IEEE Pervasive Computing

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish*

Roy Want presents his final introduction as Editor-in-chief, and announces Nigel Davies of Lancaster University, UK as the new EIC starting in 2010, along with a summary of his research and professional career. A synopsis of the magazines evolution in the last four years is also presented. To conclude, he describes the importance of "Virtual Machines (VM)" in pervasive computing, and for pervasive "Content Sharing", the two featured topics of this special issue.

Virtual Senses

Products-to-be include Touch Color, a thermal digital device that lets visually impaired people visualize works of art by touch; Smart Cane, which combines with an ultrasonic sensor to help blind people navigate paths; glasses that measure time between blinks; virtual pets; and a device that uses sensors to smell.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Virtual Machines

A system virtual machine is a software implementation of a real computer that can execute unmodified applications and an operating system. This issue contains articles and interviews that explore virtual machine use in pervasive computing.

A Virtualization Infrastructure that Supports Pervasive Computing

Smart phones might well be the most powerful pervasive embedded device and a natural candidate to serve as the platform of choice for pervasive computing. Virtualization technology offers a practical means for the widespread deployment of the necessary middleware. Interpositioning within the virtualization software layer can be exploited to redirect I/O device streams to a user-level virtual appliance for control, management, and other manipulation of remote devices.

The Case for VM-Based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing

Resource poverty is a fundamental constraint that severely limits the class of applications that can be run on mobile devices. The authors present a vision of mobile computing that breaks free of this fundamental constraint. In this vision, mobile users seamlessly utilize nearby computers to obtain the resource benefits of cloud computing without incurring WAN delays, jitter, congestion, and failures. Rather than relying on a distant "cloud," a mobile user instantiates a "cloudlet" on nearby infrastructure and uses it via a wireless LAN. Crisp interactive response for immersive applications that augment human cognition is then much easier to achieve because of the cloudlet's proximity. The authors also confirm that a critical aspect of this vision—namely, rapid customization of cloudlet infrastructure—is achievable through dynamic VM synthesis.

Leendert van Doorn and Jörg Brakensiek on Virtual Machines

To better understand virtual-machine use in pervasive computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing interviewed experts Leendert van Doorn and Jörg Brakensiek. Van Doorn is a senior fellow at AMD in charge of the overall virtualization strategy; Brakensiek, a principal member of the research staff at Nokia's Research Center, heads a team researching virtualization.

Location-Aware Computing, Virtual Networks

This issue includes four works in process on issues and applications in location-aware computing: letting users set and control privacy policies when they use location-aware applications, cold-starting recommender systems for mobile location-aware services, aggregating contextual information for location-based applications, and applying location-based services to public transportation environments. The department also includes a report on lightweight virtualization of low-power wireless personal area networks.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Content Sharing

Sensing and networking technology can automate the sharing of pervasively generated content and help people connect with others. In this issue, we present four articles that explore ways to streamline the content sharing process.

The Use of Mobile Social Presence

Two studies on the current practice of mobile context sharing and three field studies on the use of mobile context and media-sharing applications explore how people share experiences using a mobile phone and how automated context sharing in mobile environments affects communication, creating rich, new experiences and increasing feelings of social presence.

An Ecosystem for Learning and Using Sensor-Driven IM Status Messages

This article presents a prototype system (Nomatic) that automatically infers users' place, activity, and availability from sensors on their handheld devices or laptop computers and then reports this information to their instant-messaging contacts. Rather than trying to interpret users' context independently from their needs, the authors attempt to support users in repeating their own labeling behavior in similar situations. They present additional Nomatic-based applications that support their view that sustained status setting behavior depends on a complete communications ecosystem that provides for easy status entry, a variety of perception channels, and intrinsic motivation.

MobSens: Making Smart Phones Smarter

Smart mobile phones are a widely available class of computing platforms with rich internal devices and a communications infrastructure that can be appropriated and exploited to support environmental sensing, social networks, and healthcare applications. In this article, the authors discuss experiences and lessons learned from deploying four mobile sensing applications on off-the-shelf mobile phones in a framework called MobSens that contains elements of health, social, and environmental sensing at both individual and community levels. They describe the main components of these applications, which facilitate logging and external communications. They also outline the challenges faced when building and testing such applications and describe their strategies for overcoming them.

A Framework for Ubiquitous Content Sharing

The popularity of the ubiquitous sharing of user-created content motivates the authors to research a general content-sharing framework. They focus on sharing digital memories automatically created by intelligent environments. On the basis of three different application scenarios and several user studies, they provide insight into the framework's basic concepts, including a memory model. They also discuss various kinds of shared content and methods for managing access to such content in the memory model.

What Have You Done with Location-Based Services Lately?

This issue's Applications column revisits location-based applications and how far we've come since the original mobile device location-detection research started about 10 years ago. The authors discuss a number of popular location-based services and the speed at which such services have become available and commonplace. They also raise some issues about further technical challenges in privacy that result from such widespread use.

Building Taskable Spaces over Ubiquitous Services

Task-based abstraction can express end-user tasks and carry them out via underlying services with minimal effort. However, developers must first address several issues including task execution transparency, exception handling, ontologies, and abstract architecture design.

An RFID Attacker Behavior Taxonomy

Radio frequency identification (RFID) uses electronic tags to produce information about entities in the real world. Security is important when the information is used to make decisions about high-value entities such as pharmaceuticals. The authors present a taxonomy of attacker behavior to show how attacks can be sequenced to invalidate the informational goals of RFID systems. The taxonomy can be used to understand the security requirements of RFID systems.

Designing with Care: The Future of Pervasive Healthcare

Humane care—which is an important design paradigm relevant for pervasive healthcare—means designing systems with care, keeping in mind both users and other stakeholders. Understanding human values is a key factor in creating any successful healthcare application and is essential to avoid dehumanizing and stigmatizing users. By considering human values, designers and developers can create pervasive healthcare applications that better fit users' needs and desires. The Designing with Care 09 workshop aimed to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to share their experiences with incorporating values into the design of pervasive healthcare systems and to help understand the sensitive issues involved in designing for healthcare. Based on the findings from the workshop, the present state of the art is discussed, and a research agenda is presented.