Pervasive Computing presents an exciting realm where intelligent devices interact within the background of our environments to create a more intuitive experience for their human users. We demonstrate enabling context-awareness through our creation of a standardized context-management framework. Our framework moves towards device intelligence by supporting context-awareness. Context-awareness is what gives devices the ability to understand and exchange information about each other. Context information is used to determine device purpose, capabilities, location, current state, and other properties. Several elements are required in order to achieve context-awareness, including a suitable ontology, a context model, and a middleware platform upon which to implement the context model. In this work, a complete context-management framework is presented and evaluated. We propose our own ontology specification and context model, and implement a middleware using the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) interoperability standard. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-09 14:51:30.242

Stepping into the 21st century, we see more and more evidence of the growing trend towards the amalgamation of cyberspace and the physical world. This trend emerged as computing technologies moved o_ desktops and migrated into aspects of our lives through their ubiquitous presence in the physical world. As these technologies become enmeshed in our daily routines, they begin to `disappear' from our awareness and cease to be thought of as technologies and simply become tools of everyday use. Yet even as they disappear, these technologies afford a new way for us to interact with the environments of everyday life and with the ordinary objects within these environments. The furthering of this vision will require, in many cases, the tools and applications to possess greater levels of autonomy and an awareness of the user's context. As a result, the applications gradually depend more and more for their behaviour on the information (context information) that is relevant to user interactions. However, it is difficult to develop new context-aware applications that take into account the ever-increasing amount of context information. This is because: the context information sources vary not only in their types, but also in their availability in different environments; the developers have to spend significant programming efforts in gathering, pre-processing and managing the context information when designing and developing the new applications; and, the information sources can fail from time to time, resulting in operational disruptions or service degradation. To make such context information easily and widely available for to new context-aware applications, there is a need to provide information provisioning and management at the infrastructure level. This thesis explores the issues and challenges associated with the development of an autonomic middleware system that addresses the problems discussed earlier, with a particular focus on supporting fault-tolerant context information provisioning for multiple applications, providing the support of opportunistic use of the context sources (the sensors) and, maximising overall the system's interoperability for the open, dynamic computing environments (Ubiquitous computing, for example). The research presented in this thesis makes several key contributions. First, it introduces a novel standards-based approach to model heterogeneous information sources and data preprocessing components. Second, it details the design of a standards-based approach for supporting the dynamic composition of context information sources and pre-processing components. This approach plays an important role in supporting fault-tolerant information provisioning from the sensors and the opportunistic use of these sensors. More specifically, it enables any given piece of high-level context information, as required by applications, to be derived via multiple different pre-processing models, resulting in a higher degree of reliability. Third, it describes the design and development of an autonomic context management system (ACoMS), which harnesses the first two contributions above. Finally, the thesis shows how this autonomic context management system can support context-aware routing in wireless mesh networks. These contributions are evaluated through two corresponding case studies. The first is a practical firefighting scenario with three prototypical applications that validate the design and development of ACoMS. The second is an adaptive wireless mesh surveillance camera system that validates the concept of adopting ACoMS as a cross-layer information plane to ease the prototyping and development of new adaptive protocols and systems, and illustrates the needs of adaptive controls at the sensing layer to optimise resource usage.

