Suchergebnisse

In recent years, flexibility has emerged as an important guiding principle in the design of business processes. However, research on process flexibility has traditionally been solely focused on ways of how the demand for process flexibility can be satisfied by advanced process modelling techniques, i.e., issues intrinsic to the process. This paper proposes to extent existing research by studying the extrinsic drivers for process flexibility, i.e. an analysis of the root causes that drive the demand for flexible processes. These drivers can be found in the context of the process, which may include among others time, location, weather, legislation, culture or performance requirements. We argue for a stronger and more explicit consideration of these contextual factors in the design and modelling of business processes. Based on a real case study, we discuss how context can be conceptualized and integrated with existing approaches to business process design. These extensions are an essential foundation for the definition and implementation of agile processes and as such of high practical and theoretical value.

AbstractWe present CARE, a context-aware tool for nurses in nursing homes. The system utilises a sensors infrastructure to quantify the behaviour and wellbeing (e.g.,activity, mood, social and nurse interactions) of elderly residents. The sensor data is offloaded, processed and analysed in the cloud, to generate daily and long-term summaries of residents' health. These insights are then presented to nurses via an Android tablet application. We aim to create a tool that can assist nurses and increase their awareness to residents' needs. We deployed CARE in a local nursing home for two months and evaluated the system through apost-hocexploratory analysis and interviews with the nurses. The results indicate that CARE can reveal essential insights on the wellbeing of elderly residents and improve the care service. In the discussion, we reflect on our understanding and potential impact of future integrated technology in elderly care environments.

Context-aware software provides adapted services to users or other software components. On the other hand, Autonomic Pervasive Computing uses context to reduce the complexity of pervasive system utilization, management and maintenance. This paper describes two context-awareness models, the macro and micro approaches, that define and integrate contextual views of individual pervasive components (micro level) and global knowledge of the system (macro level), and provides a more detailed overview of a micro Context-aware programming model for open smart space problems. These models are presented and compared with respect to their ability to meet the requirements of the Autonomic Pervasive Computing concept of the four selves.

ABSTRACTResearch on context‐aware computing has been focusing on the technology aspect of context acquisition and interpretation of users' surrounding environment or physical context. There is no operational mechanism for integrating context awareness that is driven by user context such as users' ongoing activities and tasks. Although the necessity of integration of sensed context data with users' intent of conduct has been recognized by many researchers, it has never been empirically investigated. Using Analytic Hierarchy Process, we propose an integrated and comprehensive approach that takes into consideration both user and physical context in defining overall context awareness value. The approach is tested using secondary data of user activities in various situations and surrounding environment scenarios. The results suggest several preliminary guidelines for determining representative measures of user and physical context approaches in the design and evaluation of context‐aware systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Global warming is seriously affecting society, but also to a lesser extent the longevity of the population and migration of people from the countryside to the cities present challenges for governments. Smart applications (smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, smart water, smart health) offer an alternative to deal with these challenges. Pervasive sensors, with increasingly powerful features, allow innovative developments, making possible a progressive growth in the so-called smart applications. Because information is the backbone of any type of smart environment, this work presents an architecture approach to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced sensors. Specifically in this work this architecture is applied to renewable energy systems for a better management of the thermal energy. A semantic sensors network has been developed to provide context awareness for managing thermal flow in a near Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The key elements are an Ontology Web Language (OWL) to describe the sensors and contextual knowledge, and a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to represent rule-based inferences for context reasoning. The main goal is to improve thermal energy comfort in a building with a reduction in the energy used. ; Peer reviewed

Global warming is seriously affecting society, but also to a lesser extent the longevity of the population and migration of people from the countryside to the cities present challenges for governments. Smart applications (smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, smart water, smart health) offer an alternative to deal with these challenges. Pervasive sensors, with increasingly powerful features, allow innovative developments, making possible a progressive growth in the so-called smart applications. Because information is the backbone of any type of smart environment, this work presents an architecture approach to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced sensors. Specifically in this work this architecture is applied to renewable energy systems for a better management of the thermal energy. A semantic sensors network has been developed to provide context awareness for managing thermal flow in a near Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The key elements are an Ontology Web Language (OWL) to describe the sensors and contextual knowledge, and a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to represent rule-based inferences for context reasoning. The main goal is to improve thermal energy comfort in a building with a reduction in the energy used. ; O. H. U. thanks to the Alternative Energies Research and Development Foundation for a pre-doctoral grant and also CONACYT-CIATEQ for additional economic support.

International audience ; We are living a democratization of ubiquitous environments offering a great number of services. Different devices, having different technical capacities access those services. Such environment requires an effective service discovery approach. In this paper, we start with a study of some existing service discovery approaches. Then we introduce a semantic and context-aware service discovery approach. We propose to distribute services registries in a P2P network. The registries will be structured according to the capacities and semantics of the services. To describe capacity and semantic of a service, we annotate its WSDL description

Doutoramento em Informática ; Internet users consume online targeted advertising based on information collected about them and voluntarily share personal information in social networks. Sensor information and data from smart-phones is collected and used by applications, sometimes in unclear ways. As it happens today with smartphones, in the near future sensors will be shipped in all types of connected devices, enabling ubiquitous information gathering from the physical environment, enabling the vision of Ambient Intelligence. The value of gathered data, if not obvious, can be harnessed through data mining techniques and put to use by enabling personalized and tailored services as well as business intelligence practices, fueling the digital economy. However, the ever-expanding information gathering and use undermines the privacy conceptions of the past. Natural social practices of managing privacy in daily relations are overridden by socially-awkward communication tools, service providers struggle with security issues resulting in harmful data leaks, governments use mass surveillance techniques, the incentives of the digital economy threaten consumer privacy, and the advancement of consumergrade data-gathering technology enables new inter-personal abuses. A wide range of fields attempts to address technology-related privacy problems, however they vary immensely in terms of assumptions, scope and approach. Privacy of future use cases is typically handled vertically, instead of building upon previous work that can be re-contextualized, while current privacy problems are typically addressed per type in a more focused way. Because significant effort was required to make sense of the relations and structure of privacy-related work, this thesis attempts to transmit a structured view of it. It is multi-disciplinary - from cryptography to economics, including distributed systems and information theory - and addresses privacy issues of different natures. As existing work is framed and discussed, the contributions to the ...

SAM is a social media platform that enhances the experience of watching video content in a conventional living room setting, with a service that lets the viewer use a second screen (such as a smart phone) to interact with content, context and communities related to the main video content. This article describes three key functionalities used in the SAM platform in order to create an advanced interactive and social second screen experience for users: semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities. Both dataset-based and end user evaluations of system functionalities are reported in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the components directly involved and the platform as a whole. ; This work has been partially funded by the European Commission under the Seventh (FP7 2007-2013) Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development through the SAM (FP7-611312) project, by the Spanish Government under project REDES (TIN2015-65136-C2-2-R) and by the Generalitat Valenciana under project (PROMETEU/2018/089).