Towards a Platform for Widespread Embedded Intelligence - ERCIM

Figure 2: Extending SOA with interoperability enablers.
system interworking. In the application
layer, semantics and behaviours of services
are reasoned upon and matched
with the requested ones in order to
decide their adequacy for a given user
request. Second, semantic-rich interoperable
service interaction enables services
to cooperate and compose. In the
middleware layer, support is provided
for communication protocol and data
type system interworking. In the application
layer, semantics and behaviours of
services are adapted and interworked to
enable their seamless interaction.
Prototypes of the related architectural
components have been implemented.
Materials with Intelligence
by Simon Dobson and Kieran Delaney
Performance evaluation shows that our
solutions comply with the requirements
of the pervasive computing environment.
We are now in the process of integrating
them to offer an instance of the
overall architecture. We are further
studying extensions to the architecture to
effectively exploit beyond third generation
networks and related multi-radio
wireless handheld devices; this will
expand the scope of our interoperability
solution to further cover radio and network
heterogeneity.
Enabling the pervasive computing vision
has given rise to tremendous research
Sensor networks are the key enabling technology for building systems that adapt
autonomously to their environment, without direct human intervention. Most
sensor networks operate in free air, but research being conducted in Ireland,
between the School of Computer Science and Informatics at UCD Dublin and the
Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems at Cork IT, is starting to explore the tools
and techniques we need in order to build 'augmented materials' which combine
sensing, actuation and processing into the fabric of built objects.
Embedding sensing into a physical substrate
has a number of attractions. Each
sensor package can sense a number of
local variables such as the stress on the
material, its orientation in space, its
proximity to other materials etc.
Combine these sensors into a network
and we can construct a global view of the
material and its relationships to the real
world. Add processing and we have the
potential to build materials that "know
themselves", in some sense, and which
SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence
over the last decade. In particular, various
supporting software infrastructures
have been proposed, some enabling
semantic awareness for services, others
dealing with middleware interoperability.
Our contribution lies in the integrated
treatment of service interoperability,
from the application to the middleware
layer. Our solution has further
been designed to be lightweight and thus
can be supported in most pervasive environments,
not requiring the presence of a
dedicated server. As a result, true open,
pervasive computing environments are
enabled - integrating and composing in
an ad hoc fashion the most appropriate
networked services in order to deliver
rich applications to users, independently
of heterogeneous underlying software
technologies and semantic representations.
Our research is conducted as part of the
European IST Amigo and Plastic projects
and industrial collaborations with
Alcatel and Thales.
Links:
ARLES site: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/arles/
Please contact:
Valerie Issarny, Nikolaos Georgantas,
INRIA, France
Tel: +33 1 39 63 57 89
E-mail: Valerie.Issarny@inria.fr,
Nikolaos.Georgantas@inria.fr
can react in ways that are far more
sophisticated than are possible with simpler,
'smart' materials.
If this all sounds a bit abstract, imagine a
person with a broken leg who is wearing
a plaster cast. For a physiotherapist, the
challenge is to make the person take adequate
exercise to stimulate the break,
while at the same time stopping them
from attempting too much and risking
further damage. As the physiotherapy
programme changes over time and in
conjunction with on-going assessment of
ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 37