Alois Ferscha

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems 'tsunami' are the 'spring tide' of 7.3 billion mobile connected platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2014, 300 mio. shipped smart watches in 2014 with an expected annually growth of 35% till 2020, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eyewear systems in 2015 [1]. Following the great success of the 1st Superorganism of Wearables Workshop at Ubicomp 2014 with roughly 50 participants from 15 different countries, we build on the immense interest of the research community in the proposed topic. The structuring of the workshop in slots initiated by a keynote presentation accompanied by technical paper presentations and position statements resulted in lively and vibrant discussions. Collected material for the dissemination of the Workshop ideas can be found at the Workshop Website (https://www.pervasive.jku.at/ubicomp14/) The 2nd instantiation of the workshop will reattach to last years agenda and ask the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning superorganism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "superorganism" [3], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such superorganisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate.

A model of bystanders' effect on volunteering (in case of an observed crime or critical situation) is extended to incorporate the possibility of a sense of guilt (after nonintervention). Based on sound theoretical and experimental foundations, an existing model of the spread of unpopular norms is used to allow dispersion of an unpopular norm (a mild crime) so that a population of agents may follow or accept it. The question asked is why a society (as a whole) is not able to overturn an unpopular norm through interventions. An agent-based model is proposed which captures all necessary ingredients to explore this question. Several what-if questions are asked by varying simulation parameters. The model and simulation reveal that a sense of guilt of bystanders improves the volunteering tendency. The simulation results also provide pieces of evidence of clear differentiation between the individual and societal perception of a crime. Through the simulation results, we were able to conclude that guilt, not only, improves the volunteering tendency, but also, very clearly differentiates between the individual and societal perception of an unpopular norm. Overall, it was learned that people intervene only when they are able to overcome the inhibitions of the crowd. However, even interventions do not guarantee to overturn an unpopular norm. In fact, irrespective of the state of interventions, there is no neutralization without guilt.

Computing and communication technologies have advanced rapidly in the last decade. M&S has not yet fully realized the potential and opportunities afforded by technologies such as mobile and ubiquitous computing, big data, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and modern supercomputer architectures. This has kept M&S from achieving its fullest potential in modeling complex systems, or being widely deployed in new contexts such as online management of operational systems. Research advances are needed to enable M&S technologies to address issues such as the complexity and scale of the systems that need to be modeled today. This chapter outlines key computational challenges associated with maximally exploiting emerging computing platforms ranging from handheld mobile computers to massively parallel supercomputers, use of models and simulations in interacting with the real world, challenges associated with managing a “plethora of models” that exists today, and synergies between M&S and “big data.”

Evacuation modeling and simulation are usually used to explore different possibilities for evacuation, however, it is a real challenge to integrate different categories of characteristics in unified modeling space. In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of an evacuating crowd so that a comparative analysis of a different sets of parameters categorized as individual, social and technological aspects, is made possible. In particular, we focus on the question of rationality vs. emotionalism of individuals in a localized social context. In addition to that, we propose and model the concept of extended social influence, thereby embedding technological influence within the social influence, and analyze its impact on the efficiency of evacuation. NetLogo is used for simulating different variations in environments, evacuation strategies, and agents demographics. Simulation results revealed that there is no substantial advantage of informational overload on people, as this might work...

In addition to seamless connectedness and smartness, the objects in Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to have social capabilities. In literature, these objects are named as "social objects". In this paper, an intuitive paradigm of social interactions between these objects is argued and model. The purpose of the model is to analyze the impact of social-like capabilities on the interaction pattern of social objects in a peer-to-peer resource sharing scenario. Adopting an agent-based modeling method and simulation, a comparative study of competitive vs. cooperative behavior of peers is demonstrated. The simulation results reveal that the social capabilities of peers imparts a significant increase in the quality of interactions between social objects. Typically, the nature of underlying structure of network connectivity has a profound impact. The small-world network is not only closer to the social paradigm that surround us, but also, competes with an unbounded network; su...

Development of crowd evacuation systems is a challenge due to involvement of complex interrelated aspects, diversity of involved individuals and/or environment, and lack of direct evidence. Evacuation modeling and simulation is used to analyze various possible outcomes as different scenarios unfold, typically when the complexity of scenario is high. However, incorporation of different aspect categories in a unified modeling space is a challenge. In this paper, we addressed this challenge by combining individual, social and technological models of people during evacuation, while pivoting all these aspects on a common agent-based modeling framework and a grid-based hypothetical environment. By simulating these models, an insight into the effectiveness of several interesting evacuation scenarios is provided. Based on the simulation results, a couple of useful recommendations are also given. The most important recommendation is not to use potential field indicating the exits dynamics as an exit strategy particularly for a spatial complexity environment.

