Smart hyperspaces and project Ubikids
A smart space is an electronics-enhanced physical environment that can sense the existence of users and other entities, and provide them the right services, in the right way, at the right time. Such senses and services are based on collaborative work of many interconnected devices and computers, which may be small enough to be embedded to everyday objects in the space. So far, many creative researches have been conducted to develop and experiment a variety of smart spaces. The next research issue to emerge, we believe, is to interconnect and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level space known as a hyperspace. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the smart space concepts and related research, we describe what a smart hyperspace is all about and what related challenging issues exist. We then explain our vision and motivations towards building a specific smart hyperspace, called Ubikids, to assist parents and provide services to make them more convenient, prompt, reliable, precise, and can remotely take care of their kids. Finally, we show the fundamental approaches, conceptual designs, crucial problems and so on, regarding the project Ubikids.

title: Designing a Context-Aware System to Detect Dangerous Situations in School Routes for Kids Outdoor Safety Care
abstract: Ubiquitous computing is targeted at services and applications of computer and communication technologies in the real world. This research, as a part of UbicKids Project, is focused on designing a context-aware system that dynamically detects the possible dangerous situations in the routes where kids go to and return from schools, and provides prompt advices to kids who may encounter some dangerous situations. Based on analyses of typical dangerous situations in school routes, the paper then shows the system architecture and discusses about danger-related context information processing including context description, representation and presentation. Security and privacy issues and possible solutions are also explained. A preliminary system prototype has been implemented and some GUIs are explained. Related work is discussed with comparisons to other research work.

title: A Java-Based RFID Service Framework with Semantic Data Binding Between Real and Cyber Spaces
abstract: Recently there are getting more and more systems and applications using RFID. There is a necessity of a framework for them. This paper presents a Java-based framework that offers a set of general services to support various RFID systems for different purposes and application scenarios. The framework emphasizes on the semantic data binding for contextual information mapping between real and cyber spaces. The Java interface classes are provided to support general communications among a RFID, a reader and an application. Real and cyber spaces are synchronized via dynamic and real-time mapping from symbolic strings or IDs to the semantic XML data representations that are more effectively and efficiently useable by RFID applications. In this paper, the architecture and functional modules of the Java-based RFID service framework are explained in detail.

title: A general purpose virtual collaboration room
abstract: The general purpose virtual collaboration room (VCR) is an Internet based desktop groupware system that enables a group of remote individuals to flexibly and naturally conduct their collaborative teaching/learning/working without constraints on collaboration types, working styles, group scales, and system platforms. To cope with the complexity, a room metaphor, i.e., emulating a physical room and objects in it, is used as a framework of the system. System implementation becomes no more complex than the case of using one object by identifying associated objects in communication messages between a room server and clients. The VCR provides rich and effective support of awareness of the user, object, space, and their mutual relations. With the use of Java applets for system implementations, users can enter and use a VCR from any standard Java enabled Web browser.

title: Adaptive Video Streaming over P2P Multi-Hop Path

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 Multiplatform P2P System: its implementation and applications
abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self-organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many serious challenges. In our previous work, we implemented a synchronous P2P collaboration platform called TOMSCOP. Based on the elementary peer group services offered by the JXTA general framework, TOMSCOP provides the extra four types of services: synchronous message transportation, peer room administration, peer communication support and application space management. By using the four services, different kinds of shared applications for various specific purposes can be relatively easily developed and associated collaborative cyber spaces or communities can be quickly built across the JXTA virtual network overlaid on top of the existing physical networks. However, the TOMSCOP was implemented only in Windows XP OS. In this paper, we extend our previous work and present the implementation of a Multi-Platform P2P System (MPPS). The proposed system operates very smoothly in UNIX Solaris 9 OS, LINUX Suse 9.1 OS, Mac OSX, and Windows XP. In the future study, we would like to evaluate the implemented P2P platform and compare its performance with other P2P systems.

title: TOMSCOP - a synchronous P2P collaboration platform over JXTA
abstract: We focus on design and implementation of a synchronous P2P (peer-to-peer) collaboration platform called TOMSCOP (Technology Of Multiuser Synchronous Collaboration Platform). Based on the elementary peer group services offered by the JXTA general framework, TOMSCOP provides the extra four types of services: synchronous message transportation, peer room administration, peer communication support and application space management. By using the four services, different kinds of shared applications for various specific purposes can be relatively easily developed and associated collaborative cyber spaces or communities can be quickly built across the JXTA virtual network overlaid on top of the existing physical networks.