Los Sistemas Perceptivos del Contexto son capaces de reconocer y anticipar proactivamente a necesidades próximas del usuario teniendo en cuenta intereses, ubicación y proximidad, incluso sin necesidad de comunicárselo de manera explícita. Esto gracias al aprovechamiento de las redes sociales como la herramienta de “Inteligencia de Negocios” que permitirá no sólo conectar a los consumidores con las marcas sino también para entender a los clientes finales y con ello desarrollar productos y servicios especializados. Context Awareness se apoya de los Sistemas de Posicionamiento Global (GSP) quienes facilitan servicios basados en la ubicación del usuario para la creación de soluciones contextuales. Diversas arquitecturas son propuestas para el desarrollo de soluciones contextuales sin embargo carecen de ubicuidad, lo que limita la aplicabilidad de las mismas. Este estudio propone una arquitectura lógica para un Sistema Perceptivo del Contexto que permita agilizar la fase de desarrollo reflejando los niveles de dependencia entre componentes hardware y software. A modo validación se proponen escenarios aplicativos que consumen los servicios y dominios propuestos en la arquitectura con ayuda del procesamiento de los sensores y dispositivos inteligentes del mercado móvil. De esta manera, el estudio mejora el desarrollo de los Sistemas Inteligentes. / Los Sistemas Perceptivos del Contexto son capaces de reconocer y anticipar proactivamente a necesidades próximas del usuario teniendo en cuenta intereses, ubicación y proximidad, incluso sin necesidad de comunicárselo de manera explícita. Esto gracias al aprovechamiento de las redes sociales como la herramienta de “Inteligencia de Negocios” que permitirá no sólo conectar a los consumidores con las marcas sino también para entender a los clientes finales y con ello desarrollar productos y servicios especializados. Context Awareness se apoya de los Sistemas de Posicionamiento Global (GSP) quienes facilitan servicios basados en la ubicación del usuario para la creación de soluciones contextuales. Diversas arquitecturas son propuestas para el desarrollo de soluciones contextuales sin embargo carecen de ubicuidad, lo que limita la aplicabilidad de las mismas. Este estudio propone una arquitectura lógica para un Sistema Perceptivo del Contexto que permita agilizar la fase de desarrollo reflejando los niveles de dependencia entre componentes hardware y software. A modo validación se proponen escenarios aplicativos que consumen los servicios y dominios propuestos en la arquitectura con ayuda del procesamiento de los sensores y dispositivos inteligentes del mercado móvil. De esta manera, el estudio mejora el desarrollo de los Sistemas Inteligentes.

A identificação de características que sejam importantes sobre um dado estudante durante o processo de ensino-aprendizagem tem sido alvo de muitos estudos nos últimos tempos. Docentes, coordenadores e pedagogos têm defendido que cada indivíduo possui características particulares e importantes dentro do processo de desenvolvimento do conhecimento. A necessidade de adaptar as estratégias de ensino de acordo com as preferências do aprendiz é uma realidade dentro das salas de aula, sejam estas presenciais ou virtuais. Porém, isto não significa que numa sala de aula deva haver criação de um método para cada aluno, mas sim que se aponte qual a melhor forma de interação para cada um deles construindo grupos de aprendizes com características comuns. Trabalhando desta forma se torna possível identificar perfis de aprendizes dentro de um conjunto de estudantes, possibilitando que se possa trabalhar com conteúdos e ambientes de aprendizagem mais adequados aos aprendizes.O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar a arquitetura de um sistema que possibilita a criação de cenários de aprendizagem baseados no perfil do aluno. O docente deve indicar as características que devem ser observadas durante as interações do aprendiz em um dado ambiente de aprendizagem eletrônica. Estas características serão modeladas como informações de contexto, permitindo que os pontos definidos como observáveis sejam organizados e modelados de forma a facilitar a monitoração das interações. A classificação do aluno em um determinando tipo de perfil de aprendizagem, previamente definido pelo docente, é realizado considerando-se as informações sobre o contexto da interação e os tipos de perfis de aprendizagem. Para que seja possível construir os cenários de aprendizagem considerando o perfil do aluno este trabalho propõe criar um relacionamento entre os tipos de perfis de aprendizagem e as estratégias de ensino através das categorias descritoras