Social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion are often ignored while weighing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT). Assuming a more commonly acceptable standardization of Big Data generated by Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the social dimensions enabling its fruitful usage; emerging as Social IoV (SIoV); remains a challenge. In this paper, an agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) of a hypothetical population of smart vehicles is presented. Some important hypotheses are tested under reasonable connectivity and data constraints. The simulation results reveal that closure of social ties and its timing impacts dispersion of novel information (necessary for a recommender system) substantially. It is also observed that as the network evolves as a result of incremental interactions, recommendations guaranteeing a fair distribution of vehicles across equally good competitors is not possible.

“Honor culture” is a societal norm that persuades people to fight for their honor. Contributing factors to the persistence of honor culture include institutional weakness, and environmental challenges in terms of resources. In this paper, an agent-based model of honor culture is reexamined and extended. The main purpose of the extension is to study the spatial and temporal dynamics of honor culture in a society of different types of agents. The simulation results revealed that the number of agents with honor culture increase substantially with an increase in the institutional effectiveness, and marginally with an increase in environmental toughness. Our model extension revealed that time to reach an equilibrium (no change) of an agent type decreases with an increase in effectiveness and toughness. Finally, both the strength of agents and population segregation increase with the increase in effectiveness and toughness. These results have implications for understanding social norms which are often misinterpreted, particularly in the context of misleading generalization about environmental challenges leading to vulnerability of people.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is turning out to be one of the first impressive examples of Internet of Things (IoT). In IoV, the factors of connectivity and interaction/information dispersion are equally important as sensing/actuating, context-awareness, services provisioning, etc. However, most of the researches related to connectivity and interaction are constrained to physics of signaling and data science (semantics/contents), respectively. Very rapidly, the meanings of these factors are changing due to evolution of technologies from physical to social domain. For example, Social IoV (SIoV) is a term used to represent when vehicles build and manage their own social network. Hence, in addition to physical aspects, the social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion towards these systems of future should also be researched, a domain so far ignored in this particular context. In this paper, an agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) of a h...

Many crowd evacuation models have been developed in isolation with respect to the aspects of interest. In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of crowd evacuation, pertaining to symmetric utilization of resources in terms of exit usage and evacuation time. The model is based on a game-theoretic decision support, resolving the consequences of proximity pressure on agents of two types; emotional and rational. This model is combined with the model of routing decision, in the presence of two possible information dispersion modalities; without and with inter-agent information sharing; to update agents' perception map. An agent-based simulation using a hypothetical space is performed to evaluate the performance of the model. The simulation results reveal that panic is minimal when agents adopt nearest exit strategy, a mechanized strategy with no human aspects and interactions. However, it takes more time and results in uneven distribution of agents across the exits. In spite of utilizing human aspects, the strategies involving information sharing between agents results in even distribution of agents across the exits with acceptable population panic.

In this paper, we apply game theory to analyze interplay between emotions and rationality, to reduce the effect of herding during evacuation. The simulation model developed for this work incorporates the social behavior of the crowd to ensure an improved evacuation. This model is simulated for four strategies, built upon both social and technological aspects of decision-making, with varied sets of the agents’ density and type being either rational or emotional. This work is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively using parameters such as simulation time, agents’ distribution across exits, exit utilization, and panic. Mixed results were achieved in general; however, the game variation allowing more than one exit change showed an improvement over both variations of the game allowing a single exit change.

Purpose This paper studies the influence of information and communication technologies on human reasoning and decision making. It investigates the potential impact of ambient intelligence on change in pedestrian mobility behavior, using a large city-scale scenario. Methods This work establishes an interplay between social and technological aspects of awareness by augmenting a model-driven framework of a realistic information eco-system. A distributed multi-agent system is developed to model a real-life urban mobility environment. The model is then simulated using a large scale parallel computing platform. Results Evaluation results revealed that the quality of information in ambient-assisted environments increases when compared with those without ambient intelligence. Conclusion We conclude that there is a positive correlation between the extent of information being shared in a socially-inspired information eco-systems and the level of collective awareness in an urban mobility scena...

