This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and... more
This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and evaluates the development and design facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket, Java 2 Micro Edition and Microsoft .Net platform for the Mobile Web. Secondly, it describes the use of these tools for the implementation of three projects that have been developed at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, in Greece, providing cultural and tourist information. Based on these three case studies the paper extracts a set of PDA and mobile phone-enabled application requirements and concludes with a set of suggestions related to the way authoring tools should be exploited in order to gratify application and designer needs...
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The use of wireless networks in mobile tourist applications has brought about many services that have been branded "necessary" in many research projects. Though, latest Eurobarometer findings argue that tourists are reluctant in... more
The use of wireless networks in mobile tourist applications has brought about many services that have been branded "necessary" in many research projects. Though, latest Eurobarometer findings argue that tourists are reluctant in using such services, arguing that high costs of roaming are the major deterrent factor. This paper presents the design issues and implementation of a context-aware 'mobile tourism' research prototype, which brings together the main assets of the Internet and mobile computing technologies. Namely, by using Internet web technologies it enables the creation of personalized portable tourist applications with rich content that matches user preferences. The users may download these customizable applications to their mobile device. Thereafter, network coverage is only an option as the applications execute in standalone mode.
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been identified as a promising technology for supporting assistive environments. This article introduces PROTECT, a system that employs autonomous software objects referred to as Mobile Agents... more
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been identified as a promising technology for supporting assistive environments. This article introduces PROTECT, a system that employs autonomous software objects referred to as Mobile Agents (MAs) able of locating and informing visually impaired persons for potential risks. PROTECT utilizes a 3-tier architecture where the first tier comprises a Base Station (BS), the second tier mobile sinks (carried by blinds on their sticks) and the third tier stationary sensor nodes. This WSN is ...
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Abstract Mobile agents (MAs) have been initially developed to replace the client/server model which shows many disadvantages in WSN environments (eg very high bandwidth and energy utilization). Herein, we present CBID (Clone-Based... more
Abstract Mobile agents (MAs) have been initially developed to replace the client/server model which shows many disadvantages in WSN environments (eg very high bandwidth and energy utilization). Herein, we present CBID (Clone-Based Itinerary Design), a novel algorithm that calculates near-optimal routes for MAs that incrementally fuse the data as they visit the nodes while enabling a fast update of designed itineraries which is especially important for highly dynamic topologies. The order of visited nodes highly affects the ...
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Older adults' preferences to remain independent in their own homes along with the high costs of nursing home care have motivated the development of Ambient... more
Older adults' preferences to remain independent in their own homes along with the high costs of nursing home care have motivated the development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies which aim at improving the safety, health conditions and wellness of the elderly. This paper reports hands-on experiences in designing, implementing and operating UbiCare, an AAL based prototype system for elderly home care monitoring. The monitoring is based on the recording of environmental parameters like temperature and light intensity as well as micro-level incidents which allows one to infer daily activities like moving, sitting, sleeping, usage of electrical appliances and plumbing components. The prototype is built upon inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware (e.g., various sensors, Arduino microcontrollers, ZigBee-compatible wireless communication modules) and license-free software, thereby ensuring low system deployment costs. The network comprises nodes placed in a house's main rooms or mounted on furniture, one wearable node, one actuator node and a centralized processing element (coordinator). Upon detecting significant deviations from the ordinary activity patterns of individuals and/or sudden falls, the system issues automated alarms which may be forwarded to authorized caregivers via a variety of communication channels. Furthermore, measured environmental parameters and activity incidents may be monitored through standard web interfaces.
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ABSTRACT Many research projects have been undertaken on the use of context-aware mobile technologies for tourism that rely on the use of personal digital assistants and mobile phone devices. Many milestone projects rely on the use of a... more
ABSTRACT Many research projects have been undertaken on the use of context-aware mobile technologies for tourism that rely on the use of personal digital assistants and mobile phone devices. Many milestone projects rely on the use of a network connection and the use of GPS technologies which offer location based services. This paper presents a mobile tourism research prototype which uses web-based technologies for the creation of portable tourist applications with rich content that matches the users' profiles. The users may download these customizable applications either directly to their mobile device. Thereafter, network coverage is not further required as the applications execute in standalone mode. This prototype may be updated when the user returns online. Our prototype has been developed on the top of Java 2 Micro Edition which offers an ideal platform for the development of portable applications tailored to resource-constrained mobile devices.
