Assurer l'interopérabilité de manière dynamique et automatique demeure un enjeu majeur dans le développement et la mise en œuvre des systèmes logiciels modernes. En effet, ces systèmes comprennent souvent plusieurs composants qui fonctionnent conjointement afin de satisfaire aux exigences des utilisateurs. Toutefois, les disparités pouvant exister entre les interfaces et les comportements de ces composants les empêchent de fonctionner ensemble, c'est-à-dire d'interopérer. Les solutions existantes visent à concilier ces disparités à travers la mise en œuvre d'intergiciels ou la génération de médiateurs. La mise en œuvre d'intergiciels n'offre qu'une solution statique, inadaptée aux environnements fortement dynamiques, tels que les environnements ubiquitaires. Les approches pour la génération de médiateurs requièrent que les correspondances entre les interfaces des composants soient préalablement spécifiées, et n'offrent de ce fait qu'une solution partiellement automatique à l'interopérabilité. Ainsi, les solutions existantes se révèlent souvent insuffisantes, particulièrement dans les environnements où les composants devant interopérer ne sont connus qu'à l'exécution. Dans cette thèse, nous définissons une approche à l'interopérabilité basée sur la synthèse automatique de médiateurs. Tout d'abord, nous intégrons la programmation par contraintes et le raisonnement ontologique afin d'inférer les traductions nécessaires pour pallier les différences entre les interfaces des composants. Ces traductions servent de base à la synthèse de médiateurs qui coordonnent les comportements des composants afin de garantir l'absence d'interblocage lors de leurs interactions. Enfin, nous procédons à l'analyse et la génération des messages au niveau intergiciel de façon à implémenter ces médiateurs. Pour valider notre approche, nous avons développé un prototype, appelé MICS, qui effectue la synthèse dynamique de médiateurs afin d'assurer l'interopérabilité entre composants en dépit de leurs différences aussi bien au niveau applicatif qu'au niveau intergiciel. Nous avons également expérimenté MICS en considérant plusieurs cas d'études allant de la médiation entre messageries instantanées à la gestion de l'interopérabilité dans les systèmes de systèmes. Cela nous a permis d'une part de démontrer la viabilité de notre solution et d'autre part d'évaluer son efficacité.

Personal informatics systems help people collect and reflect on behavioral information to better understand their own behavior. Because most systems only show one type of behavioral information, finding factors that affect one’s behavior is difficult. Supporting exploration of multiple types of contextual and behavioral information in a single interface may help. To explore this, I developed prototypes of IMPACT, which supports reflection on physical activity and multiple types of contextual information. I conducted field studies of the prototypes, which showed that such a system could increase people’s awareness of opportunities for physical activity. However, several limitations affected the usage and value of these prototypes. To improve support for such systems, I conducted a series of interviews and field studies. First, I interviewed people about their experiences using personal informatics systems resulting in the Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems, which describes the different stages that systems need to support, and a list of problems that people experience in each of the stages. Second, I identified the kinds of questions people ask about their personal data and found that the importance of these questions differed between two phases: Discovery and Maintenance. Third, I evaluated different visualization features to improve support for reflection on multiple kinds of data. Finally, based on this evaluation, I developed a system called Innertube to help people reflect on multiple kinds of data in a single interface using a visualization integration approach that makes it easier to build such tools compared to the more common data integration approach.

