Research Articles on the Theme Ubiquitous Service Systems and
Technologies
Ubiquitous Information Transfer across Different Platforms by QR Codes (0031-014) Yo-Ping Huang, Yueh-Tsun Chang, and Fronde
Eika Sandnes Since the notion of ambient intelligence was
proposed in the 90s, many researchers and companies have developed
devices, applications and systems based on the idea of an intelligence
environment. Despite the obvious benefits of ambient intelligent
environments there are few examples of real-world realizations. One
reason is that systems are developed in isolation according to their
particular purpose. In fact, there are many systems that serve similar
and overlapping functions in different situations, but these systems
cannot easily be merged into one intelligent system. For example, a
museum guiding system allows tourists through handheld devices to browse
exhibition contents including text, pictures, audio, video, etc.
However, often tourists cannot easily share information with each other
when they come across interesting items. In order to help simplify
sharing, we present five information encoding types based on Quick
Response Codes (QR Code) that facilitate the connection of independent
systems implemented on different platform such as smart phones or Java
phones. Two case studies illustrating the use of these encoding types
are presented. The first system is a travel assistant system where the
traveler can share information through QR Codes and a “Schedule Code”
which provides references to specific sites. The second system, the
Mobile Bird Information Searching System allows discovered multimedia to
be shared across smart phones to Java phones via QR Codes.
Activity Inference for RFID-based
Assisted Living Applications (015-025) Judith Symonds, Boon-Chong Seet, and Jingwen Xiong
Technology assisted living is a practical solution to the increasing
demands for access to healthcare services in an era of aging populations
and dwindling supply of professional healthcare workers. Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) technology with complementary sensors is widely
considered as a very promising approach to realizing the vision of
technology assisted living. At the
core of any assisted living systems is the important function of human
activity inference, which is what enables such systems to be
intelligently perceptive and responsive to the humans under their
care. In this paper, we review the
current state-of-the-art in activity inference for RFID-based assisted
living applications, and present our ongoing work on an assisted
living prototype for ‘goal training’ or brain rehabilitation of patients
with cognitive impairment in their home environments, with a discussion
on the potential design issues involved.
Ubiquitous Web for Ubiquitous
Environments: The Role of Embedded Semantics (026-048) Ahmet Soylu, Patrick De Causmaecker, and Fridolin Wild Pervasive Computing enlarged the traditional
computing setting into the human layer of the earth. Different devices
in pervasive environments are seamlessly integrated in various ways.
Examples are wired and wireless networks, infrared connections,
Bluetooth etc. Apart from these local ties, pervasive computing
environments are mostly connected with the World Wide Web environment as
the simple most important digital information layer. In this paper we
propose an approach, a conceptual upper context model and a service
oriented framework for exploiting the vast amount of valuable
information contained by the World Wide Web for the benefit of
context-aware pervasive computing environments. Machine
understandability of the web information is the key challenge for our
purpose since a typical pervasive setting covers a variety of devices
with different characteristics. We base our approach and models on
semantic web activities, particularly on Embedded Semantics, which are
of crucial importance for bringing structure into the World Wide Web. We
first propose a conceptual upper context model, and then based on this
model we propose a web harvesting approach and a service oriented
application framework. Finally we demonstrate and evaluate our approach
and models through examples which are based on specific scenarios, each
representing a different perspective, and we partially realize our
approach and the framework for the e-Learning domain.
Extendible Context-Aware Service
System For Mobile Computing (049-062) Been-Chian Chien,
Shiang-Yi He, Hsin-Chan Tsai, and Yuen-Kuei Hsueh
Context-aware computing is one of the research fields in pervasive
computing and mobile computing. Context-aware systems can react to the
user’s preference according to the circumstances called context
including location, time and other environment conditions. Many
context-aware computing paradigms were developed in recent year;
however, it is difficult for the present systems to extend the
application domains and interoperate with other service systems due to
the problem of heterogeneity among systems. In this paper, an extendible
context-aware service system importing the concept of context
independence is proposed and designed.The main
idea of context independence includes the physical context independence
and the logical context independence. The approaches of constructing
context independence are also provided for the proposed system
architecture. The context-aware system thus can easily integrate
different service domains and diverse devices into a unifying
environment.
Motion
Extraction via Human Motion Analysis (063-072) Joseph C. Tsai, Hui-Huang Hsu, Shin-Ming
Chang, Ying-Hong Wang, Chia Cheng Chao and Timothy K. Shih
We propose a novel motion analysis algorithm by using the mean-shift
segmentation and motion estimation technique. Mean shift algorithm is
frequently used to extract objects from video according to its
efficiency and robustness of non-rigid object tracking. For diminishing
the computational complexity in searching process, an efficient block
matching algorithm: cross-diamond-hexagonal search algorithm was used.
In the motion analysis procedure, the stick figure of object obtained by
thinning process is treated as guidance to gather the statistics of
motion information. The experimental results show that the proposed
method can provide precise description of the behavior of object in
several video sequences and extrapolate human motion seamlessly by
combining different motion clips obtained from other video sequences.
Other Research Article(s)
G2G: Location-aware Mobile Social Networking with Applications in
Personalized Recommender Systems (073-094) Ioannis T. Christou and Sotiris
Michalakos We present G2G, a proximity-aware social
networking platform for Mobile Information Device (MID) users and its
applications in personalized travel assistance via location-aware
recommender systems. User proximity to a friend or a place or event is
determined via GSM cell information and enhanced via GPS information if
the mobile device has such capability. GSM cell information alone is
greatly enhanced through the concept of user-defined “hotspots” which is
the means that allows the system to expand the notion of proximity to
include not only users covered by the same GSM cell but also users
and/or hotspots covered by geographically neighboring cells. The system
can be thought of as a Selective Dissemination of Information platform
where users subscribe to it and are willing to receive selectively
information coming from their own personal network of friends and
acquaintances, and if they opt for, from other system users as well, in
the form of location-aware notes about nearby places. G2G continuously
and actively disseminates to users information relevant to their current
location within a user-defined radius. This information is published
into the system by the users themselves who can recommend a place or
event. To bootstrap the system with sufficient content however that
makes the use of the system appealing to users, we have developed Web
Information Extraction methods that extract relevant data from web pages
that contain recommendations about public places and/or events that can
be geo-located using publicly available GIS services such as Google
Earth APIs. Regarding its Social Networking aspects, the system allows
users to see nearby friends and chat with them, as well as block
selected friends from seeing them. The system also acts as a
personalized tourist guide providing visitors of outdoors cultural
heritage sites multimedia presentations about the site on the spot.
