N EWSLETTER I SSUENR. 4, J ANUARY 2014

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E

DITORIAL

Welcome to the fourth issue of the GAMBAS newsletter, with which we would like to inform you about recent advances of the GAMBAS (Generic Adaptive Middleware for Behavior-driven Autonomous Services) European research project.

It has been half a year since the last issue of the GAMBAS newsletter in which we described the results of the integration and introduced the associated software development kit for GAMBAS-enabled applications. Now it is time to announce that we have completed our first integrated prototype and to describe how the evaluation has been carried out, since the consortium has made a great effort to achieve it during this second year of the project.

As our partner profile in this edition of the newsletter, we present The Open University which is leading the user interface activities of the GAMBAS project. Its investigators have extensive experience in the area of context-awareness, context-aware interfaces, and design and evaluation of interactive systems.

In our events section, we invite you to join us at PerCom 2014 in Budapest (Hungary) on March 24-28, 2014, for the workshop titled

1st International IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Systems for Smart Cities, and to visit us in Athens at FIA 2014 to see the demonstration that will showcase the GAMBAS middleware and some of its applications.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue and we invite you to provide suggestions for improving your GAMBAS experience via email to marcus.handte@uni-due.de.

P

ROJECT

S

TATUS

The overall objective of the GAMBAS project is the development of an innovative and adaptive middleware to enable the privacy-preserving and automated utilization of behavior-driven services that adapt autonomously to the context of users.

O

BJECTIVES

To achieve this overall objective the GAMBAS project has the following scientific and technical sub goals:

1. Development of a generic middleware that encompasses:

 Models and infrastructures to support the interoperable representation and scalable processing of context.

 Frameworks and methods to support the generic yet resource-efficient multi-modal recognition of context.

 Protocols and tools to derive, generalize, and enforce user-specific privacy-policies.

 Techniques and concepts to optimize the interaction with behavior-driven services.

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The first version of the application prototype has been developed and it has

been used to create a stable version of the next evaluation

plan.

P

HASES

Conceptually, the GAMBAS project is divided into the following three main phases:

The first phase ran until the end of the first year, 2012. It included the gathering, sorting and prioritization of requirements to be used throughout the project as well as the use cases that were implemented by the application prototype. Furthermore, it included the high-level architecture and the first versions of the specifications developed in the remaining core research work packages.

The second phase has run until the end of the second year, 2013, and it has included the first implementation as the first integrated version of the be executed in the next and final phase.

The third phase concludes at the end of the project and contains the whole functionality of the GAMBAS middleware, including a second version of the prototype application and the associated execution of the evaluation plan.

R

ESULTS

GAMBAS has successfully completed the goals set out for the second phase of the project This means that, on one hand, the evaluation

of the first prototype has concluded and some important conclusions have been extracted in order to successfully continue with the second iteration of the middleware development, and on the other hand, that the requirements and use cases for the second prototype have been identified and formalized and that the final design of the middleware architecture and middleware components is about to be completed. The second implementation and integration of the middleware components is on the way.

The consortium has worked hard during this second year of the project and a total of 21 deliverables have been shipped and with very high quality. From them, six are public deliverables and are made available through the project website.

Related to the second iteration of the middleware, we have:

D1.3.2 Architecture Specification 2 - This document describes the high-level architectural design of the GAMBAS middleware from a static and dynamic perspective.

D2.1.2 Data Acquisition Specification 2 - This document describes the data acquisition framework of the GAMBAS middleware and details the data acquisition components that will be implemented on top of the framework.

D3.1.2 Privacy Preservation Specification 2 - This document describes the privacy preservation framework of the GAMBAS middleware and details how the different mechanisms will be applied to protect the privacy of users.

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D4.1.2 RDF Formalisms and Sensor Ontologies 2 - This document describes the main data models and query formalisms used by the GAMBAS middleware to enable interoperable and scalable distributed data storage and processing.

Finally, there is also a document on the User Experience:

D5.3 User Experience Report – Personal Interface - This document details the result of user studies conducted with the first software prototype. It highlights the study methodology and reports quantitative and qualitative usability data.

The public deliverables created by the GAMBAS consortium have been made available using the project website. Members of the GAMBAS Interest Group are able to access the documents directly after their submission. Other people will be able to access the documents after they have been formally reviewed. To access the documents visit http://www.gambas-ict.eu/download. 

