Earticle

Recent advances in computing and communication technologies paved the growth for applications and devices in smart home environment. A typical smart home is highly characterized by heterogeneity elements that need to perform joint execution of tasks in an efficient manner. Although there are huge growth of services, applications and devices in smart home environment, the interoperability elements still seems ambiguous. Being a distributed architecture, smart home environment needs certain degree of interoperability to manage sub-systems comprising of different platforms. Generally, these sub-systems are developed in isolation and consist of different operating system and tier of services. There is need for a cross-platform interoperability that could make the sub-systems ‘talk’ each other and operate in an interoperable fashion within smart home environment. Web Services seems to be the emerging technology that could lead the way in providing greater interoperability. In this paper we describe the potential of Web Services technology using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in addressing the interoperability requirements for smart home environment. The SOAP protocol provides data exchange mechanism as well as optimized performance for interoperation among sub-systems residing in smart home environment. The proposed system performance is evaluated to demonstrate a complete, bi-directional real-time management of sub-systems in smart home environment.

In this paper, we present a system that augments user interaction to elicit intelligence of a living room adorned with aware artefacts. These artefacts are computationally augmented everyday objects, like a phone, a light, a TV, etc., which are enabled to communicate their operational states among themselves. The operational state of an artefact is usually changed to another state as a result of an interaction by the user. Our system augments such interactions by improvising other spatially correlated artefacts with the help of commonsense knowledge. For example, if a user picks up a ringing phone while the TV is on, the system either mutes or reduces the TV volume. In this case the phone’s state is changed to “in use” state due to deliberate interaction of the user and simultaneously the state of the TV may be changed to “mute” or “low volume” by the system. Such idea of augmenting user interaction has been elaborated in this paper. We present the computational model and theimplementation detail of our approach and also demonstrate its feasibility through an informal user study.

As home devices have various functions and have improved computing power and networking ability, home device authentication has become increasingly important for improving the security of home network users. Moreover, device authentication supplies user convenience for the home network service user because it can replace the user authentication required for the used home network service. In addition, the security of the home network can be strengthened if device authentication is considered in addition to the authentication and access control for the home network user. In this paper, we describe home device authentication framework and system, certificate profile for home devices, which is based on the Internet X.509 certificate, home device authentication mechanism, and our CA administration server. And also, we propose the tracing method of lost device using our home device authentication system.

As home network is expanding into ubiquitous computing environment and a variety of services are realized, requirements and interests on security for smart home network are increasing. In order to make home network safe and stable, some security technologies including authentication, authorization, and security policy technology are needed. So, in this paper, we propose a light-weight access control mechanism used for home network environment, where various types of users and devices coexist and heterogeneous network protocols can be deployed.

In most advanced real-time control applications such as service robots, the tasks have different criticality, flexible timing constraints and variable execution time. For instance, autonomous service robots perform their activities in dynamic environments, share resources and have to cooperate to fulfill their objectives. These changing environmental conditions produce a variability of the system load. Firstly, the computational requirements of recognition tasks are variable and dependent on the number of objects perceived in scenes. Secondly, the application processes are executed at different frequencies with varying periods and deadlines that are dependent on robot speeds. To tackle these aspects a flexible real-time architecture is implemented in rt-linux in this paper. Moreover, the architecture permits to extract the slack time, enabled in the system due to load variability, and to invest it in improving the communication performances of the robots. Experimental evaluations of the architecture have been carried out with real autonomous robots.

Paper-based artefacts (e.g., forms, manuals, questionnaires) are used ubiquitously and pervasively to support a wide set of activities. Education and Health Care are major examples of such endeavour. However, given the passiveness of the medium itself, several problems (e.g., communication, adjustment, lack of interactivity) are usually encountered within these activities which hinder human efficiency or prevent users from achieving desired goals. This paper presents a framework that provides common users with tools to create interactive and adjustable digital artefacts for mobile devices. The artefacts can be adjusted to the users’ needs, introducing different configurations regarding their look, interaction and behaviour, providing support to various purposes by coping with and enhancing different procedures. The framework has been validated through two case studies by providing support to mobile learning, and within psychotherapy, by offering means to achieve ubiquitous cognitive behavioural therapy.