Almost 20 years ago, Marc Weiser envisioned the prospect of computer in 21st century, and proposed the pioneering notion of ubiquitous computing. One of Weiser's primary ideas has recently evolved to a more general paradigm known as context awareness, becoming a central research theme in many other ubiquitous computing programs. From Active Badge considered as the first context-aware application, there are numerous attempts to build effective context-aware systems. However, how to acquire context, how to process context and how to create context-aware applications is still faced with enormous challenges in the both of research and practice. This dissertation investigates deeply some chosen key issues in context awareness and develops a context-aware middleware. The main research contributions are presented in three categories: a spatialtemporal context represent model, a context-aware middleware and an intelligence context inference engine. The spatial-temporal context representation model is proposed to organize context and relations for context-aware system. Ontology-based method is adopted to construct our model, supporting both knowledge sharing and reuse as well as logic inference. This model adopts two-layer hierarchy structure for different situation. The higher layer comes up with the generic common context, while the lower layer focuses on various specific situations. Differing from existing models, besides taking locational factors into account, it supports different historical context service depending on different context resource. These context histories may be used to predict and infer the context. A context-aware middleware is designed as a platform associated with context retrieval and context processing. It is organized in two layers: the low layer provides a solution to integrate sensors and actuators with a standardized data representation; the high layer: versatile context interpreter focuses on context processing, which is made up of four parts: Context Aggregator, Inference Engine, Context Knowledge Base, and Query Engine in charge of context inferences, expressive query, and persistent storage. This middleware provides an environment for rapid prototyping of context aware services in ambient intelligent. The intelligent inference engine is the central and intellectual component of context-aware middleware. We review all the methods on activity context recognition published in three premier conferences in past decade and conclude that activity context recognition is divided into three facets: basic activity inference, dynamic activity analysis and future activity recommendation. Then we propose an intelligent inference engine based on our context-aware middleware. Beside satisfying requirements of checking the context consistency, our inference engine integrates the three most popular methods on activity context recognition: Rules, Decision Tree, and Hide Markov Model. It provides a solution for all facets of activity context recognition based on our context-aware middleware. The individuals' information collecting from their social networks under permission are leveraged to train intelligent inference engine. We finally use two scenarios (applications) to explain the generic process to develop application via our middleware, and compare and analyze the main aspects of our middleware with other five representative context-aware applications. Our middleware profits good features from existing context-aware systems and improve intelligence via supporting activity context recognition. It provides an efficient platform for a rapid developing of new context-aware applications in ambient intelligence.

Les entités physiques prises en compte par les applications dites M2M dans les télécoms sont aujourd'hui de plus en plus hétérogènes. Le défi adressé par ce travail est donc l'intégration, et la configuration automatiques de toutes ces différentes variétés d'entités physiques d'une façon homogène dans les systèmes M2M, en généralisant les approches de configuration automatique déjà connues et utilisées pour les objets communicants numériques. Cette thèse présente un cadre théorique général et des mécanismes de base pour l'identification de modèles de telles entités physiques dans les systèmes d'information embarqués répartis, en englobant dans une même approche les équipements et les sous-ensembles de l'espace, faisant se rejoindre les points de vue "internet des objets" et "environnement interactif" dans une nouvelle vision unifiée de l'intelligence ambiante. Ce travail, motivé initialement par les applications à la gestion d'énergie domestique, cherche à intégrer au réseau local de la maison des entités physiques qui ont un impact énergétique mais ne sont dotés d'aucune connexion réseau, ce qui correspond à une extension qualitative du périmètre de l'Internet des Objets. Cette intégration se fait de manière tout à fait similaire à ce qui est fait classiquement pour des équipements numériques état de l'art, c'est-à-dire par des mécanismes de découverte et configuration spontanés. Ces mécanismes comportent les étapes suivantes : détection de la présence d'une entité physique par analyse de la coïncidence d'évènements significatifs reçus de capteurs ; sélection d'un premier modèle générique représentatif de l'entité physique détectée depuis une ontologie de référence en analysant des données reçues les capteurs ; création d'un composant logiciel représentant l'entité physique détectée, à partir du modèle sélectionné, et associant les capteurs et actionneurs utiles ; supervision et contrôle de l'entité cible par l'intermédiaire de ce composant logiciel ; mise à jour incrémentale du modèle de l'entité identifiée par analyse des données issues des capteurs associés. Ce travail est parti d'applications dans l'environnement de la maison, pour lesquelles il a été validé et mis en œuvre. Mais notre approche a vocation à être généralisée et étendue à des environnements comme les bâtiments ou la ville, en offrant suivant le même principe une infrastructure partagée pour toutes les applications M2M dans ces environnements

Weighted granular best matching algorithm is proposed for the operation of context matching in context-aware computing systems. New algorithm deals with the subjective, fuzzy and multidimensional characteristics of contextual information by using weights and a granular structure for contextual information. The proposal is applied on a case: CAPRA &ndash / Context-Aware Personal Reminder Agent tool to show the applicability of the new context matching algorithm. The obtained outputs showed that proposed algorithm produces the results which are more sensitive to the user&rsquo / s intention, more adaptive to the characteristics of the contextual information and applicable to a current Context-aware system.

