Ubisafe Computing: Vision and Challenges (I)
In recent years, a variety of new computing paradigms have been proposed for various purposes. It is true that many of them intend to and really can gratify some of the people sometime, somewhere; a few of them can even gratify some of the people anytime, anywhere. However, at present, none of the computing paradigms intend to gratify all the people anytime, anywhere. With the rapid advance of information technology and the spread of information services, the IT disparity in age, social standing, and race of the people has been expanding and has become a critical social problem of the 21st century. Thus, we have a fundamental question: Can we construct, in a unified methodology, a computing environment that can gratify all the people in all situations, all places and all the time? We propose a novel and inclusive computing paradigm, named ubisafe computing, for studying and providing possible solutions to the above problem. The ultimate goal of ubisafe computing is to build a computing environment in which all people and organizations can benefit from ubiquitous services anytime anywhere with assured and desired satisfaction without worrying or thinking about safety. That is, the ubisafe computing vision emphasizes two basic aspects: ubiquitous safety and ubiquitous satisfaction to all people in all situations. This paper presents the motivations for the ubisafe computing vision but focuses on one basic aspect of ubiquitous safety that covers reliability, security, privacy, persistency, trust, risk, out of control, and other watchfulness while considering novel, essential ubicomp or percomp features of unobtrusive computers, diverse users/people and life-like systems.

title: A Dangerous Location Aware System for Assisting Kids Safety Care
abstract: This system focuses on a location-aware computing application and environment which provide preemptive information on dangerous locations in the kid's surroundings; i.e., the system alerts a kid on the move of the possible dangers whenever he/she is near accident prone areas. Using satellite-based GPS position sensing, this system can gradually learn and remember about the different locations that a kid routinely visits and/or passes by in his daily life, based on space-oriented contexts. The full set of system functionalities, including the map display, requires a graphical user interface. This location based services (LBSs) can compute the serious situations and alert kids to avoid dangerous situations. Our research can simulate the virtual environment as hyperspaces for kids safety care

title: A user-friendly platform for developing and accessing grid services
abstract: This article presents an enhanced platform that provides a friendly environment of developing grid services and accessing grid services over Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3). This platform includes a class of functions for processing parameters input from a developer via GUI, a class of functions for generating files required for defining a grid service specified, and a class of functions for creating client program and facilitating accesses of the deployed services. As a result, the development and access of grid services requires less special expert knowledge of a developer at the server side and users at the client side, the efficiency of developing and accessing grid services can be improved. This paper describes our design ideas, necessary functions, and implementations. The comparisons with other related toolkits are given and the extended version of the platform on top of the web service environment rather than GT3.

title: A Real Trading Model based Price Negotiation Agents
abstract: Sim proposed a market-driven negotiation agent model that makes adjustable amounts of concession by reacting to different market situations and trading constraints, and it was improved with an enhanced market-driven strategy by taking opponent eagerness into consideration. In both Sim's original model and improved model, however, it was implied that a negotiation agent has same behaviors and actions to all trading partners referring to a same trading issue. It is not quite true in a real world trading negotiation. Based on both models, this paper proposes a real trading model based price negotiation agents that take each trading partner as an individual with different strategies and actions. Moreover, negotiation actions between a negotiation agent and a trading partner are kept in secret and unknown to others

title: Smart u-Things and Ubiquitous Intelligence
abstract: Smart u-things are real things with attached, embedded or blended computers, networks, and/or some other devices such as sensors, actors, e-tags and so on, and they can sense, compute, communicate and take some adaptive actions/reactions/proactions according to their goals, situated contexts, users’ needs, etc. It is envisioned that smart u-thing will be everywhere eventually towards ubiquitous intelligence and smart world. One of the profound implications of such ubiquitous smart u-things is that various kinds and levels of intelligence will exist pervasively in real everyday objects, environments, systems and even ourselves, and possibly be extended from man-made to natural things. The ubicomp/percomp can be regarded, in a sense, as the computing of all these smart/intelligent u-things, which are the basic elements and components of the smart world. After clarifying the essential features and three categories of smart u-things, i.e., smart object, smart space and smart system, the talk is devoted to discuss possible challenges in smart u-things’ research in terms of real world complexity. The main intentions are to examine the possible hard issues to suggest some potential research lines; and to let researchers in this field coolhead and being aware of the hardness of these challenges in making real things truly smart.

title: Mobile Wireless Sensor Network: Architecture and Enabling Technologies for Ubiquitous Computing
abstract: A mobile wireless sensor network owes its name to the presence of mobile sink or sensor nodes within the network. The advantages of mobile WSN over static WSN are better energy efficiency, improved coverage, enhanced target tracking and superior channel capacity. In this paper we present and discuss hierarchical multi-tiered architecture for mobile wireless sensor network. This architecture is proposed for the future pervasive computing age. We also elaborate on the impact of mobility on different performance metrics in mobile WSN. A study of some of the possible application scenarios for pervasive computing involving mobile WSN is also presented. These application scenarios will be discussed in their implementation context. While discussing the possible applications, we also study related technologies that appear promising to be integrated with mobile WSN in the ubiquitous computing. With an enormous growth in number of cellular subscribers, we therefore place the mobile phone as the key element in future ubiquitous wireless networks. With the powerful computing, communicating and storage capacities of these mobile devices, the network performance can benefit from the architecture in terms of scalability, energy efficiency and packet delay, etc.

title: Simplex Memory Neural Networks
abstract: The biological neural network-simplex memory neural network-is proposed to describe the mechanisms of pattern memory in the brain. A mathematical model of the simplex memory neural network is constructed to memorize any binary pattern with content-addressable memory function. Under Hebbian learning rule, the new network has some important functions in accord with the learning and memory behaviors of the brain.

title: Fast interval-valued statistical modeling of interconnect and effective capacitance
abstract: Correlated interval representations of range uncertainty offer an attractive solution to approximating computations on statistical quantities. The key idea is to use finite intervals to approximate the essential mass of a probability density function (pdf) as it moves through numerical operators; the resulting compact interval-valued solution can be easily interpreted as a statistical distribution and efficiently sampled. This paper first describes improved interval-valued algorithms for asymptotic wave evaluation (AWE)/passive reduced-order interconnect macromodeling algorithm (PRIMA) model order reduction for tree-structured interconnect circuits with correlated resistance, inductance, and capacitance (RLC) parameter variations. By moving to a much faster interval-valued linear solver based on path-tracing ideas, and making more optimal tradeoffs between interval- and scalar-valued computations, the delay statistics roughly 10/spl times/ faster than classical Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, with accuracy to within 5% can be extracted. This improved interval analysis strategy is further applied in order to build statistical effective capacitance (C/sub eff/) models for variational interconnect, and show how to extract statistics of C/sub eff/ over 100/spl times/ faster than classical MC simulation, with errors less than 4%.

title: GRAM - a P2P system of group revision assistance management
abstract: This paper focuses on general design and prototype implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) and a proactive mechanism based version management system called GRAM (group revision assistance management). It provides four special features in comparison with other version management systems: higher system reliability and robustness, effective revision collision prevention using proactive agents, context-aware environment for team software revision, a unified XML format for configuration and history files as well as system and agent exchange messages. Every peer holds a shared space synchronized with other peers' ones, and a workspace for a user's ordinary editing. GRAM is implemented using the JXTA technology that consists of the virtual JXTA network and basic peer group services. The system GUI and basic functions in the current prototype are also presented to show its basic usages. By using GRAM, version management of various software development projects can be comfortably conducted.