Research Projects
The Mobile and Pervasive Computing Group's research revolves around
software engineering issues related to mobile and pervasive computing.
We are a member of UT's Center for Excellence in Distributed Global
Environments (EDGE). Some information about our specific ongoing and
completed research projects can be found on this page. Also see our
Publications for up-to-date pending and published
papers. An abbreviated list of projects can be found on our
projects page.
Current Projects
-
Programming Abstractions for Ubiquitous Computing
This project is developing programming abstractions and development tools that enable application developers to
effeciently interact with ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Traditional pervasive systems are typically designed for a
specific application and can afford tight coupling between applications and the deployment technologies of the
application's evironment. These application-specific deployments will soon give way to more generic and flexible
deployments which will support multiple applications developed by disjoint development teams. To support this transistion
we must provide consistent programming interfaces and flexible support to application developers.
At the heart of this project is the need to find the proper level of abstraction for ubiquitous environments,
and developing programming metaphors that are appropriate. Currently, we are pursuing two lines of research in
this area. The Application Sessions Middleware project unifies the tasks of resource discovery and
connection maintenance into a single session. The Evolving Tuples project provides a generic
platform which is deployed to nodes in a pervasive environment. The Evolving Tuples platform can be leveraged
by new applications without requiring updates to the individual nodes, while still protecting them from
attackers.
Papers:
- D. Stovall and C. Julien. "Application Sessions: Middleware for Application Development Targeting Pervasive Environments," (Under Review), 2007.
- D. Stovall and C. Julien. "Resource Discovery with Evolving Tuples," (Under Review), 2007.
- C. Julien, "Adaptive Preference Specifications for Application Sessions," In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing, Chicago, Il, December 2006.
- C. Julien and D. Stovall, "Enabling Ubiquitous Coordination Using Application Sessions," In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, Bologna (Italy), June 2006.
Details:
- DAIS: Declarative Applications in Immersive Environments: In this project,
we are developing communication, coordination, and programming abstractions that allow a mobile application on a PDA to
interact directly with resource-constrained sensors in the local environment to retrieve information on-demand without using a
single network access point. The project includes novel abstractions for sensor data aggregation and fusion performed within
the network on the resource constrained devices.
Papers:
- Julien, C. and Kabadayi, S. "Enabling Programmable Ubiquitous Computing Environments: A Middleware Perspective,"
In Advances in Ubiquitous Computing: Future Paradigms and Directions, S. Kouadri Mostefaoui, Z. Maamar, and G. M. Giaglis (Eds.)
Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2008.
- Kabadayi, S. and Julien, C.
"Scenes: Abstracting Interaction in Immersive Sensor Networks,"
Pervasive and Mobile Computing: Special Issue on Selected Papers from PerCom 2007, December 2007.
- O'Brien, W.J., Julien, C., Hammer, J., Kabadayi, S., and Luo, X.
"An Architecture for Local Decision Support in Ad Hoc Sensor Networks,"
In Proceedings of the ASCE 2007 International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering,
Pittsburgh, PA, July 2007.
- Kabadayi, S., Julien, C., O'Brien, W.J., and Stovall, D.,
"Virtual Sensors: A Demonstration,"
In 26th International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM): Demonstrations Track,
Anchorage, AK, May 2007.
- Kabadayi, S. and Julien, C.,
"A
Local Data Abstraction and
Communication Paradigm for Pervasive Computing," In Proceedings of the 5th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications,
White Plains, NY, March 2007.
- Hammer, J., Hassan, I.,
Julien, C., Kabadayi, S., O'Brien, W.J., and Trujillo, J., "Dynamic
Decision Support in Direct Access Sensor Networks: A Demonstration," In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on
Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems, Vancouver, Canada, October 2006.
- Kabadayi, S., "Middleware for On-Demand Access to Sensor
Networks," In Proceedings of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, PhD Forum, San Diego, CA, October 2006.
- Kabadayi, S., Pridgen, A., and Julien, C., "Virtual
Sensors: Abstracting Data from Physical Sensors," In Proceedings of the 4th
International Workshop on Mobile Distributed Computing (MDC'2006),
co-located with WoWMoM'06, Buffalo, NY (US), June 2006.
- Julien, C., Hammer, J., and O'Brien,
W.J., "A
Dynamic Programing Framework for Pervasive Computing Environments,"
in Proceedings of the Workshop on Building Software for Pervasive Computing (co-located with
OOPSLA 2005), October 2005.
Software:
- Passive Context Sensing: Adaptation in pervasive computing required
up-to-the-minute understanding of the state of the environment, which often comes with a significant added cost in terms of
computation and communication. We are exploring possibilities for measuring environmental and network aspects using only
passive sensing which incurs no additional communication overhead in the network. This context information can subsequently be
used by a node to adapt communication and application protocols to current conditions.
Papers:
- SMASH: Secure Mobile Agent Middleware: As software components become able to
move among hosts in the network, a question arises in how to secure interactions between the agents and among the agents
and their host platforms. SMASH investigates the variety of these security requirements, provides a mobile agent
architecture that embodies them, and still allows agents to move and coordinate anonymously to a limited extent.
Papers:
- Pridgen, A. and Julien, C., "SMASH: Modular Security for
Mobile Agents," In Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems V, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007.