The future Internet will need to cater for an increasing number of powerful devices and entire groups of networks to roam in heterogeneous access networks. The current approach towards meeting such requirements, which is to retrofit mobility solutions to different layers of the protocol stack, has given rise to an increasingly fragmented network control layer. Furthermore, retrofitting solutions in an ad-hoc manner to the protocol stack does not provide consistent support from the network to different applications. This lack of a common control layer for facilitating roaming in heterogeneous networking environments represents a crucial challenge both technically and from a user perspective. To this end, a novel mobility architecture forms the basis and the first part of this dissertation. The work on investigating current network mobility solutions and improving these solutions if deemed necessary, in order to reuse within the novel mobility architecture constitutes the second part of this dissertation. The IETF standard protocol for network mobility was implemented and its performance was analysed on a real networking environment. This enabled to identify problems in the standard which affect the handover and routing performance. To address the identified routing and protocol header overheads of the standard network mobility protocol a novel optimal routing framework, OptiNets was proposed. To address the handover latency issues, optimizations to IPv6 network attachment were incorporated and also an access technology independent multiple interface Make-Before-Break handover mechanism was proposed. The viability of the OptiNets framework and the handover optimizations were demonstrated by analysis and by implementation. A more general external factor that affects the performance of mobile networks which is bandwidth scarcity of Wireless Wide Area Networks was addressed, by proposing a bandwidth fuelling architecture for on-board mobile networks. The feasibility of the bandwidth fuelling architecture was analysed by implementing a prototype and evaluating its performance.

Aplicações ubíquas e pervasivas são cientes do contexto dos recursos utilizados no que diz respeito à disponibilidade e qualidade. Esta classe de aplicações pode se beneficiar de mecanismos para descobrir recursos que atendam aos requisitos não-funcionais desejados, e mecanismos para monitorar a qualidade destes recursos. Neste trabalho é proposta uma arquitetura para dois serviços que deveriam ser incluídos na infra-estrutura de suporte a ser utilizada pelas aplicações mencionadas: um Serviço de Contexto, que provê acesso a informações de contexto, e um Serviço de Descoberta, que permite a descoberta dinâmica de recursos, levando em conta restrições de contexto a serem satisfeitas. Estes serviços se apóiam em Agentes de Recursos, que efetivamente monitoram os recursos e sensores. Uma implementação de referência foi desenvolvida, oferecendo os serviços mencionados na forma de Serviços Web e implementando os Agentes de Recursos empregando um padrão de projeto simples. Para avaliar os serviços estes foram utilizados como infra-estrutura para o desenvolvimento de um sistema tolerante a falhas e uma aplicação de assistência domiciliar remota (tele-saúde). O desempenho dos serviços também foi avaliado. / Ubiquitous and pervasive applications are aware of the context of the used resources, regarding their availability and quality. This class of application can benefit from mechanisms to discover resources that meet their non-functional requirements and mechanisms to monitor the quality of those resources. We proposed architecture for two services that should be included in the supporting infrastructure used by the mentioned applications: a Context Service that provides access to context information; and a Discovery Service, which allows the dynamic discovery of resources, considering context constraints to be satisfied. These services rely on Resource Agents, which monitor the actual resources and sensors. A reference implementation was developed, providing the mentioned services as Web Services and implementing the Resource Agents using a simple design pattern. To evaluate these services were employed them as the infrastructure to design a fault tolerant system and a remote assisted living application. The performance of the services was also evaluated.

