Interactions in the style of the ubiquitous computing paradigm are possible today, but only in handcrafted environments within one administrative and technological realm. This thesis describes an architecture (called Continuum), a design that realises the architecture, and a proof-of-concept implementation that brings ubiquitous computing to chaotic environments. Essentially, Continuum enables an ecology at the edge of the network, between users, competing service providers from overlapping administrative domains, competing internet service providers, content providers, and software developers that want to add value to the user experience. Continuum makes the ubiquitous computing functionality orthogonal to other application logic. Existing web applications are augmented for ubiquitous computing with functionality that is dynamically compiled and injected by a middleware proxy into the web pages requested by a web browser at the user?s mobile device. This enables adaptability to environment variability, manageability without user involvement, and expansibility without changes to the mobile. The middleware manipulates self-contained software units with precise functionality (called <i>frames</i>), which help the user interact with contextual services in conjunction with the data to which they are attached. The middleware and frame design explicitly incorporates the possibility of discrepancies between the assumptions of ubiquitous-computing software developers and field realities: multiple administrative domains, unavailable service, unavailable software, and missing contextual information. A framework for discovery and authorisation addresses the chaos inherent to the paradigm through the notion of <i>role assertions</i> acquired dynamically by the user. Each assertion represents service access credentials and contains bootstrapping points for service discovery on behalf of the holding user. A proof-of-concept prototype validates the design, and implements several frames that demonstrate general functionality, including driving discovery queries over multiple service discovery protocols and making equivalences between service types, across discovery protocols.

År 2002 uppmärksammade ungdomspsykiatriska avdelningar barn som i folkmun kom att kallas "de apatiska barnen". Regeringen initierade 2004 en nationell översyn av det växande problemet. Syftet för denna uppsats är därmed att beskriva och granska kunskapsläget inom de medicinska, psykologiska och sociala forskningsfältet kring apati hos asylsökande barn i ett nationellt och internationellt perspektiv. Syftet är vidare att analysera hur man kan förstå den offentliga och mediala diskursen och hur den konstrueras utifrån ett konflikt- och maktperspektiv. För att synliggöra hur den offentliga och mediala diskursen konstrueras genomförs en kontrovers- och maktanalys. Ett rättighetsperspektiv, kopplat till FN;s konvention om barns rättigheter, är även en utgångspunkt för studien. Studien granskar ett tema men bygger på två delar med delvis olika syfte. Uppsatsens tema och området för de två delstudierna behandlar apatiska flyktingbarn inom ett medicinskt, beteende- och samhällsvetenskapligt perspektiv. Del 1 utgörs av en systematisk kunskapsöverskit inom området. Del 2 studerar konstruktionen av den offentliga och mediala diskursen gällande de apatiska barnen under åren 2005 och 2006. För delstudie 1 har vetenskapliga artiklar sökts i databaserna Medline, PsykINFO, PubMed, Assia, Pilots samt Läkartidningen. I del 2 har offentliga rapporter kopplats till nedslag i den mediala debatten i Nerikes Allehanda, Dagens nyheter och Sveriges radio under två tidspersioder. Resultatet visar stora likheter mellan Pervasive refusal syndrom och uppgivenhetssyndrom eller apati hos asylsökande barn. Analysen av den offentliga och mediala diskursen visar att frågan gav upphov till en konfliktrelaterad diskurs med en stark polisering av de asylsökande barnenes hälsa i en process där inslag av diciplinerade strategier kan påvisas samt att moralisk panik tycks ha uppstått.

Interactions in the style of the ubiquitous computing paradigm are possible today, but only in handcrafted environments within one administrative and technological realm. This thesis describes an architecture (called Continuum), a design that realises the architecture, and a proof-of-concept implementation that brings ubiquitous computing to chaotic environments. Essentially, Continuum enables an ecology at the edge of the network, between users, competing service providers from overlapping administrative domains, competing internet service providers, content providers, and software developers that want to add value to the user experience. Continuum makes the ubiquitous computing functionality orthogonal to other application logic. Existing web applications are augmented for ubiquitous computing with functionality that is dynamically compiled and injected by a middleware proxy into the web pages requested by a web browser at the user?s mobile device. This enables adaptability to environment variability, manageability without user involvement, and expansibility without changes to the mobile. The middleware manipulates self-contained software units with precise functionality (called <i>frames</i>), which help the user interact with contextual services in conjunction with the data to which they are attached. The middleware and frame design explicitly incorporates the possibility of discrepancies between the assumptions of ubiquitous-computing software developers and field realities: multiple administrative domains, unavailable service, unavailable software, and missing contextual information. A framework for discovery and authorisation addresses the chaos inherent to the paradigm through the notion of <i>role assertions</i> acquired dynamically by the user. Each assertion represents service access credentials and contains bootstrapping points for service discovery on behalf of the holding user. A proof-of-concept prototype validates the design, and implements several frames that demonstrate general functionality, including driving discovery queries over multiple service discovery protocols and making equivalences between service types, across discovery protocols.

