Earticle

In a smart building environment nomadic users can benefit from specialised context-sensitive services. These can increase productivity and offer an improved lifestyle for users. The Data Management System-Context Architecture (DMS-CA) has been designed to provide these services. The DMS-CA is novel in providing a completely generic system that is both user-friendly and efficient. The system is generic in that it can be tailored by the system administrator (using XML specifications) for a particular environment of context information inputs and a set of services. In addition, the actual rules that determine which services are triggered by which combination of contextual inputs are determined by the individual user in a user-friendly manner. Thus the generic architecture can be easily deployed for a particular building and an individual user. Generic solutions are sometimes inefficient but this system has been designed to be highly efficient through using an event-based architecture and dealing with time in a special way. The DMS-CA has been deployed for a building incorporating a wireless sensor network, and shown to provide a high quality, efficient context-sensitive data delivery service.

The self-configuration process can simplify the complexity and reduce the cost of the management and deployment of devices, applications and services in smart spaces. Mechanisms inspired from the Autonomic Computing and Pervasive Computing can be used to automate management of the heterogeneous space's component. In this paper, we present our work on Autonomic Pervasive Computing and mainly the self-configuration process. We also introduce our self-configuration middleware that is deployed at DOMUS Laboratory.

In this paper we discuss and address multifold security challenges involved in the implementation of remote healthcare in smart homes. These security challenges are derived from real-world, industrially relevant scenarios. Validated security techniques and mechanisms providing certain security properties can be captured and implemented in security patterns, which can be applied in order to satisfy security requirements in the smart home healthcare scenarios. The presented results are parts of our ongoing research effort aiming at the development of an integrated security framework for remote healthcare and ambient intelligence systems.

Hard disk-based personal video recorders have the capacity to store large quantities of video contents. A personal video recorder serving one household may have to cater for the diverse entertainment tastes imposed by different family members. Timer event programmed video recordings have a tendency to accumulate and it is difficult to access large video collections on current generation personal video recorders. This is because the recordings often are presented linearly in a chronologically ordered list that is accessed using the navigation keys on a remote control. In this study an alternative strategy for accessing large video collections via the navigation keys of a remote control is investigated. The strategy automatically clusters the video recording using cuts that are perceptually meaningful to the viewers and that minimize the retrieval effort. However, the results suggest that navigation keys do not meet the needs of large video collection browsing.

Dependent people have a great variability in their needs and levels of motor and/or cognitive handicap. Hence they call for personalized services, especially when interacting with their environment. In smart homes, the Semantic Matching Framework (SMF) provides an appropriate middleware for delivering personalized assistive services in line with the disabilities of a user. SMF is a system based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a modeling language to define ontologies for modeling and reasoning on the user environment and its profile. This paper first, details the adopted approach to personalize a smart home to people with special needs. Then shows how SMF support and manage multiple-users.

Despite growing awareness of security issues especially in SCADA networks, there exist little or scarce information about SCADA vulnerabilities and attacks. Where security has been a consideration, there has been no clear methodology to assess the security impacts brought about by attacks. Worst, there have been no or very little security tools that have been released publicly. This research aims to addresses the issues regarding security and vulnerability testing. Software program was created to simulate the vulnerability testing and carry out assessment methodologies to test existing SCADA software design and implementation. This paper also describes the application of a well know security testing approach known as the software implemented fault injection as well as building the model for security vulnerabilities identification and analysis. Impact analysis was also performed to provide a better understanding of the attacks. Sufficient security measures are needed to block all possible intrusion points into the SCADA system to significantly reduce the chances of a successful attack.

The McKIZ Aware Community will enable us to move the paradigm of an aware and assistive home to the development of an aware and assistive community infrastructure by incorporating devices and methods into a small urban community of homes, recreation facilities, retail and service providers, on city streets with vehicular traffic and public transportation. This broadens our research, data collection and evaluation of persons with disabilities and aging residents to include instrumental activities of daily living and quality of life that extend beyond the confines of their home.

The home network system (HNS, for short) is comprised of networked home appliances, which achieves various value-added services for home users. Assuring safety of the HNS and the services is a crucial issue. However, safety properties to be verified against the HNS have been given in an ad-hoc manner. This paper presents a systematic method that can derive the verifiable safety properties from a given HNS model and hazard contexts. Specifically, we first define a hazard analysis model for the HNS consisting of four levels of abstractions. We then conduct a goal-oriented analysis to specify logical relations between the adjacent abstraction levels. The analysis yields cause-and-effect chains from the abstract hazard contexts to the concrete attributes and operations of HNS objects (appliances, services, environment). Finally, the safety properties and their responsible operations are derived from the complete model, which give the strong rationale of the safety of the HNS.

The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act is a United States federal law enacted on July 30, 2002 in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals including those affecting Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom. This paper discusses the effects of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act on corporate information security governance practices. The resultant regulatory intervention forces a company to revisit its internal control structures and asses the nature and scope of its compliance with the law. This paper reviews the implications emerging from the mandatory compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act. Issues related to IT governance and the general integrity of the enterprise are also identified and discussed. Industry internal control assessment frameworks, such as COSO and COBIT, are reviewed and their usefulness in ensuring compliance evaluated.