dos objetos de aprendizagem. / The identification of characteristics of a given student that are important during the teachinglearning process has been the focus of numerous studies in recent years. Teachers, coordinators and pedagogues have defended the notion that each individual presents particular and important characteristics in the developing knowledge process. The need to adapt teaching strategies to the student\'s preferences is a reality in classrooms, being physical or virtual classrooms. However, this does not mean that a method should be created for each student in a classroom, but that the best form of interaction for each of them be identified, building groups of learners with common characteristics. Working in this way makes it possible to identify learner profiles within a group of students, allowing one to work with learning contents and environments more suited to the learners. The objective of this work is to present the architecture of a system that allows for the creation of learning scenarios based on the studen profile. The teacher should point out the features which may be observed during the student interaction in a given e-elearning environment. These features are designed as context information, allowing defined observation points to be organized and modeled for facilitating the monitoring of interactions. The student classification in a given learning profile type, defined previously by the teacher, is realized considering information about the context of interaction and the learning profile types. For the learning environment to build the learning scenarios according to the student profile, this work proposes to create a relationship between the learning profile types and the teaching strategies through the description of learning objects categories.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-22T17:26:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luthiano.pdf: 2917116 bytes, checksum: 1552e3d64f89b78bc1ba5b80c02ad3be (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-03-29 / This work was aimed at the proposition of a mechanism for context awareness in ubiquitous computing. With technological advances we have smaller and smaller devices and greater computing power and communication which enhances the mobility of the User when carrying their equipment. In this sense, a ubiquitous environment requires the existence of different devices such as sensors, actuators and electronics in general that interact in different ways with users. The diversity of devices and information in a ubiquitous environment as it is, introduces different challenges for interoperability between the different parties involved. Therefore, when building and running applications ubiquitous context-aware, a number of features that should be provided, involving the acquisition of contextual information from the set of heterogeneous sources and distributed to the representation of the information and its processing . With a view to meet these demands of ubiquitous computing, is designed to EXEHDA-SS, to be responsible for processing the contextual information for tasks of manipulation and deduction from the context using ontologies for the representation and processing of contextual information using semantic support / Este trabalho tem como objetivo central a proposic¸ ao de um mecanismo para sensibilidade ao contexto na computac¸ ao ub´ıqua. Com os avanc¸os tecnol´ogicos temos dispositivos cada vez menores e com maior poder de computac¸ ao e comunicac¸ ao o que potencializa a mobilidade do usu´ario quando portando seus equipamentos. Neste sentido, um Ambiente Ub´ıquo pressup oe a exist encia de diferentes dispositivos, tais como sensores, atuadores e eletroeletr onicos em geral que interagem de diferentes maneiras com os usu´arios. A diversidade de dispositivos e informac¸ oes de um Ambiente Ub´ıquo assim constitu´ıdo, introduz diferentes desafios para interoperabilidade entre as diferentes partes envolvidas. Portanto, ao se construir e executar aplicac¸ oes ub´ıquas sens´ıveis ao contexto, h´a uma s´erie de funcionalidades que devem ser providas, envolvendo desde a aquisic¸ ao de informac¸ oes contextuais, a partir do conjunto de fontes heterog eneas e distribu´ıdas, at´e a representac¸ ao dessas informac¸ oes, e seu processamento. Na perspectiva de atender estas demandas da computac¸ ao ub´ıqua, foi concebido o EXEHDA-SS, para ser respons ´avel pelo tratamento das informac¸ oes contextuais, realizando tarefas de manipulac¸ ao e deduc¸ ao sobre o contexto, utilizando ontologias para a representac¸ ao e processamento das informac¸ oes contextuais empregando suporte sem antico .