The modern world can be characterized by the quick proliferation of mobile devices and by the intense use of computers on our daily lives. Both pervasive computing and cloud computing have appeared as very promissing trends, but for pervasive computing to reach mainstream, many paradigm changes are needed on the current computing environments. Some of the problems found in pervasive camputing are not from a technical order, but due to a lack of standards and models to allow devices to interoperate and the problems related to the creation of low cost computing environments. Pervasive environments are marked by having sudden and frequent changes, making it necessary to think of a way to manage context information. This work aims at showing a solution that will allow the creation of pervasive computing environments using resources available in the cloud computing paradigm and taking in consideration requisites like the ability of mixing heterogenous computing devices running on the least possible amount of resources and using ontologies for context information representation and management. In this context, an architecture for the development of pervasive computing environments, an study case in a residencial cenario and an analysis of the results obtained with the proposed architecture are presented. / O mundo atual é caracterizado pela rápida proliferação de dispositivos móveis e pelo intenso uso de computadores no nosso cotidiano. Tanto a computação pervasiva quanto a computação em nuvem têm surgido como uma tendência muito promissora. Porém, para que a computação pervasiva se consolide são necessárias algumas mudanças de paradigma nos ambientes atuais da computação. Boa parte dos problemas encontrados hoje em dia na computação pervasiva não são de ordem técnica, mas sim a falta de padrões e modelos para permitir a interoperabilidade entre os dispositivos e a criação de ambientes computacionais de baixo custo. Os ambientes de computação pervasiva são caracterizados por mudanças rápidas e frequentes, sendo necessária a existência de alguma maneira para gerenciar essa informação de contexto. Essa dissertação visa apresentar uma solução para permitir a criação de ambientes de computação pervasiva utilizando serviços disponíveis no paradigma da computação em nuvem levando em consideração requisitos como a capacidade de trabalhar com dispositivos computacionais heterogêneos consumindo o mínimo possível de recursos e utilizando ontologias para a representação de informação de contexto. Nesse contexto, são apresentadas uma proposta de arquitetura para ambientes pervasivos, um estudo de caso em um cenário residencial e apresentados resultados e conclusões sobre a arquitetura proposta. Os resultados alcançados no estudo de caso permitiram a implementação de um ambiente pervasivo utilizando recursos computacionais disponíveis na nuvem e atingind os objetivos propostos no trabalho.

Actual healthcare systems suffer from a high rate of rejection by the physicians who use these systems, because it is necessary that the users explicitly provide information constantly to these systems. This way, one of the biggest challenges for pervasive healthcare systems is to find a way to use context information of the environment in a simple and functional form between different computer systems. In the literature, ontologies are frequently used for the representation of context and have an important role in pervasive systems if used together with forms of persistence and retrieval of context information. To solve the mentioned problem, is under development an architecture called ClinicSpace which focuses on providing assistance to physicians in performing their daily tasks, using concepts defined in ubiquitous computing, which allows the system to to adapt constantly to the user and their needs. To make this, it is necessary that the system be capable of (i) store information of context and (ii) provide the documents frequently used by physicians, in an adapted way to the context of the tasks performed, and available anytime and anywhere (pervasiveness). This work describes the process of developing an integrated service ClinicSpace to architecture, which supports the use of context data and clinical documents in a distributed manner, and also allows the contextualized selection of clinical documents, using data from the context at the time of clinical information query. / Os sistemas de saúde atuais sofrem de uma alta taxa de rejeição por parte dos profissionais clínicos que utilizam estes sistemas, pois é necessário que os usuários forneçam informações de forma explícita e constante. Desta forma, um dos maiores desafios para sistemas de saúde pervasivos é encontrar uma forma de utilizar informações de contexto do ambiente de um modo simples e funcional entre diferentes sistemas computacionais. Na literatura, ontologias são frequentemente utilizadas para a representação de contexto e possuem um importante papel em sistemas pervasivos se utilizadas em conjunto com formas de persistência e recuperação de informações de contexto. Para resolver o problema citado, está em fase de desenvolvimento uma arquitetura chamada ClinicSpace que tem como foco fornecer ajuda aos profissionais clínicos na execução de suas tarefas diárias, através de conceitos definidos na computação ubíqua, os quais permitem ao sistema se adaptar constantemente ao usuário e as suas necessidades. Para que isto ocorra, é necessário que o sistema seja capaz de (i) armazenar informações de contexto e de (ii) apresentar os documentos frequentemente utilizados pelos profissionais clínicos, de forma adaptada ao contexto das tarefas executadas, e disponíveis a qualquer hora e em qualquer lugar (pervasividade). Este trabalho descreve o processo de desenvolvimento de um serviço integrado à arquitetura ClinicSpace, o qual fornece suporte à utilização de dados de contexto e documentos clínicos de uma forma distribuída, e também permite a seleção contextualizada de documentos clínicos, utilizando dados de contexto no momento de consulta a informações clínicas.

