The dream of pervasive computing is slowly becoming a reality. A number of projects around the world are constantly contributing ideas and solutions that are bound to change the way we interact with our environments and with one another. An essential component of the future is a software infrastructure that is capable of supporting interactions on scales ranging from a single physical space to intercontinental collaborations. Such infrastructure must help applications adapt to very diverse environments and must protect people's privacy and respect their personal preferences. In this paper we indicate a number of limitations present in the software infrastructures proposed so far (including our previous work). We then describe the framework for building an infrastructure that satisfies the abovementioned criteria. This framework hinges on the concepts of delegation, arbitration and high-level service discovery. Components of our own implementation of such an infrastructure are presented.

Wireless devices and their services are becoming increasingly important for many people¡¦s lives. The services provided by these mobile devices enable users to work without space or time limitation. However, while these applications allow users to record and retrieve information about tasks and data, the relationships between tasks and data are left out. However, we have observed that many of people¡¦s daily activities are not independent, and they are likely to be process-oriented. In this thesis, we develop a personal workflow model that is used to capture the requirements of personal processes. This model also includes a set of primitive operations that can be used to express queries on personal processes. The algebraic properties about these operations and how to optimize queries comprised of these operations are studied. Based on these operations, we propose an SQL-like query language to ease users¡¦ query expressions. Besides, to actively remind the mobilers the right things to do at the right place and the right time, we propose a rule model that resembles event-condition-action (ECA) rules proposed for active database systems. All of the proposed features except for the rule model are implemented on Palm Pilot PDAs.

This thesis focuses on an Agent-Based Service-Oriented approach to evolving legacy system into a Pervasive Computing environment. The methodology consists of multiple phases: using reverse engineering techniques to comprehend and decompose legacy systems, employing XML and Web Services to transform and represent a legacy system as pervasive services, and integrating these pervasive services into pervasive computing environments with agent based integration technology. A legacy intelligent building system is used as a case study for experiments with the approach, which demonstrates that the proposed approach has the ability to evolve legacy systems into pervasive service environments seamlessly. Conclusion is drawn based on analysis and further research directions are also discussed.

Mobile devices are generally less powerful and more resource constrained than their desktop counterparts are, yet many of the applications that are of the most value to users of mobile devices are resource intensive and difficult to support on a mobile device. Applications such as games, video playback, image processing, voice recognition, and facial recognition are resource intensive and often exceed the limits of mobile devices. Cyber foraging is an approach that allows a mobile device to discover and utilize surrogate devices present in the local environment to augment the capabilities of the mobile device. Cyber foraging has been shown to be beneficial in augmenting the capabilities of mobile devices to conserve power, increase performance, and increase the fidelity of applications. The cyber foraging scheduler determines what operation to execute remotely and what surrogate to use to execute the operation. Virtually all cyber foraging schedulers in use today utilize historical data in the scheduling algorithm. If historical data about a surrogate is unavailable, execution history must be generated before the scheduler's algorithm can utilize the surrogate. The period between the arrival time of a surrogate and when historical data become available is called the cold-start state. The cold-start state delays the utilization of potentially beneficial surrogates and can degrade system performance. The major contribution of this research was the extension of a historical-based prediction algorithm into a low-overhead estimation-enhanced algorithm that eliminated the cold-start state. This new algorithm performed better than the historical and random scheduling algorithms in every operational scenario. The four operational scenarios simulated typical use-cases for a mobile device. The scenarios simulated an unconnected environment, an environment where every surrogate was available, an environment where all surrogates were initially unavailable and surrogates joined the system slowly over time, and an environment where surrogates randomly and quickly joined and departed the system. One future research possibility is to extend the heuristic to include storage system I/O performance. Additional extensions include accounting for architectural differences between CPUs and the utilization of Bayesian estimates to provide metrics based upon performance specifications rather than direct

How people come to trust computing technology is an important factor in the degree to which they come to accept the services that such technologies are able to provide. This is particularly important where the usage of a technology might risk compromising a person’s private information, making them vulnerable to technologically mediated attack. Research into interpersonal trust development between people has allowed designers of systems deployed using technologies such as the World Wide Web to successfully modulate a number of human interpersonal trust cues into the computer-mediated communication domain. Pervasive computing however, describes a significant shift in the ways in which people will come to encounter and use interactive technologies. No longer limited to the confines of the desktop, people can and will be able to perform many of the technological activities they would otherwise do at home in any place and at any time. However, while the services that a pervasive computing infrastructure will be able to provide may be similar to those that people are used to in the traditional world of the ‘desktop metaphor’, the novel characteristics of pervasive computing mean that many of the trust cues that were previously available to technology users may no longer offer an effective means of helping users to place their trust well. In this thesis, a mixed methods research plan, involving both laboratory-based and field-based experimental design, was developed to investigate the role of human-computer trust in respect of two novel characteristics of pervasive computing: service discovery and secure ad-hoc device association. Through leveraging various artefacts in the immediate physical world to support information presented by services in the digital world, this thesis posits that the provision of user-verifiable links between the physical and digital worlds might provide a means of increasing user trust in services whose source they can otherwise not perceive nor verify.