- Pridgen, A. and Julien,
C., "A
Secure Modular Mobile Agent System," in Proceedings
of the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (SELMAS'2006)
co-located with ICSE'06, Shanghai (China), May 2006.
- Cross-Layer Discovery and Routing: This work addresses the need for
application-adaptiev communication in mobile ad hoc networks that creates network routes based on applications' dynamic
resource requests. We have introduced an intuitive generalization of source routing which facilitates discovery of a resource
in a mobile ad hoc network and the creation and maintenance of a route from the requesting host to the discovered destination.
We thus eliminate the requirement that existing routing protocols be coupled with a name or resource resolution protocol,
instead favoring an entirely reactive approach to accommodate significant degrees of mobility and uncertainty.
Papers:
- Sliverware for Collaborative Mobile Applications: Despite computers'
widespread use for supporting personal applications, very few programming frameworks exist for creating synchronous
collaborative applications. Enabling real-time collaboration demands lightweight, modular middleware that enables the
fine-grained interactions requried by collaborative applications. We have introduced sliverware that provides
extreme modularity and customizability while at the same time realizing our goal of simplifying cooperative application
development.
Papers:
- Middleware for Integrating RFID Systems: RFID solutions have become
essential in monitoring inventory and in other large volume tracking and tagging applications. We are exploring this area on
two fronts: first, how do we simplofy and enable on-demand access to RFID stored information through middleware, and, second,
how can we integrate information sensed about the environment with identity information from RFID sensors to enable context-
and identity-aware applications?
Past Projects
- Network Abstractions: The network abstractions model provides a
formal abstract characterization of an application's context that extends to encompass a neighborhood within the ad hoc
network. The model includes a context specification mechanism that allows individual applications to tailor their operating
contexts to their personalized needs. The associated communication protocol, source initiated context construction, or
SICC, provides this context abstraction in ad hoc networks through continuous evaluation of the context. This relieves the
application developer of the obligation of explicitly managing mobility and its implications on behavior.
Papers:
- Julien, C. and Roman, G.-C., Supporting
Context-Aware Interaction in Dynamic Multi-Agent Systems, (invited paper), Environments for Multiagent Systems, D.
Weyns et al (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3374, February 2005, pp. 168-189.
- Roman, G.-C., Julien, C., and Huang, Q., Network
Abstractions for Context Aware Mobile Computing, in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software
Engineering (ICSE'02), Orlando, FL (USA),May 2002, pp. 363-373.
- Julien, C., Roman, G.-C., and Huang, Q., SICC:
Source-Initiated Context Construction in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks," Technical Report, TR-UTEDGE-2005-003, Center for
Excellence in Distributed Global Environments, The University of Texas at Austin, 2005.
Software:
- EgoSpaces: EgoSpaces is a coordination model and middleware for ad hoc
mobile environments that focuses on the needs of application development in ad hoc environments by proposing an agent-centered
notion of context, called a view, whose scope extends beyonr the local host to data and resources associated with hosts and
agents within a subnet surrounding the agent of interest. An agent may operate over multiple views whose definitions may
change over time. An agent uses declarative specifications to constrain the contents of each view by employing a rich set of
constraints that take into consideration properties of the individual data items, the agents that own them, the hosts on which
the agents reside, and the physical and logical topology of the ad hoc network. We have formalized the concept of view,
explored the notion of programming against views, discussed possible implementation strategies for transparent context
maintenance, and generated a protoype system.
Papers:
- Julien, C., and Roman, G.-C.,
EgoSpaces: Facilitating Rapid Development of
Context-Aware Mobile Applications, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,
32(5):281-298, May 2006.
- Julien, C., and Roman, G.-C., Egocentric Context-Aware Programming in Ad Hoc Mobile
Environments, inProceedings of the 10th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-10),
Charleston, SC (USA), November 2002, pp. 21-30.
- Julien, C. and Roman, G.-C., Active Coordination in Ad Hoc Networks, in
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, Pisa (Italy), February 2004, pp.
199-215.
- Julien,C., Payton, J., and Roman, G.-C., "Adaptive
Access Control in Coordination-Based Mobile Agent Systems, Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems III,
R. Choren et al (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3390, February 2005, pp. 254-271.
Software:
- Context UNITY: Context-aware computing refers to a paradigm in which
applications sense aspects of the environment and use this information to adjust their behavior in response to changing
circumstances. We have created a formal model and notation (Context UNITY) for expressing quintessential aspects of
context-aware computations; existential quantification, for instance, proves to be highly effective in capturing the
notion of discovery in open systems. Furthermore, Context UNITY treats context in a manner that is relative to the
specific needs of an individual applications and promotes an approach to context maintenance that is transparent to the
application.
Papers:
- Roman, G.-C., Julien, C., and Payton, J., Modeling Adaptive Behaviors in Context UNITY, Theoretical Computer Science, 376(3):185-204, May 2007.
- Julien, C., Payton, J., and Roman, G.-C., Reasoning About Context-Awareness in the Presence of
Mobility, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 97 (revised selected papers from FOCLASA'03), July 2004, pp. 259--276.
- Roman, G.-G., Julien, C., and Payton, J., A Formal Treatment of Context-Awareness, (invited
paper) in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 2984, Barcelona (Spain), March 2004, pp. 12-16.