Ubiquitous Computing or Pervasive Computing is a new paradigm that aims to provide information and communication technology accessible anywhere, by anyone, available anytime, where computational resources should be integrated into the physical environment in a transparent manner. One of the areas of research on pervasive computing infrastructure is related to hospital settings, because of the characteristics of mobility, collaboration and interruption. In this context, the ClinicSpace project, under development at GMob / PPGI / UFSM, uses the concepts of Pervasive Computing to help physicians while performing their tasks in an hospital settings. The goal is to allow doctors to customize the execution of their tasks, which are managed by a middleware in a pervasive environment. Medical work is highly collaborative because of specialist nature of treatments: physicians from different specialties need to collaborate across time and space. Another important aspect to note is characteristic of the asynchronous communication between these professionals, for example, when changing shift. This thesis presents a Collaboration Service created to support asynchronous collaboration among professionals through the delegation of tasks that are not yet complete, integrated to architecture of the ClinicSpace project. Currently, most studies that focus the collaborative aspects in hospital settings with a base of a pervasive middleware have focused on synchronous collaboration, with several efforts to create mechanisms to help, especially in diagnostics, physically distributed teams. Unlike these approaches, this thesis focuses on the characteristics of asynchronous collaboration in hospital settings, always with central vision in the doctor and the particular way of executing their medical activity. An analysis of the applications performance was made after the modifications to the architecture of ClinicSpace project and the conclusion was that after the introduction of a caching mechanism for the tasks, changes in the architecture remained a performance in the execution of applications in pervasive environment, similar than what they had before the modifications. / A Computação Ubíqua (Ubiquitous Computing) ou Pervasiva (Pervasive Computing) é um novo paradigma computacional que objetiva prover tecnologia de informação e comunicação em qualquer lugar, acessível por qualquer pessoa, disponível o tempo todo, onde os recursos computacionais devem estar integrados ao ambiente físico de forma transparente. Uma das áreas de pesquisa sobre infraestrutura computacional pervasiva está relacionada a ambientes clínicos, devido às características de mobilidade, interrupção e colaboração. Dentro deste contexto, o projeto ClinicSpace, em desenvolvimento no GMob / PPGI / UFSM, utiliza os conceitos de Computação Pervasiva para auxiliar os médicos na execução de suas tarefas em um ambiente hospitalar. O objetivo é permitir aos médicos a personalização da execução de suas tarefas, que são gerenciadas por uma infraestrutura computacional em um ambiente pervasivo. O trabalho clínico é altamente colaborativo devido à natureza especialista do tratamento: médicos de diferentes especialidades precisam colaborar através do tempo e espaço. Outro aspecto importante a ser observado é a característica assíncrona da comunicação entre esses profissionais, como por exemplo, em uma troca de turno. Este trabalho apresenta o Serviço de Colaboração criado para dar suporte à colaboração assíncrona entre os profissionais da área da saúde através da delegação de tarefas que ainda não foram concluídas, de forma integrada à arquitetura do projeto ClinicSpace. Atualmente, a maioria dos trabalhos que abordam os aspectos colaborativos de ambientes clínicos com suporte de uma infraestrutura computacional pervasiva tem o foco na colaboração síncrona, com vários esforços para a criação de mecanismos para auxiliar, principalmente, os diagnósticos em equipes fisicamente distribuídas. Diferente destas abordagens, este trabalho observa as características assíncronas da colaboração em ambientes hospitalares, sempre com a visão central no clínico e sua forma particular de executar a atividade médica. Foi feita uma análise de desempenho das aplicações após as modificações realizadas na arquitetura do projeto ClinicSpace e a conclusão foi que, após a introdução de um mecanismo de cache para as tarefas, as alterações na arquitetura mantiveram um desempenho na execução das aplicações no ambiente pervasivo, semelhante ao que se tinha antes das modificações.