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a compelling vision for how people will interact with multiple computer systems in the course of their daily lives. To date, practitioners have created a variety of infrastructures, middleware and toolkits to provide the flexibility, ease of programming and the necessary coordination of distributed software and hardware components in physical spaces. However, to-date no one approach has been adopted as a default or de-facto standard. Consequently the field risks losing momentum as fragmentation occurs. In particular, the goal of ubiquitous deployments may stall as groups deploy and trial incompatible point solutions in specific locations. In their defense, researchers in the field argue that it is too early to standardize and that room is needed to explore specialized domain-specific solutions. In the absence of an agreed upon set of standards, we argue that the community must consider a methodology that allows systems to evolve and specialize, while at the same time allowing the development of portable applications and integrated deployments that work between between sites. To address this we studied the programming models of many commercial and research ubicomp systems. Through this survey we gained an understanding of the shared abstractions required in a core programming model suitable for both application portability and systems integration. Based on this study we designed an extensible core model called the Ubicomp Common Model (UCM) to describe a representative sample of ubiquitous systems to date. The UCM is instantiated in a flexible and extensible platform called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF) to adapt ubicomp systems to this model. Through application development and integration experience with a composite campus environment, we provide strong evidence that this model is adequate for application development and that the complexity of developing adapters to several representative systems is not onerous. The performance overhead introduced by introducing the centralized UIF between applications and an integrated system is reasonable. Through careful analysis and the use of well understood approaches to integration, this thesis demonstrates the value of our methodology that directly leverages the significant contributions of past research in our quest for ubicomp application and systems interoperability.

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a compelling vision for how people will interact with multiple computer systems in the course of their daily lives. To date, practitioners have created a variety of infrastructures, middleware and toolkits to provide the flexibility, ease of programming and the necessary coordination of distributed software and hardware components in physical spaces. However, to-date no one approach has been adopted as a default or de-facto standard. Consequently the field risks losing momentum as fragmentation occurs. In particular, the goal of ubiquitous deployments may stall as groups deploy and trial incompatible point solutions in specific locations. In their defense, researchers in the field argue that it is too early to standardize and that room is needed to explore specialized domain-specific solutions. In the absence of an agreed upon set of standards, we argue that the community must consider a methodology that allows systems to evolve and specialize, while at the same time allowing the development of portable applications and integrated deployments that work between between sites. To address this we studied the programming models of many commercial and research ubicomp systems. Through this survey we gained an understanding of the shared abstractions required in a core programming model suitable for both application portability and systems integration. Based on this study we designed an extensible core model called the Ubicomp Common Model (UCM) to describe a representative sample of ubiquitous systems to date. The UCM is instantiated in a flexible and extensible platform called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF) to adapt ubicomp systems to this model. Through application development and integration experience with a composite campus environment, we provide strong evidence that this model is adequate for application development and that the complexity of developing adapters to several representative systems is not onerous. The performance overhead introduced by introducing the centralized UIF between applications and an integrated system is reasonable. Through careful analysis and the use of well understood approaches to integration, this thesis demonstrates the value of our methodology that directly leverages the significant contributions of past research in our quest for ubicomp application and systems interoperability.

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a compelling vision for how people will interact with multiple computer systems in the course of their daily lives. To date, practitioners have created a variety of infrastructures, middleware and toolkits to provide the flexibility, ease of programming and the necessary coordination of distributed software and hardware components in physical spaces. However, to-date no one approach has been adopted as a default or de-facto standard. Consequently the field risks losing momentum as fragmentation occurs. In particular, the goal of ubiquitous deployments may stall as groups deploy and trial incompatible point solutions in specific locations. In their defense, researchers in the field argue that it is too early to standardize and that room is needed to explore specialized domain-specific solutions. In the absence of an agreed upon set of standards, we argue that the community must consider a methodology that allows systems to evolve and specialize, while at the same time allowing the development of portable applications and integrated deployments that work between between sites. To address this we studied the programming models of many commercial and research ubicomp systems. Through this survey we gained an understanding of the shared abstractions required in a core programming model suitable for both application portability and systems integration. Based on this study we designed an extensible core model called the Ubicomp Common Model (UCM) to describe a representative sample of ubiquitous systems to date. The UCM is instantiated in a flexible and extensible platform called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF) to adapt ubicomp systems to this model. Through application development and integration experience with a composite campus environment, we provide strong evidence that this model is adequate for application development and that the complexity of developing adapters to several representative systems is not onerous. The performance overhead introduced by introducing the centralized UIF between applications and an integrated system is reasonable. Through careful analysis and the use of well understood approaches to integration, this thesis demonstrates the value of our methodology that directly leverages the significant contributions of past research in our quest for ubicomp application and systems interoperability. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

