PERSIST

Project Overview
PERsonal Self-Improving SmarT-space provides a middleware framework for the provision and operation of a Personal Smart Space (PSS).
The vision of PERSIST is of a Personal Smart Space, which is associated with the portable devices carried by the user and which moves around with him/her, providing context-aware pervasiveness to the user at all times and places. The Personal Smart Space will cater for the needs of users, adapting to their preferences and learning new ones as these arise.
PERSIST is funded by the FP7 Programme. The PERSIST project has been running since April 2008, and will be completed 2010. For more information contact kdoolin@tssg.org.
Project Implementation
Current trends in the design of pervasive systems have concentrated on the problem of isolated smart spaces (such as smart homes) via a fixed infrastructure. This is likely to lead to the evolution of islands of pervasiveness separated by voids in which there is no support for pervasiveness.
The objective of PERSIST is to develop Personal Smart Spaces that provide a minimum set of functionalities which can be extended and enhanced as users encounter other smart spaces during their everyday activities. They will be capable of learning and reasoning about users, their intentions, preferences and context. They will be endowed with pro-active behaviours, which enable them to share context information with neighbouring Personal Smart Spaces, resolve conflicts between the preferences of multiple users, make recommendations and act upon them, prioritise, share and balance limited resources between users, services and devices, reason about trustworthiness to protect privacy and be sufficiently fault-tolerant to guarantee their own robustness and dependability.
To this end the PERSIST project has developed an architecture and framework for the development of Personal Smart-space applications. The architecture consists of five different layers, each addressing a well defined part of the PSS functionality. The names and purpose of these layers are presented below.
Layer 1 – Devices. The PSS definition suggests that a single PSS can span across many different devices. Depending on their processing and networking capabilities, these devices may either implement the PSS stack or part of it, or simply interact with the rest of the PSS framework.
Layer 2 – System Run-Time Environment. The System Run-Time layer serves as an abstraction layer between the underlying device operating system and the PSS software in order to achieve as much platform independence as possible. Essentially, this layer is what makes a device PSS-capable. Hence, employing an “off-the-shelf” implementation of a virtual machine run-time will offer PSS portability over a wide range of software and hardware platforms.
Layer 3 – Overlay Network Management. The Overlay Network Management layer provides the PSS architecture with a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) management and communication layer. The services within this layer will provide functionality for PSS peer group management, peer discovery and message routing between peer networks.
Layer 4 – Service Run-Time Environment. The Service Run-Time Environment layer provides a container for the PSS services. It supports service life cycle management features and provides a service registry, as well as, a device registry. Moreover, it allows for service management in a distributed fashion among multiple devices within the same PSS.
Layer 5 – PSS Framework. The PSS Framework layer is the core of the PSS architecture. Its functions include discovering and composing PSS and 3rd party services, as well as, managing context data and user preferences. Moreover, the PSS Framework layer supports automatic learning of preferences and inference of user intentions. This information, together with data from recommender systems, enables the proactive behaviour of the PSS platform. Grouping of context data and preferences, as well as, conflict resolution are also provided by the PSS Framework layer.
Project Achievement
Demonstration
Testbed setup and organisation activities are ongoing, but no demo is currently available.
The project source code is available via a Apache Public licence on the Sourceforge site http://sourceforge.net/projects/psmartspace/
Non-referreed academic papers
19 papers have been presented on behalf of PERSIST, of which 7 have involved TSSG. These are as follows:
[1] M. Rockl, K. Frank, G. Hermann, and M. Vera, “Knowledge Representation and Inference in Context-Aware Computing Environments”, 2nd International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies (UBICOMM 2008), Valencia, Spain, September – October 2008.
[2] K. Frank, M. Rockl, and P. Robertson, “The Bayeslet Concept for modular Context Inference”, 2nd International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies (UBICOMM 2008), Valencia, Spain, September – October 2008.
[3] M. Crotty, N. Taylor, H. Williams, K. Frank, I. Roussaki, and M. Roddy, “A Pervasive Environment Based on Personal Self-Improving Smart Spaces”, Workshop on Architectures and Platforms for AmI at the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence 2008 (AmI 08), Nürnberg, Germany, November 2008.
[4] I. Roussaki, N. Liampotis, N. Kalatzis, K. Frank, and P. Hayden, “How to make Personal Smart Spaces Context-aware”, PERSIST Workshop on Intelligent Pervasive Environments (AISB 2009), Edinburgh, Scotland, April 2009.
[5] K. Frank, P. Robertson, S. McBurney, N. Kalatzis, I. Roussaki, and M. Marengo, “A Hybrid Preference Learning and Context Refinement Architecture PERSIST Workshop on Intelligent Pervasive Environments (AISB 2009), Edinburgh, Scotland, April 2009.
[6] C. Venezia, N. Taylor, H. Williams, K. Doolin, and I. Roussaki, “Novel Pervasive Computing Services experienced through Personal Smart Spaces”, International Workshop on Data Management in Ad Hoc and Pervasive Computing in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2009), Taipei, Taiwan, May 2009.
[7] K. Frank, N. Kalatzis, I. Roussaki, and N. Liampotis, “Challenges for Context Management Systems imposed by Context Inference”, 6th International Workshop on Managing Ubiquitous Communications and Services (MUCS 2009), Barcelona, Spain, June 2009.
Events
The project has been presented at 8 public events, including 3 public workshops. The full list is as follows:
1. Daidalos public workshop 2008 (Heidelberg, Germany, September 2008)
2. NEM Summit 2008 (St Malo, France, October 2008)
3. Irish Future Internet Forum (Dublin, Ireland, October 2008)
4. Lifting the Lid Technology Showcase for SMEs (Edinburgh, UK, November 2008)
5. Future of Internet Assembly (Madrid, Spain, December 2009)
6. AmI and IRIS event (Ljubljana, Slovenia, March 2009)
7. PERSIST workshop in AISB 09 (Edinburgh, UK, April 2009).
8. Joint PERSIST/C-Cast Workshop (ICT 2010, Florence, Italy, 2010).