This study diagnoses performance in a mature manufacturing company based on an inquiry into contextual ambidexterity. Previous research has shown that creating a high performance context is founded upon the constructs of performance management and social support; however, this research has been conducted in fast evolving, relatively young companies such as software design firms. To date, no research has shown if a well established manufacturing firm can create a context with high levels of performance management and social support establishing a high performance environment and therefore be contextually ambidextrous. The presented contextual ambidexterity inquiry considers social support based upon four specific types of support, namely emotional, appraisal, informational, and instrumental support. Within social support, the concepts of trust and burnout are also vital in establishing the proper culture to achieve high performance. Further, performance management is founded upon human capital management established in a suitable corporate culture. In this study, this approach to a contextual ambidexterity inquiry is applied within the context of a U.S. based division of a global manufacturing company based on a survey, participant observation, and individual interviews. The research contributes to both the academic and practitioner environments with a greater understanding of the antecedents of high performance in an environment outside that of a young, fast evolving software firms. Further, it is shown that a high performance context may exist within organizations that are vastly different from those previously studied. In addition, this study offers an approach to a contextual ambidexterity inquiry with refined definitions and measures based on established constructs as well as new constructs. The implications of these additions to our understanding of contextual ambidexterity to both academia and practice are discussed and several avenues of future research are proposed.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:51:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo2013_1.pdf: 7106085 bytes, checksum: 47ad31fd4b9b044b146cc59b0e2bc197 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Em uma época em que os usuários precisam processar uma quantidade cada vez maior de informação e executar tarefas cada vez mais complexas em um intervalo menor de tempo, a introdução do conceito de contexto em sistemas computacionais torna-se uma necessidade. Contexto é definido como as condições interelacionadas em que alguma coisa existe ou ocorre . Contexto é o que viabiliza a identificação do que é ou não relevante em uma dada situação. Sistemas sensíveis ao contexto são aqueles que utilizam contexto para prover informações ou serviços relevantes para a execução de uma tarefa. Projetar um sistema sensível ao contexto não é trivial, uma vez que é necessário lidar com questões relacionadas a que tipo de informação considerar como contexto, como representar essas informações, como podem ser adquiridas e processadas e como projetar o uso do contexto pelo sistema. Embora existam trabalhos que tratem desafios específicos envolvidos no desenvolvimento de sistemas sensíveis ao contexto, a maioria das soluções é proprietária ou restrita a um determinado tipo de aplicação e não são facilmente replicáveis em diferentes domínios de aplicação. Além disso, um outro problema é que projetistas de software têm dificuldade em especificar o que exatamente considerar como contexto e como projetar a sua representação, gerenciamento e uso. Esta tese propõe um framework de apoio ao projeto de sistemas sensíveis ao contexto em diferentes domínios, o qual é composto por quatro elementos principais: (i) uma arquitetura genérica para sistemas sensíveis ao contexto, (ii) um metamodelo de contexto independente de domínio, que guia a modelagem de contexto em diferentes aplicações; (iii) um conjunto de perfis UML que considera a estrutura do contexto e do comportamento sensível ao contexto; e (iv) um processo que direciona a execução de atividades relacionadas à especificação do contexto e ao projeto de sistemas sensíveis ao contexto. Para investigar a viabilidade da proposta, desenvolvemos o projeto de duas aplicações em diferentes domínios. Para uma destas aplicações, foi criado um protótipo funcional, o qual foi avaliado por usuários finais

In 1984, Miller published the paper: Bias among forensic document examiners: A need for procedural changes, with the intent to elicit some concern about the amount of cognitive bias among forensic document examiners. There is a need for the development of procedures regarding how a document examiner can minimize the amount of cognitive bias that may lead to erroneous conclusions by the examiner. Such procedures would serve to demonstrate that a conscientious effort was made by the examiner and the submitting agency to control extraneous variables that could bias the results of the examination. Some 28 years after Miller1 the forensic sciences are confronted with serious criticism with respect to cognitive bias (e.g. Risinger et al.2, and the NAS report3). It appears that not much of Millers suggestions have been applied in practice. No good general procedures have been implemented for minimizing the risk of cognitive bias in most institutes. In this paper we address the main issues raised in the 1984 paper, and describe the current state of affairs with respect to minimizing cognitive bias in the forensic sciences. There is still a need for procedural changes in the forensic sciences.