En la actualidad, la cámara de vídeo se ha convertido en un dispositivo omnipresente. Debido a su miniaturización, estas se pueden encontrar integradas en multitud de dispositivos de uso diario, desde teléfonos móviles o tabletas, hasta ordenadores portátiles. Aunque estos dispositivos son empleados por millones de personas diariamente de forma inofensiva, capturando vídeo, realizando fotografías que luego son compartidas, etc.; el empleo de videocámaras para tareas de videovigilancia levanta cierta preocupación entre la población, sobre todo cuando estas forman parte de sistemas inteligentes de monitorización. Esto supone una amenaza para la privacidad debido a que las grabaciones realizadas por estos sistemas contienen una gran cantidad de información que puede ser extraída de forma automática mediante técnicas de visión artificial. Sin embargo, la aplicación de esta tecnología en diversas áreas puede suponer un impacto muy positivo para las personas. Por otro lado, la población mundial está envejeciendo rápidamente. Este cambio demográfico provocará que un mayor número de personas en situación de dependencia, o que requieren apoyo en su vida diaria, vivan solas. Por lo que se hace necesario encontrar una solución que permita extender su autonomía. La vida asistida por el entorno (AAL por sus siglas en inglés) ofrece una solución aportando inteligencia al entorno donde residen la personas de modo que este les asista en sus actividades diarias. Estos entornos requieren la instalación de sensores para la captura de datos. La utilización de videocámaras, con la riqueza en los datos que ofrecen, en entornos privados haría posible la creación de servicios AAL orientados hacia el cuidado de las personas como, por ejemplo, la detección de accidentes en el hogar, detección temprana de problemas cognitivos y muchos otros. Sin embargo, dada la sencilla interpretación de imágenes por las personas, esto plantea problemas éticos que afectan a la privacidad. En este trabajo se propone una solución para poder hacer uso de videocámaras en entornos privados con el objetivo de dar soporte a las personas y habilitar así el desarrollo de servicios de la vida asistida por el entorno en un hogar inteligente. En concreto, se propone la protección de la privacidad en aquellos servicios AAL de monitorización que requieren acceso al vídeo por parte de un cuidador, ya sea profesional o informal. Esto sucede, por ejemplo, cuando se detecta un accidente en un sistema de monitorización y ese evento requiere la confirmación visual de lo ocurrido. Igualmente, en servicios AAL de telerehabilitación puede ser requerida la supervisión por parte de un humano. En este tipo de escenarios es fundamental proteger la privacidad en el momento en que se esté accediendo u observando el vídeo. Como parte de este trabajo se ha llevado a cabo el estudio del estado de la cuestión en la cual se han revisado los métodos de protección de la privacidad visual presentes en la literatura. Esta revisión es la primera en realizar un análisis exhaustivo de este tema centrándose, principalmente, en los métodos de protección. Como resultado, se ha desarrollado un esquema de protección de la privacidad visual basado en el reconocimiento del contexto que permite adecuar el nivel de privacidad durante la observación cuando las preferencias del usuario coinciden con el contexto. La detección del contexto es necesaria para poder detectar en la escena las circunstancias en que el usuario demanda determinado nivel de privacidad. Mediante la utilización de este esquema, cada uno de los fotogramas que componen un flujo de vídeo en directo es modificado antes de su transmisión teniendo en cuenta los requisitos de privacidad del usuario. El esquema propuesto hace uso de diversas técnicas de modificación de imágenes para proteger la privacidad, así como de visión artificial para reconocer dicho contexto. Por tanto, en esta tesis doctoral se realizan diversas contribuciones en distintas áreas con el objetivo de llevar a cabo el desarrollo del esquema propuesto de protección de la privacidad visual. De este modo, se espera que los resultados obtenidos nos sitúen un paso más cerca de la utilización de videocámaras en entornos privados, incrementando su aceptación y haciendo posible la implantación de servicios AAL basados en visión artificial que permitan aumentar la autonomía de las personas en situación de dependencia.

