The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy. In this paper, we introduce the definition of edge computing, followed by several case studies, ranging from cloud offloading to smart home and city, as well as collaborative edge to materialize the concept of edge computing. Finally, we present several challenges and opportunities in the field of edge computing, and hope this paper will gain attention from the community and inspire more research in this direction.

Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

Context is a poorly used source of information in our computing environments. As a result, we have an impoverished understanding of what context is and how it can be used. In this paper, we provide an operational definition of context and discuss the different ways in which context can be used by context-aware applications. We also present the Context Toolkit, an architecture that supports the building of these context-aware applications. We discuss the features and abstractions in the toolkit that make the task of building applications easier. Finally, we introduce a new abstraction, a situation which we believe will provide additional support to application designers.

/pdf/understanding-and-using-context-ixmte100q2.pdf

Understanding and Using Context

When humans talk with humans, they are able to use implicit situational information, or context, to increase the conversational bandwidth. Unfortunately, this ability to convey ideas does not transfer well to humans interacting with computers. In traditional interactive computing, users have an impoverished mechanism for providing input to computers. By improving the computer’s access to context, we increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction and make it possible to produce more useful computational services. The use of context is increasingly important in the fields of handheld and ubiquitous computing, where the user?s context is changing rapidly. In this panel, we want to discuss some of the research challenges in understanding context and in developing context-aware applications.

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ctk/pubs/HUC99-panel.pdf

Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop, in diverse environments, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is accelerating. One challenge that remains in this emerging research field is the ability to enhance the behavior of any application by informing it of the context of its use. By context, we refer to any information that characterizes a situation related to the interaction between humans, applications, and the surrounding environment. Context-aware applications promise richer and easier interaction, but the current state of research in this field is still far removed from that vision. This is due to 3 main problems: (a) the notion of context is still ill defined, (b) there is a lack of conceptual models and methods to help drive the design of context-aware applications, and (c) no tools are available to jump-start the development of context-aware applications. In this anchor article, we address these 3 problems in turn. We first define context, identify categories of contextual information, and characterize context-aware application behavior. Though the full impact of context-aware computing requires understanding very subtle and high-level notions of context, we are focusing our efforts on the pieces of context that can be inferred automatically from sensors in a physical environment. We then present a conceptual framework that separates the acquisition and representation of context from the delivery and reaction to context by a context-aware application. We have built a toolkit, the Context Toolkit, that instantiates this conceptual framework and supports the rapid development of a rich space of context-aware applications. We illustrate the usefulness of the conceptual framework by describing a number of context-aware applications that have been prototyped using the Context Toolkit. We also demonstrate how such a framework can support the investigation of important research challenges in the area of context-aware computing.

/pdf/a-conceptual-framework-and-a-toolkit-for-supporting-the-3ct19ji2mn.pdf

A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications

Digital displays are a ubiquitous feature of our public spaces - both ever present, and "always on". In this paper we use a combination of literature survey, experimental work, and stakeholder interviews to consider if maximising the amount of time such displays are powered on is truly advantageous. We challenge existing practice by considering arguments from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (viewers, passers-by, content creators and signage owners), and identify multiple facets for consideration including levels of attention, cognitive load, impact on social interactions, energy and financial costs, advertising revenue, perceptions of failure and the pressures of creating valuable content.

/pdf/better-off-when-should-pervasive-displays-be-powered-down-1zo3gqn7wr.pdf

Better off: when should pervasive displays be powered down?

Among the many branches of computer science, ubiquitous computing enjoys an unusually distinguished history of creating and deploying prototypes. Why is this? A tempting answer is that many ubicomp researchers and practitioners have backgrounds in subjects such as HCI and systems--areas with a strong focus on learning from deploying working prototypes. However, a more compelling answer might be that ubicomp, unlike almost every other subspecialty with the exception of HCI, is about embedding computing into existing human systems. This introduction is part of a special issue on Real-World Deployments.

Real-World Ubicomp Deployments: Lessons Learned

Traditional digital signage analytics are based on a display-centric view of the world, reporting data on the content shown augmented with frequency of views and possibly classification of the audience demographics. What these systems are unable to provide, are insights into viewers' overall experience of content. This is problematic if we want to understand where, for example, to place content in a network of physically distributed digital signs to optimise content exposure. In this paper we propose a new approach that combines mobility simulations with comprehensive signage analytics data to provide viewer-centric physical analytics. Our approach enables us to ask questions of the analytics from the viewer's perspective for the first time, including estimating the exposure of different user groups to specific content across the entire signage network. We describe a proof of concept implementation that demonstrates the feasibility of our approach, and provide an overview of potential applications and analytics reports.

/pdf/next-generation-physical-analytics-for-digital-signage-4id3sgvgmk.pdf

Next Generation Physical Analytics for Digital Signage

Distributed multimedia computing is seen as the next generation of information technology. This new technology has both the potential to create new application areas and augment those that already exist. This paper introduces multimedia and describes the characteristics of multimedia information. Those application areas where this new technology is having a significant impact are also discussed along with an evaluation of the current state of the art

Distributed multimedia computing: an assessment of the state of the art

This paper presents a novel wireless access point architecture designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications over metropolitan scale areas. In addition, once deployed, this network will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to the Internet from their local city and campus environments.The proposed architecture is based on an approach utilising a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack that uses packet marking and network level packet filtering at the edge of the wired network to achieve this objective. The paper describes this architecture in detail and contrasts it with existing systems to highlight the key benefits of our approach.

/pdf/a-wireless-public-access-infrastructure-for-supporting-1xh93u1fm1.pdf

Nigel Davies

Papers

Better off: when should pervasive displays be powered down?

Real-World Ubicomp Deployments: Lessons Learned

Next Generation Physical Analytics for Digital Signage

Distributed multimedia computing: an assessment of the state of the art

A wireless public access infrastructure for supporting mobile context-aware IPv6 applications