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This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and... more
This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and evaluates the development and design facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket, Java 2 Micro Edition and Microsoft. Net platform for the Mobile Web. Secondly, it describes the use of these tools for ...
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Abstract-Proposed distributed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, have not adequately management scalability problems, when monitoring tasks requiring the employment of itinerant agents is considered.... more
Abstract-Proposed distributed management architectures, incorporating mobile agent (MA) technology, have not adequately management scalability problems, when monitoring tasks requiring the employment of itinerant agents is considered. Mechanisms building optimal agents itinerary are needed to minimise the total migration cost in terms of the round-trip latency and the incurred traffic. This is of particular importance when the management of networks spanning multiple subnets is involved. On this direction, we have designed and ...
This paper explores requirements application authoring tools should satisfy for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. The paper reviews the use of mobile... more
This paper explores requirements application authoring tools should satisfy for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. The paper reviews the use of mobile technologies in the context of cultural organizations and tourism. It identifies and evaluates the development and design facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket and Java 2 Micro Edition. It describes ...
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Kenteris, Michael and Economou, Daphne and Gavalas, Damianos (2008) The quest to build a multi-platform mobile tourist guide for the Municipal Council of Mytilene, Greece. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Scientific Conference of... more
Kenteris, Michael and Economou, Daphne and Gavalas, Damianos (2008) The quest to build a multi-platform mobile tourist guide for the Municipal Council of Mytilene, Greece. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Scientific Conference of the E-Business Forum in "E-Business in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality", 14 March 2008, Athens, Greece. e-Business Forum. ... Full text not available from this repository. ... WestminsterResearch is powered by EPrints 3 which is developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of ...
Abstract: The present paper argues that CI could offer useful input in the Web science paradigm by providing theoretical and practical examples in socio-technical applications. Specifically, we demonstrate the case of an operational... more
Abstract: The present paper argues that CI could offer useful input in the Web science paradigm by providing theoretical and practical examples in socio-technical applications. Specifically, we demonstrate the case of an operational mobile cultural tourism guide for the city of Mytilene in Greece. We explore the potential of the Web to promote local cultural information to tourist user groups exploiting the use of multi-platform Web devices explicitly to enhance tourism activities. The question which arises in this paper is of how content of ...
Remote healthcare monitoring and on demand provision of support attracts a lot of interest due to the ability to provide assistance to elderly and patients when needed; thus on one side the hospitals demand less personnel to be engaged in... more
Remote healthcare monitoring and on demand provision of support attracts a lot of interest due to the ability to provide assistance to elderly and patients when needed; thus on one side the hospitals demand less personnel to be engaged in monitoring patients, whereas on the other side the patient does not need to remain hospitalized unless there is need to. Wireless and wearable devices enable the constant monitoring of vital parameters; with the aid of appropriate infrastructures they can be sent to the hospital and when it is ...
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Recommender Systems (RS) have been extensively utilized as a means of reducing the information overload and offering travel recommendations to tourists. The emerging mobile RSs are tailored to mobile device users and promise to... more
Recommender Systems (RS) have been extensively utilized as a means of reducing the information overload and offering travel recommendations to tourists. The emerging mobile RSs are tailored to mobile device users and promise to substantially enrich tourist experiences, recommending rich multimedia content, context-aware services, views/ratings of peer users, etc. New developments in mobile computing, wireless networking, web technologies and social networking leverage massive opportunities to provide highly accurate and effective tourist recommendations that respect personal preferences and capture usage, personal, social and environmental contextual parameters. This article follows a systematic approach in reviewing the state-of-the-art in the field, proposing a classification of mobile tourism RSs and providing insights on their offered services. It also highlights challenges and promising research directions with respect to mobile RSs employed in tourism.
