a mechanism for incorporating mobile clients, primarily to their computational intractability on mobile devices. However, recent developments in agent and mobile computing technologies – both from a hardware and software perspective, have rendered the mobile phone a viable platform for agents. One implication of this is that agents now offer a viable platform for service delivery to mobile users. This chapter reflects on some of the pertinent issues necessary for this, including Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). The discussion is illuminated with a systematic description of EasyLife – a framework that harnesses the agent paradigm to construct and deliver services to mobile users.
    Scopus© Citations 1  520
  • 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
    Agent-based coordination for the sensor web
    The approach described advocates the use of a multi-agent system, and specifically the use of multi-agent distributed constraint optimisation algorithms. Developing software for low powered sensing devices introduces several problems to be addressed; the most obvious being the limited computational resources available. In this paper we discuss an implementation of ADOPT, a pre-existing algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, and describe how it has been integrated with a reflective agent platform developed for resource constrained devices, namely Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). The usefulness of this work is illustrated through the canonical multi-agent coordination problem, namely graph colouring.
      16038Scopus© Citations 2
  • 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
    Browsing the Sensor Web : Pervasive Access for Wide-area Wireless Sensor Networks
    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are almost exclusively regarded as data gathering entities. Various sensed data elements are captured and routed back to a central server for processing, visualization and interpretation. However, it can be realistically conjectured that scenarios will increasingly emerge that demand a facility for ad-hoc interaction with individual sensor nodes. Moreover, such interaction will occur in the physical environment in close proximity to where the sensor node is physically located. In this paper, the need for in-situ ad-hoc interaction is motivated. A methodology for facilitating such interaction is presented, and the implementation of a sensor browser is described.
      395
  • Publication
    Agent Factory: a framework for prototyping logic-based AOP languages
    Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of AOP languages. While these can mostly be characterized as logic-oriented languages that map situations to courses of action, they are based on a variety of concepts, resulting in obvious differences in syntax and semantics. Less obviously, the development tools and infrastructure - such as environment integration, reuse mechanisms, debugging, and IDE integration surrounding these languages also vary widely. Two drawbacks of this diversity are: a perceived lack of transferability of knowledge and expertise between languages; and a potential obscuring of the fundamental conceptual differences between languages. These drawbacks can impact on both the languages’ uptake and comparability. In this paper, we present a Common Language Framework that has emerged out of ongoing work on AOP languages that have been deployed through Agent Factory. This framework consists of a set of pre-written components for building agent interpreters, together with a set of tools that can be easily adapted to different AOP languages. Through this framework we have been able to rapidly prototype a range of different AOP languages, one of which is presented as a case study in this paper.
    Scopus© Citations 16  554
  • Publication
    PI : perceiver and interpreter of smart home datasets
    Pervasive healthcare systems facilitate various aspects of research including sensor technology, software technology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Researchers can often benefit from access to real-world data sets against which to evaluate new approaches and algorithms. Whilst more than a dozen data sets are currently publicly available, their use of heterogeneous mark-up impedes easy and widespread use. We describe PI – the Perceiver and semantic Interpreter – which offers a workbench API for the querying, re-structuring and re-purposing of a range of diverse data formats currently in use. The use of a single API reduces cognitive overload, improves access, and supports integration of generic and domain-specific information within a common framework.
      748
  • Publication
    Robot soccer anywhere: achieving persistent autonomous navigation, mapping and object vision tracking in dynamic environments
    The paper describes an ongoing effort to enable autonomous mobile robots to play soccer in unstructured, everyday environments. Unlike conventional robot soccer competitions that are usually held on purpose-built robot soccer "fields", in our work we seek to develop the capability for robots to demonstrate aspects of soccer-playing in more diverse environments, such as schools, hospitals, or shopping malls, with static obstacles (furniture) and dynamic natural obstacles (people). This problem of "Soccer Anywhere" presents numerous research challenges including: (1) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in dynamic, unstructured environments, (2) software control architectures for decentralized, distributed control of mobile agents, (3) integration of vision-based object tracking with dynamic control, and (4) social interaction with human participants. In addition to the intrinsic research merit of these topics, we believe that this capability would prove useful for outreach activities, in demonstrating robotics technology to primary and secondary school students, to motivate them to pursue careers in science and engineering
    Scopus© Citations 3  406
  • Publication
    Clustering algorithm incorporating density and direction
    This paper analyses the advantages and disadvantages of the K-means algorithm and the DENCLUE algorithm. In order to realise the automation of clustering analysis and eliminate human factors, both partitioning and density-based methods were adopted, resulting in a new algorithm – Clustering Algorithm based on object Density and Direction (CADD). This paper discusses the theory and algorithm design of the CADD algorithm. As an illustration of its applicability, CADD was used to cluster real world data from the geochemistry domain.
    Scopus© Citations 7  908
  • Publication
    A Low-Latency Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
    Recent advances in wireless sensors network (WSN) technology have made possible the manufacturing of tiny low-cost, low-power sensors with wireless multi-hop communication and sensing capabilities. Energy conservation for WSNs is a primary objective that needs to be addressed at all layers of the networking protocol stack. In many applications latency is another crucial factor to be addressed. However this must be done in the context of the energy constraints imposed by the network. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of two node scheduling regimes within MERLIN (MAC energy efficient, routing and localization integrated), an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for WSNs. In particular we contrast the X and V scheduling family schemes with respect to the following properties: network setup time, network lifetime and message latency. We conduct our experiments within the OmNet++ simulator.
      355Scopus© Citations 15