La complexité et l'ampleur des scénarios de l'Intelligence Ambiante impliquent que des attributs tels que l'expressivité de modelisation, la flexibilité de representation et de deploiement et la facilité de configuration et de developpement deviennent des caracteristiques centrales pour les systèmes de gestion de contexte. Cependant, les ouvrages existants semblent explorer ces attributs orientés-developpement a un faible degré.Notre objectif est de créer un intergiciel de gestion de contexte flexible et bien configurable, capable de répondre aux différents scenarios. A cette fin, notre solution est construite a base de techniques et principes du Web Semantique (WS) et des systèmes multi-agents (SMA).Nous utilisons le WS pour proposer un noveau meta-modèle de contexte, permettant une modelisation expressive et extensible du contenu, des meta-proprietés (e.g. validité temporelle, parametres de qualité) et des dépendances (e.g. les contraintes d'integrité) du contexte.De plus, une architecture a base de SMA et des composants logiciels, ou chaque agent encapsule un aspect fonctionnel du processus de gestion de contexte (acquisition, coordination, diffusion, utilisation) est developpée.Nous introduisons un nouveau moyen de structurer le deploiement d'agents selon les dimensions du modèle de contexte de l'application et nous elaborons des politiques déclaratives gouvernant le comportement d'adaptation du provisionnement contextuel des agents. Des simulations d'un scenario d'université intelligente montrent que un bon outillage construit autour de notre intergiciel peut apporter des avantages significatifs dans la génie des applications sensibles au contexte. / The complexity and magnitude of Ambient Intelligence scenarios imply that attributes such as modeling expressiveness, flexibility of representation and deployment, as well as ease of configuration and development become central features for context management systems.However, existing works in the literature seem to explore these development-oriented attributes at a low degree.Our goal is to create a flexible and well configurable context management middleware, able to respond to different scenarios. To this end, our solution is built on the basis of principles and techniques of the Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems.We use the Semantic Web to provide a new context meta-model, allowing for an expressive and extensible modeling of content, meta-properties (e.g. temporal validity, quality parameters) and dependencies (e.g. integrity constraints).In addition, we develop a middleware architecture that relies on Multi-Agent Systems and a service component based design. Each agent of the system encapsulates a functional aspect of the context provisioning processes (acquisition, coordination, distribution, use).We introduce a new way to structure the deployment of agents depending on the multi-dimensionality aspects of the application's context model. Furthermore, we develop declarative policies governing the adaptation behavior of the agents managing the provisioning of context information.Simulations of an intelligent university scenario show that appropriate tooling built around our middleware can provide significant advantages in the engineering of context-aware applications.

Our society is increasingly demanding situation-aware smarter software (SASS) systems, whose goals change over time and depend on context situations. A system with such properties must sense their dynamic environment and respond to changes quickly, accurately, and reliably, that is, to be context-aware and self-adaptive. The problem addressed in this dissertation is the dynamic management of context information, with the goal of improving the relevance of SASS systems' context-aware capabilities with respect to changes in their requirements and execution environment. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the investigation of dynamic context management and self-adaptivity to: (i) improve context-awareness and exploit context information to enhance quality of user experience in SASS systems, and (ii) improve the dynamic capabilities of self-adaptivity in SASS systems. Context-awareness and self-adaptivity pose signi cant challenges for the engineering of SASS systems. Regarding context-awareness, the rst challenge addressed in this dissertation is the impossibility of fully specifying environmental entities and the corresponding monitoring requirements at design-time. The second challenge arises from the continuous evolution of monitoring requirements due to changes in the system caused by self-adaptation. As a result, context monitoring strategies must be modeled and managed in such a way that they support the addition and deletion of context types and monitoring conditions at runtime. For this, the user must be integrated into the dynamic context management process. Concerning self-adaptivity, the third challenge is to control the dynamicity of adaptation goals, adaptation mechanisms, and monitoring infrastructures, and the way they a ect each other in the adaptation process. This is to preserve the eff ectiveness of context monitoring requirements and thus self-adaptation. The fourth challenge, related also to self-adaptivity,concerns the assessment of adaptation mechanisms at runtime to prevent undesirable system states as a result of self-adaptation. Given these challenges, to improve context-awareness we made three contributions. First, we proposed the personal context sphere concept to empower