Media façades, realized through projection systems, could be a promising technology for scalable public displays in urban spaces. With low requirements regarding the infrastructure and virtually no influence on the buildings’ fabric, projected façades offer exceptional flexibility and extensibility as well as easy maintenance. As cities are increasingly confronted with digital signage products besides other public display systems, a projector-based system offers the possibility to be switched off and restore the screen to its previous state in the blink of an eye. We present the prototypical implementation of a “Staged Façades Framework” leveraging a façade’s structure and ornamentation for dynamically adapting pieces of multimedia content.

To the inspired observer, computer science nowadays appears to be challenged (and driven) by technological progress and quantitative growth. Among the technological progress challenges are advances in sub-micron and system-on-a-chip designs, novel communication technologies, microelectro-mechanical systems, nano and materials sciences. The vast pervasion of global networks over the past years, the growing availability of wireless communication technologies in the wide, local and personal area, and the evolving ubiquitous use of mobile and embedded information and communication technologies are examples for challenges posed by quantitative growth. We perceive a shift from the “one person with one computer” paradigm, which is based on explicit man machine interaction, towards a ubiquitous and pervasive computing landscape, in which implicit interaction and cooperation is the primary mode of computer supported activity. This change – popularly referred to as “Pervasive Computing” – poses serious challenges to the conceptual architectures of computing, and the related engineering disciplines in computer science. In this work, I will reflect on some of the emerging pervasive and ubiquitous computing trends and potentials, and in particular on the software engineering issues associated with the provision of context aware systems. Historical Background “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it“ was Mark Weiser’s central statement in his seminal paper [Weis 91] in Scientific American in 1991. His conjecture, that “we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background” has fertilized the embedding of ubiquitous computing technology into a physical environment which responds to people’s needs and actions. Most of the services delivered through such a “technology-rich” environment are services adapted to context, particularly to the person, the time and the place of their use. Along Weiser’s vision, it is expected that context-aware services will evolve, enabled by wirelessly ad-hoc networked, mobile, autonomous special purpose computing devices (i.e. “smart appliances”), providing largely invisible support for tasks performed by users. It is expected that services with explicit user input and output will be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of sensors, and controlling it via a manifold of actuators in such a way that it becomes merged with the virtual world. Applications and services will have to be greatly based on the notion of context and knowledge, will have to cope with highly dynamic environments and changing resources, and will need to evolve towards a more implicit and proactive interaction with users. A second historical vision impacting the evolution of pervasive computing claimed for an intuitive, unobtrusive and distraction free interaction with technology-rich environments. In an attempt of bringing interaction “back to the real world” [WMG 93] after an era of keyboard and screen interaction, computers started to be understood as secondary artefacts, embedded and operating in the background, whereas the set of all physical objects present in the environment were started to be understood as the primary artefacts, the “interface”. Instead of interacting with digital data via keyboard and screen, physical interaction with digital data, i.e. interaction by manipulating physical artefacts via “graspable” or “tangible” interfaces, was proposed. Inspired by the early approaches of coupling abstract data entities with everyday physical objects and surfaces like Bishop’s Marble Answering Machine, Jeremijenko’s Live Wire and Wellner’s Digital Desk [WMG 93], tangible interface research [GOI 98] has evolved, where physical artefacts are considered as both (i) representations and (ii) controls for digital information. A physical object thus represents information while at the same time acts as a control for directly manipulating that information or underlying associations. With this seamless integration of representation and control into a physical artefact also input and output device fall together. Placed meaningfully, such artefacts can exploit physical affordances suggesting and guiding user actions, while not compromising existing artefact use and habits of the user. Recent examples for “embodied interaction”, where input and output are fused into physical object manipulation, include architecture and landscape design and analysis [PRI 02], object shape modeling interfaces using brick like blocks or triangular tiles [GOI 98]. Although the first attempts of the ubiquitous and pervasive computing vision in the early nineties fell short due to the lack of enabling hardand software technologies, are now, about ten…

Purpose It has been witnessed that many incidents of crowd evacuation have resulted in catastrophic results, claiming lives of hundreds of people. Most of these incidents were a result of localized herding that eventually turned into global panic. Many crowd evacuation models have been proposed with different aspects of interests. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to bring together many of these aspects to study evacuation dynamics. Design/methodology/approach The proposed agent-based model, in a hypothetical physical environment, uses perception maps for routing decisions which are constructed from agents’ personal observations of the surroundings as well as information gathered through distant communication. Communication is governed by a trust model which measures the authenticity of the information being shared. Agents are of two types; emotional and rational. The trust model is combined with a game-theoretic model to resolve conflict of agents’ own type with that of types...