This thesis describes research on methods for Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing to better suit users in an Intelligent Environment. The approach is to create and equip a computing environment, such as our Active Office, with technologies that can identify user needs and meet these need in a timely, efficient and unobtrusive manner.¶ The critical issues in the Intelligent Environment are how to enable transparent, distributed computing to allow continued operation across changing circumstances and how to exploit the changing environment so that it is aware of the context of user location, the collection of nearby people and objects, accessible devices and changes to those objects over time.¶ Since the Intelligent Environment is an environment with rapid and rich computing processing, the distributed context processing architecture (DiCPA) was developed to manage and respond to rapidly changing aggregation of sensor data. This architecture is a scalable distributed context processing architecture that provides: 1. continued operation across changing circumstances for users, 2. the collection of nearby people and objects, 3. accessible devices and 4. the changes to those objects over time in the environment. The DiCPA approach focuses on how the Intelligent Environment provides context information for user location, user mobility and the user activity model. Users are assumed mobile within the Intelligent Environment and can rapidly change their access to relevant information and the availability of communications and computational resources.¶ Context-Aware Computing is a new approach in software engineering for Intelligent Environment. It is an approach in the design and construction of a context-aware application that exploits rapid changes in access to relevant information and the availability of communication and computing resources in the mobile computing environment. The goal of Context-Aware Computing is to make user interaction with the computer easier in the smart environment where technology is spread throughout (pervasive), computers are everywhere at the same time (ubiquitous) and technology is embedded (ambient) in the environment. Context-aware applications need not be difficult, tedious or require the acquisition of new skills on the part of the user. They should be safe, easy, simple to use and should enable new functionality without the need to learn new technology. They should provide relevant information and a simple way for a user to manage.¶ The Intelligent Environment requires a context-aware application to improve its efficiency and to increase productivity and enjoyment for the user. The context awareness mechanism has four fundamental cores i.e. identity (who), activity (what), location (where) and timestamp (when). Based on DiCPA architecture, the model of user location (where), user mobility (where), user activity (what) and Intelligent Environment response (what) were developed. Prototypes were also developed to proof the Context-Aware Computing concept in the Intelligent Environment.¶ An Intelligent Environment uses the multi-disciplinary area of Context-Aware Computing, which combines technology, computer systems, models and reasoning, social aspects, and user support. A “good quality” project for Context-Aware Computing requires core content and provides iterative evaluation processes, which has two types of iteration: design and product iteration of the evaluation. The aim of the development of an evaluation program in Context-Aware Computing is to determine what to test, how to test and the appropriate metrics to use. This work presents the metrics for a good quality project in the Context-Aware Computing area, which is followed by the evaluation of the prototypes of this work.

Researchers have approached the problem of designing context-aware systems, computer systems that can react intelligently to the context in which they are used, from both software engineering and human-centred perspectives. While engineered context-aware systems have found successful application in optimising technical settings without requiring mundane and explicit interaction from humans, challenges remain in furthering their application to more complex environments. In particular, when technical decisions and human actions are intertwined in sophisticated work environments (rather than, for example, the simple act of transferring a mobile phone call to receive a signal from the nearest tower), the problem of designing context-aware systems demands further examination and calls for a new approach. A natural extension of the software engineering approach in more challenging environments is to try to implement increasingly sophisticated algorithms for managing context in the hope that this will lead to autonomous application behaviour. In contrast, research from a human-centred perspective, grounded in the social sciences and philosophy, demonstrates that context is not entirely objective and measurable but rather is dynamic and