The tourist trip design problem (TTDP) refers to a route-planning problem for tourists interested in visiting multiple points of interest (POIs). TTDP solvers derive daily tourist tours, i.e., ordered visits to POIs, which respect tourist... more
The tourist trip design problem (TTDP) refers to a route-planning problem for tourists interested in visiting multiple points of interest (POIs). TTDP solvers derive daily tourist tours, i.e., ordered visits to POIs, which respect tourist constraints and POIs attributes. The main objective of the problem discussed is to select POIs that match tourist preferences, thereby maximizing tourist satisfaction, while taking into account a multitude of parameters and constraints (e.g., distances among POIs, visiting time required for each POI, POIs visiting days/hours, entrance fees, weather conditions) and respecting the time available for sightseeing on a daily basis. The aim of this work is to survey models, algorithmic approaches and methodologies concerning tourist trip design problems. Recent approaches are examined, focusing on problem models that best capture a multitude of realistic POIs attributes and user constraints; further, several interesting TTDP variants are investigated. Open issues and promising prospects in tourist trip planning research are also discussed.
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Mobile tourist guides have attracted considerable research interest during the past decade resulting in numerous standalone and web-based mobile applications. Particular emphasis has been given to personalisation of services, typically... more
Mobile tourist guides have attracted considerable research interest during the past decade resulting in numerous standalone and web-based mobile applications. Particular emphasis has been given to personalisation of services, typically based on travel recommender systems used to assist tourists in choosing places to visit; these systems address an important aspect of personalization and hence reduce the information burden for the user. However, existing systems fail to exploit information, behaviours, evaluations or ratings of other tourists with similar interests, which would potentially provide ground for the cooperative production of improved tourist content and travel recommendations. In this paper we extend this notion of travel recommender systems utilizing collaborative filtering techniques while also taking into account contextual information (such as the current user’s location, time, weather conditions and places already visited by the user) for deriving improved recommendations in pervasive environments. We also propose the use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) installations around tourist sites for enabling precise localization and also providing mobile users convenient and inexpensive means for uploading tourist information and ratings about Points of Interest (POI) via their mobile devices. We also introduce the concept of ‘context-aware rating’, whereby user ratings uploaded through WSN infrastructures are weighted higher to differentiate among users that rate POIs using the mobile tourist guide application while onsite and others using the Internet away from the POI.
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Mobile agents (MAs) have been proposed as a distributed middleware approach suitable for autonomic data aggregation operations in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Determining optimal itineraries for MAs traveling through WSN nodes is a... more
Mobile agents (MAs) have been proposed as a distributed middleware approach suitable for autonomic data aggregation operations in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Determining optimal itineraries for MAs traveling through WSN nodes is a non-trivial problem. Thus, several heuristics have been proposed to perform efficient itinerary planning for MAs. However, the evaluation of these heuristics is typically performed on the ground of different parameter spaces and assumptions about the underlying network and the capabilities of nodes. Herein, we implement, simulate and compare the most prominent itinerary planning algorithms upon a common parameter space, making realistic network-level assumptions.
The investigation of mobile agent (MA) middleware as a technology for implementing efficient data fusion schemes on wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been a subject of intense research in the past few years. Nevertheless, the itineraries... more
The investigation of mobile agent (MA) middleware as a technology for implementing efficient data fusion schemes on wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been a subject of intense research in the past few years. Nevertheless, the itineraries followed by travelling MAs largely determine the overall performance of the data fusion applications. Along this line, this article introduces a novel algorithmic approach for efficient itinerary planning of MA objects engaged in data fusion tasks. Our algorithm adopts an iterated local search (ILS) approach in deriving the hop sequence of multiple travelling MAs over the deployed source nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gain of our method against existing multiple MA itinerary planning methods.
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A critical issue dealt with in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) is the real time response of actors to events occurring in the network area. The fast notification of actors from Sensor Nodes (SNs) about the events as well as the... more
A critical issue dealt with in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) is the real time response of actors to events occurring in the network area. The fast notification of actors from Sensor Nodes (SNs) about the events as well as the effective coordination of actors for prompt event handling is most important in these networks. In this paper, we introduce a distributed protocol for effective event handling in a WSAN. Existing approaches mainly favoring actors near the current event for handling it, may lead to highly ineffective solutions for certain worst-case scenarios. Through a randomized approach, our solution also selects distant actors for handling events, and guarantees fast average responsiveness to events and a balanced energy distribution among actors. In addition, it features efficient distributed algorithms for sensor to actor and actor to actor coordination which are of independent interest.