PROJECT OVERVIEW

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 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.

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

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.

PROJECT ACHIEVEMENT

Demonstration Testbed setup and organisation activities have started, but no demo is available.

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)

PROJECT EFFECTIVENESS & LEARNING

Addressed Issues

The framework will provide a basis for further experimentation in the pervasive smart-space area. For example, the integration of several sensor technologies with the platform. The demonstration will take place in TSSG, so a residual demo is possible. The project is in its first year and still running, therefore a more complete analysis of its potential impact is not available at this time.

Wider context

Some evaluation of the PERSIST scenarios is taking place during the project. This should be useful in determining what type of future services the user might find useful. In particular, the relative effect that privacy concerns, convienence, and the availablility of user data would have on “acceptable” end-user services, and the corresponding enablers. It should be noted the sample group is quite small (20-30 people), but does include technical and non-technical people.

Find out more information on the PERSIST project PERSIST or contact the project manager on;

Project Manager Kevin Doolin

TSSG, Carriganore, Waterford

Email :- Kevin Doolin