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

In this editorial, Nigel Davies explores the question of ethics in mobile and pervasive computing research. Although this topic is central to researchers in the field, the question of adopting an ethical approach to pervasive computing extends beyond the research domain, affecting practitioners as well.

Ethics in Pervasive Computing Research

The electricty industry, as other utilities, is concerned with the management of large scale distribution networks. These networks have been developing for more than a century and the methods for operating them have changed over this time. For almost fifty years mobile communications have played an increasingly important role in the co-ordination of activities in the field. In more recent years, the industry has exploited IT with the result that a significant amount of mixed-media information is now held in computerised form. This information is available to office workers on their desktop. However, it is believed that substantial benefits could be accrued by making this information available to those workers who operate in the field, i.e. by moving the desktop into the field. This paper reports on the initial findings of the DTI/SERC supported MOST project which aims to produce a pilot system to demonstrate how mixed-media information can be exploited in the field using mobile computers and wide-area radio communications as enabling technologies.

Moving the 'desktop' into the field

With recent advances in networking and workstation technology, a variety of distributed multimedia applications are now becoming feasible, e.g. multimedia desktop conferencing and distance learning. However, the deployment of such applications has so far been rather limited. In the authors' opinion this limited deployment is largely explained by the immature state of distributed multimedia system support technologies rather than a lack of creativity on the part of application developers. The present paper therefore attempts to increase awareness of the relevant support technology issues by presenting a discussion of the state of the art in the key technologies of multimedia communications and distributed systems. It is argued that, while significant advances have been made on specific topics such as high performance transport protocols and real-time process scheduling in operating systems, considerable research is still required to produce a complete, integrated solution to the support of distributed multimedia applications.

System support for multimedia applications: an assessment of the state of the art

INTRODUCTION In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the availability and adoption of mobile devices with wireless communications capabilities. Such devices can be used as the end-system in network-based (single or multi- user) interactive systems. However, design guidelines for building mobile interactive systems are surprisingly scarce. Developers require design guidelines that take into account the possible affects that operation in the mobile communications environment may have on the user's interaction with the system. In this paper, we do not claim to report a rich set of design guidelines to be used when constructing mobile interactive systems. Instead, we argue the case for one, fairly straightforward, guideline. Our argument is that designers should consider the potential benefits of providing users with increased levels of awareness in order to enable the user to deal with the constraints imposed by unreliable and unpredictable network communications. This principle builds on the approach argued in [1], i.e. that by providing cooperating users with increased levels of awareness they are better equipped to deal with problems caused by the temporal delays resulting from unreliable network communications. In this paper, we use the term mobile-awareness to describe the notion of providing users with an awareness of the affect that

http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/p8-cheverst.pdf

Mobile-awareness:designing for mobile interactive systems

Walking School Buses (WSBs) are becoming an increasingly popular way of reducing school gate congestion. They typically feature a coordinator who is assigned to walk a designated route, calling at several pick-up points that parents can use to join their children to the "bus". However, parents often feel limited by the rigidity of the scheduled walking bus arrival and departure times making it difficult to coordinate the delivery of children onto the bus with conflicting morning activities. As a result, most parents choose instead to rely on car journeys to the school. In this work we demonstrate a mobile system that allows parents to visualise real-time predictions of walking bus arrival times and thus supports more flexible travel coordination behaviours, providing greater opportunities for parents to utilise walking bus services and reduce car usage.

/pdf/supporting-walking-school-buses-2720ns8yqv.pdf

Nigel Davies

Papers

Ethics in Pervasive Computing Research

Moving the 'desktop' into the field

System support for multimedia applications: an assessment of the state of the art

Mobile-awareness:designing for mobile interactive systems

Supporting walking school buses