Browsing by Subject "Mobile computing"
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Item A surrogate framework for personal profile devices(Texas Tech University, 2004-12) Desikan, MukundanWe are entering into a new era of computing world where the power of the larger computing devices will soon be taken over by smaller mobile devices. There has been exponential growth of these wireless and mobile devices over the past decade and soon trillions of these will be revolving as fireflies communicating with each other in the network. Imagine a world in which your digital camera takes pictures and instantly sends pictures to your mobile device and you are able to print the pictures on to your printer all happening from different locations without any restrictions. Will the near future eliminate the remoteness and boundary conditions and bring us more closely associated? The Service Oriented Computing environment together with Jini technology has been providing promising solutions to make this possible by defining an appropriate surrogate framework that would connect mobile devices to both offer services and to access services. My research is based on designing this framework that will integrate the Mobile cUents with SORCER network. I would address the following issues required to design the appropriate framework for the Personal Profile devices based on Cormected Device Configuration to be integrated with SORCER • Gateways that can act as surrogates • Surrogate hosts acting on behalf of mobile devicesItem Effects and implications of changing approaches to information on technical communication(2011-05) Betz, MatthewThe ways that individuals take advantage of information and communication technologies are leading to new approaches to both information and communication. Recent technological developments, such as cellular phones and wireless-broadband internet are being used to provide instant access to information and networks, allowing users to satisfy their needs or desires almost immediately and from almost any location. More specifically, shifting approaches to information have encouraged a new kind of rapid meaning making in physical and digital spaces that differs in fundamental ways from the sort of quickly-formed view of the world that television and radio brought. Who is producing and distributing this information is of primary concern to technical communicators because amateurs and uninformed users now have access to the same networks, and content production and distribution methods as professionals. Parallel to individuals’ decentralized and true-enough information approaches are concerns over the position of credentialed knowledge workers to information spaces, communities, and cultures, and concerns over new relationships between quality and speed. Due to the growing scale of new approaches to information, the field of technical communication is now faced with a crisis best articulated by one significant question: how do growing trends of personal agency and self-service in technologized societies affect technical communication as a discipline, and individual approaches to knowledge and authority? While the reliability and ethos of professional technical communicators can largely mitigate the threat of untrained, uncredentialed users who have the ability to develop and distribute technical information freely, social networks can contribute to the crisis through striking much of the authority from technical communicators who do not work to form strong or functional identities in those spaces.Item Efficient management of large metadata catalogs in a ubiquitous computing environment(2012-05) Beatty, Dan; Lopez-Benitez, Noe; Urban, Susan D.; Sill, Alan F.; Smith, Philip W.Trends in experimental sciences, such as astrophysics, have led to many critically needed, non-normalized, and massive meta-data catalogs that organize collections of recorded photographic and spectrographic observations of similar size. Observations of the night sky can best be presented using a data model that conveys the observations, analysis, objects contained with the observations, and results of analysis pertaining to those objects. Such a model is devised and it is referred to as the internet Flexible Image Transport System (iFITS). In addition a set of mapping functions to transform instances of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey into instances of iFITS, a light-weight marshaling method to transfer data to and from server side instances to mobile instances. Furthermore, this dissertation explores four architectures such as content management, software/ infrastructure/ platform as a service, context rule engine based request-response loop factory, and representational state transfer (REST) based query engines to facilitate the mining of the meta-data catalogs containing these observations.Item A framework for distributed applications on systems with mobile hosts(2002) Skawratananond, Chakarat; Garg, Vijay K. (Vijay Kumar), 1963-Item The Gander search engine for personalized networked spaces(2012-12) Michel, Jonas Reinhardt; Julien, Christine; Garg, VijayThe 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.Item Grapevine : efficient situational awareness in pervasive computing environments(2012-12) Grim, Evan Tyler; Julien, Christine; Garg, VijayMany 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.Item Mobile computing in a clouded environment(2009-12) Rosales, Jacob Jason; Julien, Christine; Bard, WilliamCloud Computing has started to become a viable option for computing centers and mobile consumers seeking to reduce cost overhead, power consumption, and increase software services available within their platform. For instance distributed memory constrained mobile devices can expand their ability to share real time data by utilizing virtual memory located within the cloud. Cloud memory services can be configured to restrict read and write access to the shared memory pool on a partner by partner basis. Utilization of such resources in turn reduces hardware requirements on mobile devices while lessening power consumption for each physical resource. Within the Cloud Computing paradigm, computing resources are provisioned to consumers on demand and guaranteed through service level agreements. Although the idea of a computing utility is not new, its realization has come to pass as researchers and corporate companies embark on a journey of implementing highly scalable cloud environments. As new solutions and architectures are proposed, additional use cases and consumer concerns have been revealed. These issues range from consumer security, adequate service level agreements and vendor interoperability, to cloud technology standardizations. Further, the current state of the art does not adequately address these needs for mobile consumers, where services need to be guaranteed even as consumers dynamically change locations. Due to the rapid adoption of virtualization stacks and the dramatic increase of mobile computing devices, cloud providers must be able to handle logical and physical mobility of consumers. As consumers move throughout geographical regions, there exists the probability that a consumer’s new locale may hinder a producer’s ability to uphold service level agreements. This inability is due to the fact that a producer may not have physical resources located relatively close to a mobile consumer’s new locale. As a consequence, producers must either continue to provide degraded resource consumption or migrate workloads to third party producers in order to ensure service level agreements are maintained. The goal of this report is to research existing architectures that provide the ability to