users to control the life cycle of personal context information in user-centric SASS systems. Second, we proposed the SmarterContext ontology to model context information and its monitoring requirements supporting changes in these models at runtime. Third, we proposed an effi cient context processing engine to discover implicit contextual facts from context information speci fied in changing context models. To improve self-adaptivity we made three contributions. First, we proposed a framework for the identi cation of adaptation properties and goals, which is useful to evaluate self-adaptivity and to derive monitoring requirements mapped to adaptation goals. Second, we proposed a reference model for designing highly dynamic self-adaptive systems, for which the continuous pertinence between monitoring mechanisms and both changing system goals and context situations is a major concern. Third, we proposed a model with explicit validation and veri cation (V&V) tasks for self-adaptive software, where dynamic context monitoring plays a major role. The seventh contribution of this dissertation, the implementation of Smarter-Context infrastructure, addresses both context-awareness and self-adaptivity. To evaluate our contributions, qualitatively and quantitatively, we conducted several comprehensive literature reviews, a case study on user-centric situation-aware online shopping, and a case study on dynamic governance of service-oriented applications. / Graduate

Submitted by Cássia Santos (cassia.bcufg@gmail.com) on 2016-09-08T13:52:43Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Ernesto Fonseca Veiga - 2016.pdf: 3105414 bytes, checksum: 404f9ee6b395253e73e4c1b1fefe6d67 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-09-09T14:31:54Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Ernesto Fonseca Veiga - 2016.pdf: 3105414 bytes, checksum: 404f9ee6b395253e73e4c1b1fefe6d67 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-09T14:31:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Ernesto Fonseca Veiga - 2016.pdf: 3105414 bytes, checksum: 404f9ee6b395253e73e4c1b1fefe6d67 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-07-19 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Context Management Systems (CMS) are responsible for processing the context throughout its life cycle, which is performed in four steps defined in the literature: acquisition, modeling, reasoning and dissemination. The modeling step has great relevance in this process, being responsible for transforming the data acquired from sensors in highlevel context. However, this step has been impacted by the increasing deployment of sensors and the large volume of information that is available, creating the need to provide services to carry out the handling of such information, providing adequate representation and supporting the development of applications. In this sense, the ontology-based representation has major advantages, including: high expressiveness, standardization and interoperability. Before highlighted requirements by the literature, this work presents the construction of services related to the context life cycle modeling step: representation, aggregation and history, based on ontologies. These services have been designed and implemented as components that integrated a CMS called Hermes. Therefore, the scope of this work is composed by: i) Hermes Widget: ontological representation of independent domain context, based on Stimulus-Sensor-Observation standard; ii) Hermes Aggregator: ontologically represented context aggregation and its conversion for application domains; and iii) Hermes History: context history for the different levels of expression produced by other components. These services have been validated and evaluated in a human vital signs monitoring scenario. / Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Contexto (CMS) são responsáveis pelo processamento do contexto ao longo do seu ciclo de vida, que é realizado em quatro etapas definidas pela literatura: aquisição, modelagem, raciocínio e disseminação. A etapa de modelagem possui grande relevância neste processo, sendo responsável por transformar os dados adquiridos de sensores em contexto de alto nível. Porém, esta etapa tem sido impactada pela crescente implantação de sensores e o grande volume de informações que são disponibilizadas, gerando a necessidade de prover serviços que realizem a manipulação dessas informações, oferecendo representação adequada e apoio ao desenvolvimento de aplicações. Neste sentido, a representação baseada em ontologias apresenta grandes vantagens, entre as quais destacam-se: alta expressividade, padronização e interoperabilidade. Diante dos requisitos destacados pela literatura, este trabalho apresenta a construção dos serviços relacionados à etapa de modelagem do ciclo de vida do contexto: representação, agregação e histórico, baseados em ontologias. Estes serviços foram projetados e implementados como componentes que integram um CMS denominado Hermes. Sendo assim, compõem o escopo deste trabalho: i) Hermes Widget: representação ontológica de contexto independente de domínio, baseada no padrão Stimulus-Sensor-Observation; ii) Hermes Aggregator: agregação de contexto representado ontologicamente e conversão do contexto para domínios de aplicação; e iii) Hermes History: histórico de contexto para os diferentes níveis de expressividade produzidos pelos demais componentes. Estes serviços foram validados e avaliados em um cenário de monitoramento de sinais vitais humanos.