La prise en considération des exigences en matière de sécurité, de vie privée et de confiance au sein des environnements pervasifs (ubiquitaires) est indispensable à la fourniture des services personnalisés aux utilisateurs. L’objectif de cette thèse est de disposer d’une architecture souple et évolutive intégrant l’authentification des utilisateurs, la préservation de leur vie privée et la gestion de la confiance en vue d’optimiser la stratégie de contrôles d’accès aux services personnalisés. La première contribution porte sur la proposition d’un protocole d’authentification mutuelle construit à partir de schémas cryptographiques robustes d’établissement de clés basés sur les courbes elliptiques (MaptoPoint/Curve algorithm, Weil Pairing) et d’un modèle dynamique basé sur les attributs issus des données contextuelles. La seconde contribution porte sur la conception d’une nouvelle architecture bâti sur un modèle basé sur les attributs et organisée autour de 3 couches : la couche de contrôle de le vie privée qui assure la protection de la vie privée des utilisateurs en contrôlant leurs données personnelles, la couche d’accès associant les processus d’authentification et de contrôles d’accès en intégrant des mécanismes dédiés à la gestion des paramètres de confiance et la couche de service pour la gestion des accès aux services selon le profil de l’utilisateur et de son environnement. La troisième contribution porte sur le développement et la mise en œuvre d’un prototype au sein de la plateforme dédiée à la fourniture de services du laboratoire Handicom de Telecom SudParis. / To provide personalized services to users in pervasive environments, we should consider both user's privacy, trust and security requirements. Traditional authentication and access control mechanisms are not able to adapt their security policies to a changing context while insuring privacy and trust issues. This thesis introduces a new global vision for the protection of pervasive environments, based on context-aware principle. The aim of this thesis is to get a flexible and scalable framework including user authentication, user privacy preserving and trust management in order to optimize the access control strategy to personalized services. The first contribution include the proposal of a mutual authentication protocol supported by both robust key establishment schemes based on elliptic curves (MaptoPoint/Curve algorithm, Weil Pairing) and a dynamic model based on attributes issued from contextual data. The second contribution include the design of a new architecture built on an attribute based model and organized over 3 layers: the privacy control layer which insure the protection of the user private life by controlling their personal data, the access layer which associate authentication and access control processes while providing mechanisms dedicated to trust parameters management , and finally the service layer for service access management according to the user profile and his environment. The third contribution the implementation and the deployment of a prototype within the service delivery platform in Handicom lab of Telecom & Management SudParis.

Pervasive computing proposes a new paradigm for human-computer interaction. By embedding computation, sensing, and networking into our daily environments, new computing systems can be developed that become helpful, supportive, and invisible elements of our lives. This tight proximity between the human and computational worlds poses challenges for the design of these systems - what disciplines should be involved in their design and what tools and processes should they follow? We address these issues by advocating for interdisciplinary design of pervasive computing systems. Based upon our experiences teaching courses in interactive architecture, product design, physical computing and through surveys of existing literature, we examine the challenges faced by interdisciplinary teams when developing pervasive computing systems. We find that teams lack accessible prototyping tools to express their design ideas across domains. To address this issue we propose a new software-based design tool called electronic storyboards. We implement electronic storyboards by developing a domain-specific modeling language in the Eclipse Graphical Editor Framework. The key insight of electronic storyboards is to balance the tension between the ambiguity in drawn storyboards and the requirements of implementing computing systems. We implement a set of user-applied tags, perform layout analysis on the storyboard, and utilize natural language processing to extract behavioral information from the storyboard in the form of a timed automaton. This behavioral information is then transformed into design artifacts such as state charts, textual descriptions, and source code. To evaluate the potential impact of electronic storyboards on interdisciplinary design teams we develop of user study based around ``boundary objects''. These objects are frequently used within computer-supported collaborative work to examine how objects mediate interactions between individuals. Teams of computing and non-computing participants were asked to storyboard pervasive computing systems and their storyboards were evaluated using a prototype electronic storyboarding tool. The study examines how teams use traditional storyboarding, tagging, tool queries, and generated artifacts to express design ideas and iterate upon their designs. From this study we develop new recommendations for future tools in architecture and fashion design based upon electronic storyboarding principles. Overall, this study contributes to the expanding knowledge base of pervasive computing design tools. As an emerging discipline, standardized tools and platforms have yet to be developed. Electronic storyboards offer a solution to describe pervasive computing systems across application domains and in a manner accessible to multiple disciplines. / Ph. D.