I

NTEREST

G

ROUP

I

NVITATION

If you are interested in the GAMBAS project objectives and results, we want to encourage you to join the GAMBAS Interest Group at

http://www.gambas-ict.eu/sig.

All members of the GAMBAS Interest Group will be invited to project workshops via email and will also receive the current and following versions of the electronic project newsletter. As a greater benefit, the members will have access to the publications of the project consortium. So if you are interested, register today. 

P

ARTNER

P

ROFILE

(OU)

The Pervasive Interaction Lab at the Open University is concerned with technological and human aspects of pervasive/ubiquitous computing, exploring the possible interactions between people, technologies and representations. A main focus of the lab is on augmenting and extending every-day, learning and work activities. The lab brings together over twenty academics from various disciplines such computer science, engineering, cognitive science, sociology, design and psychology. The Pervasive Interaction Lab is part of the Centre for Research in Computing (CRC) at the Open University, a collaborative infrastructure that combines more than 100 Computing researchers, from the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), and the Department of Computing and Communications.

G

ERD

K

ORTUEM

Gerd Kortuem is Professor of Computing at The Open University and Director of the Ubiquitous Computing & Sustainability Lab. His research focuses on the design of digital technologies to tackle key societal issues such as health, education, energy and transportation, and covers digital cities, urban data mining, the Internet of Things, human computer Interaction and wearable computing. He has been PI on several UK and European research projects (e.g. COBIS, ALLOW, NEMO) and currently runs research projects on smart energy, intelligent transport and smart education with BT, E.On, Intel, INRIA and others. His most recent research project is MK:Smart, a £16M Milton Keynes-based smart city project (www.mksmart.org),

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education..Prof Kortuem holds a Diploma in Computer Science from Stuttgart University and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Oregon. He can be contacted atwww.kortuem.com.

E

LECTRONIC

V

ERSION

An electronic version of this newsletter can be found on the GAMBAS website at

http://www.gambas-ict.eu/download. Access to the electronic version is free of charge.

N

EWSLETTER

A

RCHIVE

The GAMBAS website also provides access to the archived versions of this newsletter. If you are interested in receiving the next issue of the newsletter via email, just sign up for the Interest Group so we can forward them to you at http://www.gambas-ict.eu/sig.

S

OFTWARE

D

EVELOPMENT

K

IT

GAMBAS SDK has been in beta testing, meaning that its core functionality had been implemented completely but we were still actively refining the abstractions given out to the application developer to ensure that the SDK was both, powerful and easy to use. The official release of the SDK 0.0.1. beta version of the GAMBAS SDK took place last January 10, 2014. The release available on the GAMBAS website includes several code examples and 4 tutorials that demonstrate the use of different aspects of the middleware. More details are available at

http://www.gambas-ict.eu/api

P

ROJECT

F

ACTS

Acronym: GAMBAS

Title: Generic Adaptive Middleware

for Behavior-driven Autonomous Services

Coordinator: Pedro José Marrón

Institution: Universität Duisburg-Essen

Email: pjmarron@uni-due.de

Consortium: Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany)

ETRA Investigación y Desarrollo (Spain)

National University of Ireland, Galway (Ireland)

The Open University (United Kingdom)

Aristech GmbH (Germany)

Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid, S. A.

(Spain)

Duration: 36 months

Kickoff: February 2012

Budget: 3.105.024 €

Funding: 2.194.000 €

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A wide variety of tests were carried out to evaluate each

of the features developed. The demonstration phase

took place in Madrid (Spain)

F

IRST

A

PPLICATION

P

ROTOTYPE

The first GAMBAS application prototype was delivered in October 2013 (Month 19 of the project). This prototype that can cover the use cases identified in the first evaluation plan has been successfully developed and further evaluated.

