Grapevine

Grapevine is a framework that enables applications to share context information in a localized region of a pervasive computing network, use that information to dynamically form groups defined by their shared situations, and assess the aggregate context of that group.

Moving beyond more typical egocentric world views, Grapevine allows an application to distribute its own context information while simultaneously leveraging the context information it receives to modify its behavior and aggregate task-relevant group context information that can also distributed within the network. We use novel data structures such as probabilistic Bloomier filters to represent context information efficiently and minimize the network resources required to support Grapevine's use.

Our long term vision is a framework that allows a pervasive computing application developer to delegate all context related functionality to Grapevine and focus solely on the task at hand. Instead of spending time determining what context information is needed, who it should be sent to, and managing the lifecycle of the information it has received, a Grapevine-enabled application can merely indicate the context information it has to offer and the context information it is interested in receiving. Achieving this vision leaves many interesting research challenges such as communicating and responding to interest gradients within the network, determining the frequency with which information should be sent, assessing a quality metric for the context information on hand, and finding ways to provide all this functionality without placing undue burden on the limited resources available to pervasive computing platforms.

This project is funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grants CNS-0844850 and CNS-1218232. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Project Participants: Samuel (Sungmin) Cho (Assistant professor), Dr. Christine Julien (MPC director)

Publications:

  1. Samuel (Sungmin) Cho, Christine Julien. "Size Efficient Big Data Sharing Among Internet of Things Devices," 1st International Workshop on Behavioral Implications of Contextual Analytics (co-located with IEEE PerCom 2017). 2017.
  2. Nathaniel Wendt, Christine Julien. "SpatioTemporal Traveler," Proceedings of the Posters and Demos Session of the 17th International Middleware Conference. 2016.
  3. Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das, Christine Julien. "Determining Quality- and Energy-Aware Multiple Contexts in Pervasive Computing Environments," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 2016.
  4. Samuel (Sungmin) Cho, Christine Julien. "CHITCHAT: Navigating Tradeoffs in Device-to-Device Context Sharing," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. 2016.
  5. Chenguang Liu, Christine Julien. "Pervasive Context Sharing in Magpie: Adaptive Trust-Based Privacy Protection," Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services. 2015.
  6. Samuel (Sungmin) Cho, Christine Julien. "The Grapevine Context Processor: Application Support for Efficient Context Sharing," Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Software Engineering and Systems. 2015.
  7. Tomas Diaz, Christine Julien. "Demo Abstract: MoodChat: Using Context-Awareness to Connect Likeminded Co-Located Individuals," IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. 2015.
  8. Samuel (Sungmin) Cho, Christine Julien. "Efficient Decentralized Context Sharing via Smart Aggregation," International Conference on Mobile Ad -Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS). 2014.
  9. Michael Xing, Christine Julien. "Trust-Based, Privacy-Preserving Context Aggregation and Sharing in Mobile Ubiquitous Computing," International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing. 2013.
  10. Evan Grim, Chien-Liang Fok, Christine Julien. "Grapevine: Efficient Situational Awareness in Pervasive Computing Environments," Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference on. 2012.
  11. Evan Grim, Christine Julien. "Spitty Bifs are Spiffy Bits: Interest-based context dissemination using spatiotemporal bloom filters," Mobiquitous. 2012.
  12. Christine Julien, Ágoston Petz, Evan Grim. "Rethinking Context for Pervasive Computing: Adaptive Shared Perspectives," International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms and Networks. 2012.
  13. Christine Julien. "The Context of Coordinating Groups in Dynamic Mobile Environments," Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination). 2011.