<p>The cellular phone network has been increasing rapidly during the last years. For many people the mobile phone has become an every day gadget with a wide performance and functional range. The usage of technologies like GPRS, HSCSD, EDGE and UMTS as well as the bandwidth of networks and consequently the connectivity of the phones has also increased persistently. Coming along with that, three technologies, which are ubiquitous or pervasive computing, mobile and wireless networks and location-based technologies, are making rapid progress.</p><p>The aim of this thesis is to offer an architecture for a location-based user interface in the intersection of the three technologies mentioned above. The system should work with a minimum of special hardware requirement. Not to overload the user with information, the user interface should be adaptable, context-aware and location-based. The context-data should remain extendible and adaptable.</p>

This dissertation identifies the diluting effects that network society has had on the avant-garde subcultures, by first building a framework through which to understand the social structure and spatial production of the historical avant-garde, and then comparing this with contemporary avant-garde movements. The avant-garde is a cultural tradition that originated in modern 18th century Europe and North America, that critically responds to hegemonic power structures and mainstream cultural assumptions. I use the term “avant-garde subcultures” because my research focuses on the entire social group of the avant-garde. Most scholarship on the avant-garde has overlooked the importance that social relations, in particular supportive actors, and collaborative spaces have served in the creativity of the avant-garde. During the past twenty years, as society has shifted into a dependence on networked interactive technologies, the boundaries which protect these avant-garde spaces and social relations were diluted. As a result, avant-garde subcultures have entered a phase of recursively repeating themselves and culturally stagnating. I begin by reviewing the historical avant-garde and subcultures, building an overarching theory that explains that avant-garde is a type of subculture. Using past scholarship that maps the conceptual lineage from early bohemians to 1970s punk rock, I synthesize a set of traits which all avant-garde subcultures exhibit, and which can be used to build their genealogy. I then extend this genealogy to contemporary art practitioners, to prove that the avant-garde tradition continues to this day. Next, I develop a philosophical understanding of the importance of space for hegemonic power structures, based largely on the work of Henri Lefebvre. I explain how avant-garde subcultures produce spaces of representation in the cafes, bars and night clubs they inhabit, which challenge hegemony by being different from normal values and aesthetics. I reference first-hand accounts of these spaces of representation, to show how they enable the collaboration and creative thinking that is most often associated with the avant-garde. The avant-garde protect these spaces through a set of cultural boundaries: fashion, slang, esoteric knowledge, accumulation, and physical space. Manuel Castell's concept of network society depicts how hegemonic power structures have become pervasive, and thus can overcome the boundaries of avant-garde subcultures. As a result, avant-garde subcultures have increasingly become retrogressive and fluid. Some avant-garde practitioners, such as tactical media, have evolved methods for addressing these problems. While these are effective in continuing the avant-garde tradition of introducing difference, there are no adequate methods for producing new spaces of representation. I examine Eyebeam, an arts and technology center, which has since 1997 provided a space for many contemporary practitioners. While unique in its circumstances, Eyebeam has adopted several processes which have enabled it to overcome the diluting effects of network society, thereby providing a potential model for building future spaces of representation.

Many pervasive computing applications demand expressive situational awareness, which entails an entity in the pervasive computing environment learning detailed information about its immediate and surrounding context. Much work over the past decade focused on how to acquire and represent context information. However, this work is largely egocentric, focusing on individual entities in the pervasive computing environment sensing their own context. Distributed acquisition of surrounding context information is much more challenging, largely because of the expense of communication among these resource-constrained devices. This thesis presents Grapevine, a framework for efficiently sharing context information in a localized region of a pervasive computing network, using that information to dynamically form groups defined by their shared situations, and assessing the aggregate context of that group. Grapevine’s implementation details are presented and its performance benchmarked in both simulation and live pervasive computing network deployments. / text

The vision of pervasive computing is one of a personalized space populated with vast amounts of data that can be exploited by humans. Such Personalized Networked Spaces (PNetS) and the requisite support for general-purpose expressive spatiotemporal search of the “here” and “now” have eluded realization, due primarily to the complexities of indexing, storing, and retrieving relevant information within a vast collection of highly ephemeral data. This thesis presents the Gander search engine, founded on a novel conceptual model of search in PNetS and targeted for environments characterized by large volumes of highly transient data. We overview this model and provide a realization of it via the architecture and implementation of the Gander search engine. Gander connects formal notions of sampling a search space to expressive, spatiotemporal-aware protocols that perform distributed query processing in situ. This thesis evaluates Gander through a user study that examines the perceived usability and utility of our mobile application, and benchmarks the performance of Gander in large PNetS through network simulation. / text

