Matt Stabeler

I’ve been reading lots of things recently about wearable computing, but previously I was reading around context and situation awareness, had a number of thoughts based on the ideas I read. Alot of my more recent reading has also referenced some of this material, so it seems  it may be useful, and I have written a short document about how I understand it at the moment.

Ideas About Context

Met with paddy this morning to talk about where to go from here.

I’ve been reading around Context, Privacy, Infrastructure, Management etc. in relation to wearable computing. There are a number of texts that mention it, but nothing (so far) that has dealt with it directly.

Paddy suggested reading and using the idea from http://infoblog.stanford.edu/ that you take the main assumptions about an area, list them out, then change one or two of them, and see what happens. (yet to read artical)

Also, paddy suggested to have a think about stream processing.

I should also look at the locations/conferences/groups that are doing these thing – i.e. find papers that are newer, and may not be highly cited.

Suggested conferences to look into:

MobHoc, MobiCom, Middleware, etc

Paddy also mentioned that reading can expand to fill all available time, so don’t let!

Paddy and I met to discuss the IRCSET Report and my research direction.

Regards the former, the document I wrote was fine, and Paddy will submit a supervisor report separately (as per the IRCSET guidelines).

Regards the latter, I said that I felt that although I had been reading around many areas, and was enthused by attending Pervasive 2008, I did not really have a particular topic that I was readings around. Paddy suggested that allthough I effectively have the freedom (within reason) to research what I wanted, he has some ideas that I could work on.

The topic he suggested was to investigate Wearable Computing/Technology, and to build up my knowledge on the subject by spending the following week doing a breadth-first search of the related literature. We suggested and we agreed that the emphasis could be on the infrastructure and management of wearable technologies within pervasive computing environments. Areas/Issues of interest (some added by me later) being:

power, communications, compliance, privacy, commonalities, categorisation, storage & reporting, processing capacity……

The 1 week project resulting in me finding 3-4 good papers in the field that Paddy and I could use to discuss further research.

Also discussed at the meeting, with Aaron was what to do with the Basadaeir system, we decided that we should meet together (Paddy, Aaron, Matt and Julie) to talk about  where this project could head.

We also briefly talked about Aaron’s Bluetooth idea of encoding communications into Bluetooth name strings, and decided to discuss that at a later date. Aaron will send me his thoughts to date on the project.

I recently attended the Pervasive 2008 conference in Sydney, Australia. where I submitted my paper – SensorMash: Exploring System Fidelity Through Sensor Mashup, which I co-authored with Steve Neely and Paddy Nixon.

I presented a poster and a one-minute-madness talk, for which I won best one-minute-madness.

I have/will write(n) a summary of the events there (as a reflection on my experience), and the ideas that I had for new projects as a result of the conference.

In todays supervisor meeting, we discussed mostly a new project, for submission to Ubicomp 2008 (deadline 4th April) which combines sensormash and CFP into a robust system for matching people to interests and bringing about new possibilities for collaboration by displaying information in an untuitive and informative way.

details are here: Meeting 27Feb2008

Last week, we submitted a paper to the Pervasive Late Breaking Results section of the Pervasive conference in Sydney.

Attached is the document (pdf).

Sensormash uses construct as its datastore, and allows users to mash-up the readings from sensors, to give a derived location reading for a user, as well as an average reading.

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to get Ubitracker to run directly from construct. I have created a Contruct class in PHP which deals with the construct communications, for both querying (SPARQL) and inserting data (RDF Triplets).

This enabled me to create an application that uses this to get the data from (any local) construct directly, and format it as XML as expected by the ubitracker interface.

There is more work to be done to do with meta-data needed to run the interface (such as tag/object bindings), once this has been completed, the interface can be run and installed very easily. This would allow other groups who utilize Ubisense, to run this application. A blue sky view of this project would be to create a platform within which sensor ‘plugins’ could be developed and used to display interesting things to users.

Further stages of development will require some rethinking of the output XML structure, to include other sensor types and data (such as Bluetooth readings/locations, Calendar linkage, Webcam images, etc. etc.)

It will be particularly interesting to develop an application which uses all of the location type data to get a good approximation of an objects (persons) location.

I’ve been busy with module stuff, and have been generally experimenting with construct and ubisense and the Ubitracker site the Tom and I created.

I created the backend system (Java/MySQL/PHP) and the management interface for the system (PHP/MySQL):
http://kind.ucd.ie/~matthewstabeler/ubitracker/

Which allows you to manage data about users, and also to send notifications to objects(tags) in the ubisense system, which is quite good fun!

We plan to link this interface with Construct and eventually run the live system directly using data from Construct.

Tom created the front end interface:
http://kind.ucd.ie/~tomholland/ubitracker/

Which tracks the users in realtime (ish), we plan to make some sort of playback mechanism for data within the ubitracker system.

Also, I finished the Natural Comuting assignment, which was eventually entitled, Optimum Coverage of the Autonomous Sensor Swarm: Sensor PSO. This system was a simple implementation of Particle Swarm Optimisation to optimise the positioning of sensors. Details are on my projects page here

I’m now working on the idea of Categorizing sensors, and developing a mobile version of construct, I posted more details on this blog here.

I also had an idea about location sensing using derived information available to social networking sites, this started as more of a personal thing, but seems it might have some academic merit! But i’ll update about that when I’ve got something tangible to show!
!

The discussion I had with Aaron and Paddy involved the idea of categorizing sensors based on their abilities and functionality, with a view to creating a mobile version of construct. This led me to do some reading, and whilst I still have a pile of papers to read, I have come up with a project plan, with the view of getting something into the Ubicomp 2008 conference.

The attached file is the outline/draft of the project as I see it, and is what I intend to be getting on with!

Project Spec

I have finished a paper on Sensor PSO, which is for one of my structured PhD Modules: Natural Computing. Details can be found here attached is the PDF version.

Optimum Coverage of the Autonomous Sensor Swarm