created through human action. It may not be easily detected through technical sensing systems, and therefore simply employing more sophisticated algorithms within the technical sphere may not be effective. While engineering approaches have continued to evolve, the problem of how to design interfaces to context-aware applications still remains. The research reported in this dissertation investigated the problem of designing context-aware systems for the complex environment of a dental surgery. I undertook, though a participatory design approach (a) to better characterise the problem of designing context-aware systems, and (b) to understand how design methods could be employed to bridge the human and software engineering approaches. The gap in existing research on context-aware systems is evident in the way that the methods applied to designing systems don't provide an insight into how people actively create the context in which they work (in a practical rather than theoretical sense) they don‘t closely examine the behaviours of people, the role and arrangement of artefacts, and the dynamic relationships between people and artefacts. I found that an understanding of how these features of work and human behaviour are realised in practice in a given environment is fundamental to being able to design an effective context-aware system for that environment. The challenge is to design at the boundary between the technical and the social. The contribution of this thesis is an approach that explores context-aware design through synthesis. The synthetic approach leads to design opportunities and guidelines based on an understanding of the processes through which people actively co-create the context in which they work. I have applied and built upon a number of existing user-centred design and participatory design methods, in addition to creating some new methods in order to develop an understanding of how designers can examine the human aspects surrounding the co-creation of context and apply these in a way that progressively informs the design process. The methods collectively represent a novel approach to designing context-aware applications and differ from the more traditional technical approaches of developing software frameworks and infrastructures, and formal models of context, tasks, users, and systems. The techniques presented have focused primarily on developing an understanding of how humans find meaning in their actions along with their interaction with other people and technology. Participatory design methods help participants to reveal potential implicit technical resources that can be presented explicitly in technologies in order to assist humans in managing their interactions with and amidst technical systems gracefully. The methods introduced and the design approach proposed complement existing research on context-awareness from both a human-centred and software engineering perspective. This research builds on the notion of providing resources which allow users to manage their own context and also manage shifts in control while interacting with other people and with a variety of technical artefacts. It does this by examining a complex work environment, in particular looking at the kinds of resources people use and expect to use (and the constraints around these), the form(s) it is appropriate for them to take, and the patterns of interaction they will ultimately be used within.

Lors de la dernière décennie, le nombre d'appareils possédant des capacités sans fil a très fortement augmenté, attirant ainsi le grand public vers les réseaux mobiles sans fil. Nous considérons le cas des réseaux mobiles ad hoc aussi connu sous le nom de MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks). La caractéristique principale des MANETs est la grande dynamicité des nœuds (induite pas le mouvement des utilisateurs), la propriété volatile des transmissions sans fil, le comportement des utilisateurs, les services et leurs utilisations. Cette thèse propose une solution complète pour la découverte de service dans les réseaux ad hoc, de la couche réseau sous-jacente à la découverte de service à proprement dite. La première contribution est le protocole Stable Linked Structure Flooding (SLSF) qui établi une structure basée sur des clusters stable et permet d'obtenir une dissémination efficace qui passe à l'échelle. La seconde contribution est SLSR (Stable Linked Structure Routing) qui utilise la structure de dissémination de SLSF et permet de faire du routage à travers le réseau. En utilisant ces protocoles comme base, nous proposons d'améliorer la découverte de service en prenant en compte le contexte. De plus, nous avons contribué à la simulation réseau en couplant des modèles et des simulateurs de domaines différents qui une fois couplés permettent d'élaborer et la simuler des scénarios riches et variés adaptés aux MANETs. Cette thèse à été réalisé au sein du projet ANR SARAH qui avait pour but le déploiement de service multimédia dans une architecture ad hoc hybride.

