866841
Neighborhood-Consistent Transaction Management for Pervasive Computing Environments
This paper examines the problem of transaction management in pervasive computing environments and presents a new approach to address them. We represent each entity as a mobile or static semi-autonomous device. The purpose of each device is to satisfy user queries based on its local data repository and interactions with other devices currently in its vicinity. Pervasive environments, unlike traditional mobile computing paradigm, do not differentiate between clients and servers that are located in a fixed, wired infrastructure. Consequently, we model all devices as peers. These environments also relax other assumptions made by mobile computing paradigm, such as the possibility of reconnection with a given device, support from wired infrastructure, or the presence of a global schema. These fundamental characteristics of pervasive computing environments limit the use of techniques developed for transactions in a “mobile” computing environments. We define an alternative optimistic transaction model whose main emphasis is to provide a high rate of successful transaction terminations and to maintain a neighborhood-based consistency. The model accomplishes this via the help of active witnesses and by employing an epidemic voting protocol. The advantage of our model is that it enables two or more peers to engage in a reliable and consistent transaction while in a pervasive environment without assuming that they can talk to each other via infrastructure such as base stations. The advantage of using active witnesses and an epidemic voting protocol is that transaction termination does not depend on any single point of a failure. Additionally, the use of an epidemic voting protocol does not require all involved entities to be simultaneously connected at any time and, therefore, further overcomes the dynamic nature of the environments. We present the implementation of the model and results from simulations.
468262
Collaborative joins in a pervasive computing environment
Abstract.We present a collaborative query processing protocol based on the principles of Contract Nets. The protocol is designed for pervasive computing environments where, in addition to operating on limited computing and battery resources, mobile devices cannot always rely on being able to access the wired infrastructure. Devices, therefore, need to collaborate with each other in order to obtain data otherwise inaccessible due to the nature of the environment. Furthermore, by intelligently using answers cached by peers, devices can reduce their computation cost. We show the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating performance of devices querying for data while moving in a citylike environment.
1245230
A policy language for a pervasive computing environment
We describe a policy language designed for pervasive computing applications that is based on deontic concepts and grounded in a semantic language. The pervasive computing environments under consideration are those in which people and devices are mobile and use various wireless networking technologies to discover and access services and devices in their vicinity. Such pervasive environments lend themselves to policy-based security due to their extremely dynamic nature. Using policies allows the security functionality to be modified without changing the implementation of the entities involved. However, along with being extremely dynamic, these environments also tend to span several domains and be made up of entities of varied capabilities. A policy language for environments of this sort needs to be very expressive but lightweight and easily extensible. We demonstrate the feasibility of our policy language in pervasive environments through a prototype used as part of a secure pervasive system.
1962537
Finding and Ranking Knowledge on the Semantic Web
Swoogle helps software agents and knowledge engineers find Semantic Web knowledge encoded in RDF and OWL documents on the Web. Navigating such a Semantic Web on the Web is difficult due to the paucity of explicit hyperlinks beyond the namespaces in URIrefs and the few inter-document links like rdfs:seeAlso and owl:imports. In order to solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel Semantic Web navigation model providing additional navigation paths through Swoogle's search services such as the Ontology Dictionary. Using this model, we have developed algorithms for ranking the importance of Semantic Web objects at three levels of granularity: documents, terms and RDF graphs. Experiments show that Swoogle outperforms conventional web search engine and other ontology libraries in finding more ontologies, ranking their importance, and thus promoting the use and emergence of consensus ontologies.
9322495
SOUPA: standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications
We describe a shared ontology called SOUPA - standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. SOUPA is designed to model and support pervasive computing applications. This ontology is expressed using the Web ontology language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desires, and intentions, time, space, events, user profiles, actions, and policies for security and privacy. We discuss how SOUPA can be extended and used to support the applications of CoBrA, a broker-centric agent architecture for building smart meeting rooms, and MoGATU, a peer-to-peer data management for pervasive environments.
14330906
Creating Context-Aware Software Agents
Sharing ontologies, sensing context and reasoning are crucial to the realization of context-aware software agents. This document de- scribes our efforts in using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Prolog Forward Chaining (Pfc) system to provide support for ontology sharing and reasoning in the CoolAgent Recommendation System (CoolAgent RS), a context-aware multi-agent system. We also describes the implementation of the CoolAgent RS document and cuisine recommendation services that provide tailored services by exploiting user's context.
1552091
Phrase Structure Trees Bear More Fruit than You Would Have Thought
In this paper we will present several results concerning phrase structure trees. These results show that phrase structure trees, when viewed in certain ways, have much more descriptive power than one would have thought. We have given a brief account of local constraints on structural descriptions and an intuitive proof of a theorem about local constraints. We have compared the local constraints approach to some aspects of Gazdar's framework and that of Peters and Ritchie and of Karttunen. We have also presented some results on skeletons (phrase structure trees without labels) which show that phrase structure trees, even when deprived of the labels, retain in a certain sense all the structural information. This result has implications for grammatical inference procedures.
11638124
Measuring benchmark similarity using inherent program characteristics
This paper proposes a methodology for measuring the similarity between programs based on their inherent microarchitecture-independent characteristics, and demonstrates two applications for it: 1) finding a representative subset of programs from benchmark suites and 2) studying the evolution of four generations of SPEC CPU benchmark suites. Using the proposed methodology, we find a representative subset of programs from three popular benchmark suites - SPEC CPU2000, MediaBench, and MiBench. We show that this subset of representative programs can be effectively used to estimate the average benchmark suite IPC, L1 data cache miss-rates, and speedup on 11 machines with different ISAs and microarchitectures - this enables one to save simulation time with little loss in accuracy. From our study of the similarity between the four generations of SPEC CPU benchmark suites, we find that, other than a dramatic increase in the dynamic instruction count and increasingly poor temporal data locality, the inherent program characteristics have more or less remained unchanged
5138605
String Adjunct Grammars
In this paper, we have introduced a new style of formal grammars called String Adjunct Grammars (AG). The rules in an AG have a considerably different formal character as compared to the 'rewrite rule' in a Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG). Such a study of formal grammars of different styles (i.e., formal character of rules) is of great interest because each style is well suited for characterizing certain aspects of natural language structure and is awkward for characterizing certain other aspects. Several subclasses of AG's motivated by strong linguistic considerations have been studied, comparing them with PSG's. Linguistic relevance of these grammars (and other gram mars suggested by this study) has been discussed at the end.
498300
Low power multilevel interconnect networks using wave-pipelined multiplexed (WPM) routing
A low power multilevel interconnect architecture that uses wave-pipelined multiplexed (WPM) interconnect routing is proposed in this paper. WPM takes advantage of existing interconnect idleness and implements low-overhead wire sharing to reduce the number of routing tracks required for intra-macrocell communication. It is shown that the extra available routing area could then be used to redesign the interconnect network to substantially reduce coupling capacitance and driver sizes. System-level simulation reveals that the systematic application of WPM reduces total power of a 40M transistor macrocell by almost 28% without any loss in performance.
41591052
A Tree Generating System