Pervasive Computing Applications and Security – A Deep Insight

Pervasive computing has made life easy with communication devices. Today devise collaboration has enhanced everywhere in this environment. It has made computing devices invisible and the services. This pervasive framework provides applications with interactions, numerous cooperation and accessibility, and integration. The proposed work enumerates the applications, pervasive security challenges. It provides security predicaments by assigning certificate credentials, access controls, trust management, and some security techniques to overcome the security paradigms in these distributed networks with IoT and the pervasive computing framework. The work also encounters security perplexities in handling the security threats and user interaction issues. Nevertheless, security techniques are listed for various pervasive applications in distinct domains such as healthcare, industries, and transforming sensitive information. The smart applications with smart environments perhaps force towards the new technologies in the pervasive computing outlook. The work also embedded with middleware with the context-based situation in these pervasive applications

Letter from the Editors: AI Magazine in the New Era of AI

Artificial Intelligence has witnessed an exponential growth in the last decade and, thanks to its many successful and pervasive applications, it has now become a research field with profound societal impacts. The interest in AI has reached an all-time high from all sectors of our modern society, including industry, health, education and government. AI Magazine, founded in 1980, has documented the rise of AI from an elite and almost esoteric field to its current status of key player in modern society. Under the leadership of exceptional scientists with a global vision of the field, David Leake first and then Ashok Goel, it has provided a venue for vibrant discussion on technological transformations, research trends and fundamental breakthroughs.

Learning-Based Coordination Model for On-the-Fly Self-Composing Services Using Semantic Matching

Forecasts announce that the number of connected objects will exceed 20 billion by 2025. Objects, such as sensors, drones or autonomous cars participate in pervasive applications of various domains ranging from smart cities, quality of life, transportation, energy, business or entertainment. These inter-connected devices provide storage, computing and activation capabilities currently under-exploited. To this end, we defined “Spatial services”, a new generation of services seamlessly supporting users in their everyday life by providing information or specific actions. Spatial services leverage IoT, exploit devices capabilities (sensing, acting), the data they locally store at different time and geographic locations, and arise from the spontaneous interactions among those devices. Thanks to a learning-based coordination model, and without any pre-designed composition, reliable and pertinent spatial services dynamically and fully automatically arise from the self-composition of available services provided by connected devices. In this paper, we show how we extended our learning-based coordination model with semantic matching, enhancing syntactic self-composition with semantic reasoning. The implementation of our coordination model results in a learning-based semantic middleware. We validated our approach on various experiments: deployments of the middleware in various settings; instantiation of a specific scenario and various other case studies; experiments with hundreds of synthetic services; and specific experiments for setting up key learning parameters. We also show how the learning-based coordination model using semantic matching favours service composition, by exploiting three ontological constructions (is-a, isComposedOf, and equivalentTo), de facto removing the syntactic barrier preventing pertinent compositions to arise. Spatial services arise from the interactions of various objects, provide complex and highly adaptive services to users in seamless way, and are pertinent in a variety of domains such as smart cities or emergency situations.

A review on artificial intelligence in high-speed rail

High-speed rail (HSR) has brought a number of social and economic benefits, such as shorter trip times for journeys of between one and five hours; safety, security, comfort and on-time commuting for passengers; energy saving and environmental protection; job creation; and encouraging sustainable use of renewable energy and land. The recent development in HSR has seen the pervasive applications of artificial intelligence (AI). This paper first briefly reviews the related disciplines in HSR where AI may play an important role, such as civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and signalling and control. Then, an overview of current AI techniques is presented in the context of smart planning, intelligent control and intelligent maintenance of HSR systems. Finally, a framework of future HSR systems where AI is expected to play a key role is provided.

Efficient Algorithm for Answering Fuzzy Medical Requests in Pervasive Healthcare Information Systems

The progress in mobile devices and wireless networks technologies has considerably contributed to integrate pervasive computing expertise in many domains with the aim of improving the quality of services and users' mobility. However, in many situations, users may face difficult situations, needing faster decisions, where classical systems impose the submission of classic queries in which crisp conditions must be carefully fixed. This inconvenience limits the potential of pervasive applications accessed by users having few times to make the right decisions. To introduce the contributions of this paper, we choose the medical domain as example. We considered a pervasive healthcare application under which physicians haven't enough time to fix carefully their queries in some emergency cases. Therefore, they are allowed to flexibly express their preferences using conjunctive fuzzy queries and to quickly receive best answers anywhere and anytime while treating patients in the shortest time and consequently free resources for eventually other urgent requests. In this work, we consider, in general, the problem of efficiently finding the top-K answers for a conjunctive fuzzy query from the top-N conjunctive query rewritings of the query. In particular, we propose an efficient algorithm called the Top-N rewritings algorithm for finding the top-N query rewritings of a medical conjunctive fuzzy query using a set of conjunctive crisp views. At the best of our knowledge, this algorithm is the first to generate, without computing all possible rewritings, the N best ones ordered according to their satisfaction degrees and that are likely to return the best K-answers for the user fuzzy query. The relevance of a query rewriting is estimated using a second algorithm called the Query-satisfaction computing algorithm proposed to estimate, through the histograms maintained to approximate the distribution of set of values returned by the rewriting and to which fuzzy predicates are related, the pertinence of a conjunctive fuzzy query rewriting rather than accessing the database relations.

Will Microblogs Shape China's Civil Society Under President's Xi's Surveillance State?

Western scholars have previously predicted Weibo and social media will provide Chinese netizens with an opportunity to foster its nascent civil society. However, the growing applications of surveillance technologies have challenged this rosy, yet deterministic prediction. This chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas's concept of public sphere is less likely to function properly, given the pervasive applications of surveillance technologies in China, which has fundamentally challenge its many assumptions. Using Habermas's analytical framework that is used to better comprehend the role of social media in Chinese politics, the authors argue that information technologies turn out to deteriorate the formation and maintenance of a public sphere for Chinese civil society. The authors employ a case study to examine the interrelations among social media, surveillance technologies, civil society, state power, economic development, political process, and democratization in China as demonstrated in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Law Protests.

Implementing Risk Management in Pervasive and IoT Environments

The pervasive nature of networked things envision various risks as these digital devices generate high volume of data with variable nature. The technological growth is also a product of highly interrelated complex data, so it becomes a strong argument for risks management in pervasive and internet of things environments. This research analyzes many risks present in pervasive and IoT environments. The paper elaborates various risk analysis strategies in the pervasive and IoT environments which are highly configurable in nature. The paper has implemented risk management in pervasive applications by providing risky code insights by a smart software. The risky regions of software code are analyzed by the software and managed on priority. The state of art constructs a strong case for establishing interrelationships between risks management and quality assurance in big computation environments.