Ambient intelligence refers to the vision of computationally augmented everyday environments that are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to humans and intelligently support their daily lives. Ambient ecologies are the infrastructures of ambient intelligence. To enable system developers to frame and manage the dynamic and complex interaction of humans with ambient ecologies consisting of a mixture of physical (real) and virtual (digital) objects, novel interaction paradigms are needed. Traditional interaction paradigms like the WIMP (windows, icon, menus, and pointing devices) paradigm for desktop computing operate in a closed world, unaware of the physical, social and cultural context. They restrict human perception and action to screen, mouse and keyboard with the assumption that human attention will be fully devoted to interaction with the computer. Emerging interaction paradigms for ambient intelligence are typically centered on specific devices, specific computing environments or specific human capabilities. Also, many of them are driven by technological advancements rather than viewing the human agent as their starting point. A principled, theoretical approach centered in the individual human agent, their situation and activities that are comprehensive and integrated while at the same time instrumental in the design of ambient ecologies has been lacking. This thesis introduces egocentric interaction as an approach towards the modeling of ambient ecologies with the distinguishing feature of taking the human agent’s body, situation and activities as center of reference, as opposed to the more common device-centric approaches in facilitating human-environment interaction. Egocentric interaction is encapsulated in a number of assumptions and principles such as situatedness, the proximity principle, the physical-virtual equity principle, perception and action instead of “input” and “output,” and activity-centeredness. A situative space model is proposed based on some of these principles. It is intended to capture what a specific human agent can perceive and not perceive, reach and not reach at any given moment in time. The situative space model is for the egocentric interaction paradigm what the virtual desktop is for the WIMP interaction paradigm: more or less everything of interest to a specific human agent is assumed and supposed to happen here. In addition, the conception and implementation of the easy ADL ecology based on egocentric interaction, comprising of smart objects, a personal activity-centric middleware, ambient intelligence applications aimed at everyday activity support, and a human agent literally in the middle of it all is described. The middleware was developed to address important challenges in ambient intelligence: (1) tracking and managing smart objects; (2) tracking a human agent’s situative spaces; (3) recognizing human activities and actions; (4) managing and facilitating human-environment interaction; and (5) to ease up the development of ambient intelligence applications. The easy ADL ecology was first simulated in immersive virtual reality, and then set up physically as a living laboratory to evaluate: (1) the technological and technical performance of individual middleware components, (2) to perform a user experience evaluation assessing various aspects of user satisfaction in relation to the support offered by the easy ADL ecology, and (3) to use it as a research test bed for addressing challenges in ambient intelligence. While it is problematic to directly compare the “proof-of-concept” easy ADL ecology with related research efforts, it is clear from the user experience evaluation that the subjects were positive with the services it offered. / easy ADL project

In grids, delegation is a key facility that can be used to authenticate and authorize requests on behalf of disconnected users. In current grid systems,delegation is either performed dynamically, in an unrestricted manner, or by a secure but static method. Unfortunately, the former compromises security and the latter cannot satisfy the requirements of dynamic grid application execution. Therefore, development of a delegation framework that enables a restricted and flexible delegation mechanism becomes increasingly urgent as grids are adopted by new communities and grow in size. The main barriers in development of such a mechanism are the requirements for dynamic execution of grid applications, which make it difficult to anticipate required access rights for completing tasks in advance. Another significant architectural requirement in grids is federated security and trust. A considerable barrier to achieving this is cross-organizational authentication and identification. Organizations participating in Virtual Organizations (VOs) may use different security infrastructures that implement different protocols for authentication and identification; thus, there exists a need to provide an architectural mechanism for lightweight, rapid and interoperable translation of security credentials from an original format to a format understandable by recipients. This thesis contributes the development of a delegation framework that utilizes a mechanism for determining and acquiring only required rights and credentials for completing a task, when they are needed. This is what we call an on-demand delegation framework that realizes a bottom-up delegation model and provides a just-in-time acquisition of rights for restricted and dynamic delegation. In this thesis, we further contribute the development of a credential mapping mechanism using off-the-shelf standards and technologies. This mechanism provides support for an on-the-fly exchange of different types of security credentials used by the security mechanisms of existing grids. / QC 20100622

In this thesis, an emergency management system taking advantage of mobile computing and its awareness on context is provided. The framework primarily aims to create an infrastructure for acquiring implicit and explicit data about an emergency situation by using capabilities of smart mobile devices and converting them into value-added information to be used in phases of emergency management. In addition to conceptual description of the framework, a real prototype implementation is developed and successful application of the framework is demonstrated. Sample cases are analyzed in conjunction with the prototype and an experiment for reporting an emergency situation is carried out by a group of participants in order to demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of the framework. Data collected during the experiment are examined in order to determine the advantages of the proposed system in comparison with traditional emergency reporting efforts.