adequately uphold service level agreements as mobile consumers move from locale to locale. Further we propose an architecture that can be implemented along with existing solutions in order to ensure consumers receive adequate service levels regardless of locality. We believe this architecture will lead to increased cloud interoperability and decreased consumer to producer platform coupling.Item Place me : location based mobile app for Android platform(2010-12) Singhal, Aman; Aziz, Adnan; Khurshid, SarfarazThis report describes PlaceMe, a client side, mobile application built on the Android platform that provides personal location-based services such as location reminders, bookmarking, mapping and search nearby. The reminder system allows creating location based reminders, and alerts the user what he needs to do, when he is in the right place to do them. Bookmarking allows the user to virtually “save” places of interest while he is on the move and obtain driving directions. Mapping enables the user to visualize his relative geographic location in real time, and map the location reminders and bookmarks. Finally, search nearby exploits Google’s powerful local search engine to allow finding and bookmarking nearby places such as gas stations, restaurants, etc, and retrieving map-based directions. We first discuss the requirements and use-cases for PlaceMe, followed an introduction to the Android software stack. Next, we describe our design architecture, implementation model, test strategy and key performance enhancements. Then, we evaluate and compare the performance of the Android platform across a set of standard micro-benchmarks. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of future development ideas and present our thoughts on prospects of app-based mobile computing.Item Requirements, specifications and deployment models for autonomous jobsite safety proximity monitoring(2013-05) Luo, Xiaowei; O'Brien, William J.; Leite, FernandaConstruction has a higher injury and fatality rate than most of the other industries. Given this situation, existing research has studied various issues and factors affecting construction safety management and has attempted to use all available methods to improve the construction safety performance. However, the construction accident rate remains among the highest in the United States and the world. The primary objective of this research is to advance autonomous proximity monitoring and hence provide a safer environment for construction workers. In particular, I seek to advance current evaluations of proximity warning technologies to a more robust engineering approach to the design and deployment of autonomous safety monitoring systems. The contributions of the research are demonstrated through specifications, deployments, and testing of proximity monitoring systems for crane loads and falling from height. My research advances current knowledge in three areas. First, I develop specifications for proximity safety monitoring in a sensed environment, built from existing guidelines and expert interviews. Second, I translate the specifications to computer interpretable rules and deploy them in a distributed computing environment. This demonstrates the feasibility of a systems approach and reusability of components to speed deployment. Third, I evaluate the accuracy of the specifications and systems under imperfect data. I further evaluate some approaches to dealing with imperfect data. Collectively, these advances move existing proximity warning research from evaluation of specific systems to an engineering approach to development and deployment of distributed systems with reusable components that explicitly treats imperfect data.Item Supporting device-to-device search and sharing of hyper-localized data(2015-05) Michel, Jonas Reinhardt; Julien, Christine; Garg, Vijay; Lam, Simon; de Veciana, Gustavo; Vishwanath, SriramSupporting emerging mobile applications in densely populated environments requires connecting mobile users and their devices with the surrounding digital landscape. Specifically, the volume of digitally-available data in such computing spaces presents an imminent need for expressive mechanisms that enable humans and applications to share and search for relevant information within their digitally accessible physical surroundings. Device-to-device communications will play a critical role in facilitating transparent access to proximate digital resources. A wide variety of approaches exist that support device-to-device dissemination and query-driven data access. Very few, however, capitalize on the contextual history of the shared data itself to distribute additional data or to guide queries. This dissertation presents Gander, an application substrate and mobile middleware designed to ease the burden associated with creating applications that require support for sharing and searching of hyper-localized data in situ. Gander employs a novel trajectory-driven model of spatiotemporal provenance that enriches shared data with its contextual history -- annotations that capture data's geospatial and causal history across a lifetime of device-to-device propagation. We demonstrate the value of spatiotemporal data provenance as both a tool for improving ad hoc routing performance and for driving complex application behavior. This dissertation discusses the design and implementation of Gander's middleware model, which abstracts away tedious implementation details by enabling developers to write high-level rules that govern when, where, and how data is distributed and to execute expressive queries across proximate digital resources. We evaluate Gander within several simulated large-scale environments and one real-world deployment on the UT Austin campus. The goal of this research is to provide formal constructs realized within a software framework that ease the software engineering challenges encountered during the design and deployment of several applications in emerging mobile environments.Item The role of app development and mobile computing in motivating the secondary mathematics classroom(2014-09-29) Marquez, Jennifer LeeItem UbiPAL : secure messaging and access control for ubiquitous computing(2015-05) Bielstein, Cameron Taylor; Alvisi, Lorenzo; Dickerson, Robert F.The ubiquitous computing environment and modern trends in personal computing, such as body sensor networks and smart houses, create unique challenges in privacy and access control. Lack of centralized computing and the dynamic nature of human environments and access rules render most access control systems insufficient for this new category of systems. UbiPAL is an object-oriented communication framework for ubiquitous systems which provides secure communication and decentralized access control. UbiPAL uses a modified SecPAL implementation to provide reliable, ad hoc access control. The UbiPAL system uses cryptographically signed, publicly held namespace certificates and access control lists in the style of TLS certificates. This approach allows message authentication and authorization in an ad hoc, completely decentralized method while maintaining human readability of policy language. UbiPAL was implemented as a C++ library, made freely available at (1), and evaluated to have minimized overhead. Even on the slowest device evaluated, a Raspberry Pi, UbiPAL authentication and authorization adds less than 20 milliseconds to the delivery a message with a message overhead of 153 bytes. The UbiPAL programming model separates access policy from application programming and results in small amounts of code required from the application programmer, creating an accessible paradigm for programming ubiquitous computing systems.