A Smart Ambient Sound Aware Environment for Be Quiet Reminding
This paper presents a prototype of a smart sound aware environment that captures ambient sounds, analyzes sound situations and gives a be-quiet reminder to someone who generates sound exceeding certain volume level and disturbing others in the same site. It shows the microphone net to sense sound data and the speaker net to send be-quiet reminders. All computers are interconnected with a P2P network atop of the TOMSCOP platform. It discusses how sound data is captured and processed, and when a be-quiet reminder decision is made with analyzing contexts of sounds and users in a room. Some preliminary experimental results are given

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: 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: Smart hyperspaces and project Ubikids
abstract: 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: Towards a Natural Internet-Based Collaborative Environment with Support of Object Physical and Social Characteristics
abstract: Objects in this article refer to sharable applications, such as a whiteboard and a video player, used by multi-users who are in different sites and have computers connected to networks. The objects are important elements in our Internet-based desktop collaborative system, called virtual collaboration room (VCR). We argue that a natural collaborative environment should be developed in a framework of using both a room metaphor and an object metaphor, i.e., emulating the fundamental characteristics of real rooms and real objects, respectively. This article gives the first systematic specifications of object physical and social characteristics, and discusses how to exploit and implement the object characteristics in VCR. A preliminary prototype of platform independent real-time audio/video communications among multiple users is also described. It can be used together with VCR.

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 mobile negotiation agent embedded hybrid online purchasing system
abstract: We propose a mobile negotiation agent embedded hybrid online purchasing system (MineAgeHops in short) with three emphases: agent's mobility, evolvable negotiation model, and hybrid architecture. As in the physical world, a buyer agent can travel to a virtual shop resided in a remote host for obtaining information about a product and directly negotiating on the product with a seller in the virtual shop. Human negotiation is a complex process. The evolvable negotiation model makes effort to reflect different negotiation levels with increasing knowledge and experience as time goes. A hybrid of centralized and decentralized architecture can overcome network bottleneck problem as well as improve purchasing efficiency by enabling agents' mobility and flexibility.

title: Probabilistic interval-valued computation: toward a practical surrogate for statistics inside CAD tools
abstract: Interval methods offer a general, fine-grain strategy for modeling correlated range uncertainties in numerical algorithms. We present a new, improved interval algebra that extends the classical affine form to a more rigorous statistical foundation. Range uncertainties now take the form of confidence intervals. In place of pessimistic interval bounds, we minimize the probability of numerical "escape"; this can tighten interval bounds by 10times, while yielding 10-100times speedups over Monte Carlo. The formulation relies on three critical ideas: liberating the affine model from the assumption of symmetric intervals; a unifying optimization formulation; and a concrete probabilistic model. We refer to these as probabilistic intervals, for brevity. Our goal is to understand where we might use these as a surrogate for expensive, explicit statistical computations. Results from sparse matrices and graph delay algorithms demonstrate the utility of the approach, and the remaining challenges

title: Rough Asymptotics of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations
abstract: This note is concerned with the asymptotic behavior of adapted solutions to forward-backward SDEs when the forward diffusion contains small noises. We prove the sample path Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for the adapted solutions to the FBSDEs under appropriate conditions stated in terms of a certain type of convergence of the solutions to the associated quasilinear PDEs. As an application we apply the LDP results to a problem of rare event simulation. We provide a necessary condition for the existence of an asymptotically efficient estimator amongst the class of importance sampling estimators.