Several Intent-aware user interface components have been developed to support bus users with personalized interfaces for more effective travel guidance. These interfaces exploit the capabilities of the GAMABS middleware to assist users with proactive information about their transport choices with respect to their individual travel intentions. The interfaces have been integrated into a mobile bus travel application for the Android platform, which allows users to interact with the transport information system in Madrid based on their current and different features of the GAMBAS middleware and test the associated application prototype. It has been made available through the Google Play store and they require the GAMBAS middleware app. The links are:

 GAMBAS Middleware:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id

=eu.gambas.application.app

 GAMBAS Bus Navigator:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id

=eu.gambas.prototype.app

P

ROTOTYPE

E

VALUATION

The evaluation of GAMBAS developments and results planned for the first iteration of the GAMBAS application prototype was done and reported in the last months of 2013. Thus, a wide variety of tests were performed to capture the indicators either in the laboratory setting or using the prototype tests, according to the initial level of fulfillment is assessed. The evaluation has been carried out

twofold, performing both laboratory and prototype tests. Beyond the initial evaluation plan, the final evaluation has not only proved the degree of fulfillment as planned but has also been useful to detect possible improvements and to pave the way to the second prototype. With the first evaluation report, the first iteration of the development is concluded.

D

EMONSTRATION

P

HASE

The evaluation of the GAMBAS application prototype has been executed by means of a set of technical tests that have been defined to show the key features of the GAMBAS middleware, keeping in mind that the primary application scenario is public transportation.

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15 days in Madrid, carrying out a wide variety of tests to evaluate each of the features developed. Previous to this testing phase, a pre-evaluation took place a month early, in order to test the preliminary version of the prototype, and detect in advance any critical bugs which could further affect the demonstration phase.

E

VENTS AND

P

UBLICATIONS

In the following, we would like to highlight a number of past and upcoming events and we would like to give you an overview over related publications created by members of the GAMBAS consortium.

GAMBAS

P

ROJECT

M

EETINGS

The GAMBAS project started officially on the 1st_{of February 2012 and is currently in the end}

of its second year. During the last months three more project meeting have been held.

The sixth GAMBAS project meeting, hosted by UDE, was held on July 10th_{and 11}th_{2013 in}

Duisburg, Germany. During the meeting, upcoming deliverables were prepared but the main focus was the development of the first prototype application.

The seventh GAMBAS project meeting was hosted by EMT in Madrid, Spain, on October 3rd_{and 4}th_{2013. The main focus for this}

meeting was the internal demonstration and testing of the application prototype and the review of the status of the upcoming (and/or delayed) deliverables.

The eighth GAMBAS project meeting, hosted by ETRA I+D, was recently held on January 14th

and 15th_{2014 in Valencia, Spain. It was mainly}

focused on the second review preparation and the preliminary identification of the scope for the 2nd_prototype._

P

UBLICATION

–

PURBA

2013

The Third International Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) took place in Zurich, Switzerland in September 8th 2013. During the conference members of the GAMBAS consortium presented a paper titled “Mining temporal patterns of transport behavior for predicting future transport usage".

P

UBLICATION

–

S

EN

C

ITY

2013

In the Workshop on SenCity that took place in Zurich, Switzerland in September 9th 2013, members of the GAMBAS consortium presented a paper titled “Informing the design of future transport information services with travel behavior data ".

P

UBLICATION

–

WISE

2013

Some members of the GAMBAS consortium participated in the 14th Int. Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2013) in Nanjing (China), in October 2013 and presented a paper titled “Fine-Grained Access Control for RDF data on Mobile Devices”.

P

UBLICATION

–

ISWC

2013

In the 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2013) that took place in Sydney, Australia in, October 2013, two papers were presented: “Elastic and scalable processing of Linked Stream Data in the Cloud” and “DAW: Duplicate-AWare Federated Query Processing over the Web of Data”.

The papers and the associated presentations are accessible for all GAMBAS Interest Group members through our dissemination page at

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U

PCOMING

E

VENT

–

P

ER

C

OM

2014

The GAMBAS consortium invites you to join the upcoming GAMBAS workshop at this year's 12th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2014) in Budapest, Hungary on March 24-28, 2014. The workshop will be titled 1st International IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Systems for Smart Cities. More details on the workshop can be found at

http://www.ubicitec.org/percity/

U

PCOMING

E

VENT

–

FIA

2014

In March 2014 GAMBAS middleware will be demonstrated at Future Internet Assembly Athens. This demonstration will showcase the GAMBAS middleware and some of its applications. The demonstration takes place on March 18th to 20th 2014. More information can be found at

N EWSLETTER I SSUENR. 4, J ANUARY 2014

Contents

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DITORIAL

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WISE

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