This study presents the development and evaluation of a conversational agent, EcoBot, designed to inform users about their energy habits and persuade them to save more energy when at home, to help fight climate change and energy waste. To reach this goal, three persuasion strategies were first identified: Feedback, to give users personalized suggestions based on their habits, Goal Setting, to set and track consumption goals for the user’s domestic appliances, and Social Comparison, to compare the user’s consumption with that of others. While developing the chatbot, an advanced context system was used to improve the user experience by reducing the amount of information the user has to provide in input and allowing the chatbot to switch between the strategies seamlessly. Furthermore, it was decided not to use an FSM to manage the flow of the conversation to allow a quick change of context without forcing the conversation in a single direction and to have greater flexibility in future EcoBot development. The chatbot was implemented using an NLP library and its functionalities have been modeled with a set of independent intents. After the design and development, an evaluation phase was conducted with 29 users, half of whom used as a comparison a reduced version of EcoBot (capable only of providing generic feedback) while the other half used the complete version. Although the experiment did not demonstrate greater effectiveness in convincing users to save more energy in the complete version of EcoBot, it was evident that it had greater user satisfaction and a better overall experience. This result is crucial for designing pleasant persuasive systems for users to use in the future. Future work will focus on increasing the accuracy of responses and the number of EcoBot features and conducting a longer and more realistic experiment to test the effectiveness of EcoBot in convincing users to save more energy. / Denna studie presenterar utvecklingen och utvärderingen av en konversationsagent, EcoBot, utformad för att informera användare om deras energivanor och övertala dem att spara mer energi när de är hemma, för att hjälpa till att bekämpa klimatförändringar och energislöseri. För att nå detta mål identifierades först tre övertalningsstrategier: Feedback, för att ge användarna personliga förslag baserat på deras vanor, Målsättning, för att sätta och spåra konsumtionsmål för användarens hushållsapparater, och Social Comparison, för att jämföra användarens konsumtion med det av andra. Under utvecklingen av chatboten användes ett avancerat kontextsystem för att förbättra användarupplevelsen genom att minska mängden information som användaren måste tillhandahålla i input och låta chatboten växla mellan strategierna sömlöst. Vidare beslutades att inte använda en FSM för att hantera konversationsflödet för att möjliggöra ett snabbt byte av sammanhang utan att tvinga samtalet i en enda riktning och för att ha större flexibilitet i framtida EcoBot-utveckling. Chatboten implementerades med hjälp av ett NLP-bibliotek och dess funktioner har modellerats med en uppsättning oberoende avsikter. Efter design och utveckling genomfördes en utvärderingsfas med 29 användare, varav hälften använde som jämförelse en reducerad version av EcoBot (kan bara ge generisk feedback) medan den andra hälften använde den fullständiga versionen. Även om experimentet inte visade större effektivitet när det gäller att övertyga användare att spara mer energi i den kompletta versionen av EcoBot, var det uppenbart att det hade större användarnöjdhet och en bättre övergripande upplevelse. Detta resultat är avgörande för att designa trevliga övertygande system för användare att använda i framtiden. Framtida arbete kommer att fokusera på att öka noggrannheten i svaren och antalet EcoBot-funktioner och att genomföra ett längre och mer realistiskt experiment för att testa effektiviteten hos EcoBot för att övertyga användare att spara mer energi.

Management was once described as the art of getting things done through the efforts of oneself and other people (Follett, 1941) and is functionalised through acts of planning, organising, leading and controlling tasks and people for pre-defined objectives. These four cardinal pillars of management are translated into various models, tools and techniques of best practice of how to manage. While acknowledging that the substance of the current management models, tools and techniques have for years broadly contributed to how organisations are run, my research sheds more light on the shortcomings underlying some of the assumptions and ways of thinking behind these models and tools. My research findings based on my experience in working for the Department for International Development suggests that management practice and organisational change occur in the context of human power relationships in which people constrain and enable each other on the basis of human attributes such as identities, attitudes, values, perceptions, emotions, fears, expectations, motives and interests. I argue that these human attributes, human power relations and the totality of human emotions arise in the social, and understanding the ways in which these attributes shape local interaction and daily human relating is critical in making sense of the reality of organisational change and management. I suggest that management practice occurs in the context of everyday politics of human relating. It is that type of politics that takes place within families, groups of people, organisations, communities, and indeed throughout all units of society around the distribution of power, wealth, resources, thoughts and ideas. This way of thinking has enormous implications for the way we conceptualise management theory and practice. I am suggesting that managers do not solely determine, nor do employees freely choose their identities, attitudes, values, perceptions, emotions, fears, expectations and motives. These human dimensions arise from social relationships and personal experiences. As such, it is simply not for a manager to decide or force other employees on which of these human attributes to influence their behaviour. I am arguing that the social nature of management practice and role of human agents is inherently complex and cannot, in the scientific sense, be adequately reduced to discrete, systematic, complete and predictive models, tools and techniques without losing some meaning of what we do in management.