This dissertation is in the area of pervasive computing. It focuses on designing platforms for storing, querying, and computing contextual information. More specifically, we are interested in platforms for storing and querying spatio-temporal events where queries exhibit locality. Recent advances in sensor technologies have made possible gathering a variety of information on the status of users, the environment machines, etc. Combining this information with computation we are able to extract context, i.e., a filtered high-level description of the situation. In many cases, the information gathered exhibits locality both in space and time, i.e., an event is likely to be consumed in a location close to the location where the event was produced, at a time whic h is close to the time the event was produced. This dissertation builds on this observation to create better platforms for computing context. We claim three key contributions. We have studied the problem of designing and optimizing spatial organizations for exchanging context. Our thesis has original theoretical work on how to create a platform based on cells of a Voronoi diagram for optimizing the energy and bandwidth required for mobiles to exchange contextual information t hat is tied to specific locations in the platform. Additionally, we applied our results to the problem of optimizing a system for surveilling the locations of entities within a given region. We have designed a platform for storing and querying spatio-temporal events exhibiting locality. Our platform is based on a P2P infrastructure of peers organized based on the Voronoi diagram associated with their locations to store events based on their own associated locations. We have developed theoretical results based on spatial point processes for the delay experienced by a typical query in this system. Additionally, we used simulations to study heuristics to improve the performance of our platform. Finally, we came up with protocols for the replicated storage of events in order to increase the fault-tolerance of our platform. Finally, in this thesis we propose a design for a platform, based on RFID tags, to support context-aware computing for indoor spaces. Our platform exploits the structure found in most indoor spaces to encode contextual information in suitably designed RFID tags. The elements of our platform collaborate based on a set of messages we developed to offer context-aware services to the users of the platform. We validated our research with an example hardware design of the RFID tag and a software emulation of the tag's functionality. / text

ABSTRACT THE EFFECTS OF PRIMING ON SPONTANEOUS VERBAL LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS by Michelle L. Ivey A multi-element design was used to investigate the effect of priming on spontaneous verbal communication in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Three children with ASD engaged in 20-minute thematic activity sessions (ACT) with the investigator. Prior to the ACTs, they met with another trained researcher for 10-minute presessions. Half of the presessions incorporated the conventions of priming with materials to be used in the upcoming ACT (i.e., related presessions; RP). During the other half of the presessions, participants were not primed for the upcoming ACT (i.e., unrelated presesessions; UP). The researcher conducted presessions so the investigator was blind to the condition. Procedural fidelity checks of the presessions, based on a checklist of the critical components of priming, revealed 100% adherence to procedures. Participants’ utterances during ACT were recorded, transcribed, and coded based on functionality. The dependent variables were spontaneous comments, requests, topic initiations, social information seeking, and total. Once the criterion of a 30% increase from the mean of the first 3 UP was achieved for three consecutive sessions, priming was withdrawn and then reinstated to demonstrate a functional relation. Additionally, Cohen's d was calculated to determine effect size for the intervention. Reliability was assessed for transcription and coding. There were fewer than 10 word disagreements on any transcript, which did not affect coding. A line by line comparison of the coding across the dependent variables yielded an average reliability of 85%. Visual inspection of the data and statistical analysis revealed that two of the three participants reached criterion for spontaneous comments (Cohen's d = .32 and .95), one reached criterion for total utterances (Cohen's d = 2.99), the other achieved the goal during the reinstatement following the withdrawal (Cohen’s d = 1.00). None increased requesting. Topic initiation and social information seeking did not occur with sufficient frequency for meaningful analyses. Similar to most interventions with individuals with ASD, priming was effective for increasing spontaneous verbal comments for some but not all of the participants. Priming was highly effective for two of the participants. This ground-breaking study creates momentum for further investigation and examination of the variables that affect benefit.

The proliferation of small devices and the advancements in various technologies have introduced the concept of pervasive environments. In these environments, user tasks can be executed by using the deployed components provided by devices with different capabilities. One appropriate paradigm for building user tasks for pervasive environments is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Using SOA, user tasks are represented as an assembly of abstract components (i.e., services) without specifying their implementations, thus they should be resolved into concrete components. The task resolution involves automatic matching and selection of components across various devices. For this purpose, we present an approach that allows for each service of a user task, the selection of the best device and component by considering the user preferences, devices capabilities, services requirements and components preferences. Due to the dynamicity of pervasive environments, we are interested in the continuity of execution of user tasks. Therefore, we present an approach that allows components to monitor locally or remotely the changes of properties, which depend on. We also considered the adaptation of user tasks to cope with the dynamicity of pervasive environments. To overcome captured failures, the adaptation is carried out by a partial reselection of devices and components. However, in case of mismatching between an abstract user task and a concrete level, we propose a structural adaptation approach by injecting some defined adaptation patterns, which exhibit an extra-functional behavior. We also propose an architectural design of a middleware allowing the task's resolution, monitoring of the environment and the task adaptation. We provide implementation details of the middleware's components along with evaluation results