This paper presents a novel approach for counting hand-performed activities using deep learning and inertial measurement units (IMUs). The particular challenge in this task is finding the correct window size for capturing activities with different durations. Traditionally, fixed window sizes have been used, which occasionally result in incorrectly represented activities. To address this limitation, we propose segmenting the time series data into variable-length sequences using ragged tensors to store and process the data. Additionally, our approach utilizes weakly labeled data to simplify the annotation process and reduce the time to prepare annotated data for machine learning algorithms. Thus, the model receives only partial information about the performed activity. Therefore, we propose an LSTM-based architecture, which takes into account both the ragged tensors and the weak labels. To the best of our knowledge, no prior studies attempted counting utilizing variable-size IMU accel...

Abstract. Modern ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has developed a vision where the “computer ” is no longer associated with the concept of a single device or a network of devices, but rather the entirety of situated services originat-ing in a digital world, which are perceived through the physical world. It is observed that services with explicit user input and output are becoming to be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of sensors, and controlling it via a plethora of actuators. The nature and appearance of computing devices is changing to be hidden in the fabric of everyday life, invisibly networked, and omnipresent, with applications greatly being based on the notions of context and knowledge. Interaction with such globe spanning, modern ICT systems will presum-ably be more implicit, at the periphery of human attention, rather than explicit, i.e. at the focus of human attention. Socio-inspired ICT assumes that future, glo...

@incollection{RISC3817, author = {Wolfgang Schreiner and Karoly Bosa and Andreas Langegger and Thomas Leitner and Bernhard Moser and Szilard Pall and Volkmar Wieser and Wolfram Wöß }, title = {{Parallel, Distributed, and Grid Computing}}, booktitle = {{Hagenberg Research}}, language = {english}, chapter = {VII}, pages = {333--378}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Berlin}, isbn_issn = {ISBN 78-3-642-02126-8}, year = {2009}, editor ...

Rob Aspin Nick Avis Rassul Ayani Luciano Bononi Azzedine Boukerche Wolfgang Broll Wentong Cai Dan Chen Gabriele D'Angelo Declan Delaney Jauvane de Oliveira Lorenzo Donatiello Abdulmotaleb El Saddik Alois Ferscha Emmanuel Frécon Richard Fujimoto Boon Ping Gan Ilona Heldal ...

The achievements attained in accelerating the simulation of the dynamics of complex discrete event systems using parallel or distributed multiprocessing environments are comprehensively presented. While parallel discrete event simulation (DES) governs the evolution of the system over simulated time in an iterative SIMD way, distributed DES tries to spatially decompose the event structure underlying the system, and executes event occurrences in spatial subregions by logical processes (LPs) usually assigned to diierent (physical) processing elements. Synchronization protocols are necessary in this approach to avoid timing inconsistencies and to guarantee the preservation of event causalities across LPs. Included in the survey are discussions on the sources and levels of parallelism, synchronous vs. asynchronous simulation and principles of LP simulation. In the context of conservative LP simulation (Chandy/Misra/Bryant) deadlock avoidance and deadlock detection/recovery strategies , C...

Dynamic changes of pupil dilation represent an established indicator of cognitive load in cognitive sciences Exploitation of these insights regarding pupil dilation as an indicator of cognitive load for attention-aware Information and Communication (ICT) systems has been impeded due to restrictions of pupil analysis to a posteriori processing and exclusion of disturbing environmental factors. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an algorithm based on Hoeks’s pupil response model, enabling online analysis of pupil dilation for the dynamic interpretation of cognitive load as an input for interactive, attention-aware systems, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches regarding complexity, accuracy, flexibility and computation time. Beyond mathematical pupil modeling, this paper identifies Environment Illumination compensation (IC), Blink Compensation (BC), Reference Baseline computation (RB) and Onset/Offset detection (OO) as crucial fields of research for the transfer of ...

Modern ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has developed a vision where the “computer” is no longer associated with the concept of a single device or a network of devices, but rather the entirety of situated services originating in a digital world, which are perceived through the physical world. It is observed that services with explicit user input and output are becoming to be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of sensors, and controlling it via a plethora of actuators. The nature and appearance of computing devices is changing to be hidden in the fabric of everyday life, invisibly networked, and omnipresent, with applications greatly being based on the notions of context and knowledge. Interaction with such globe spanning, modern ICT systems will presumably be more implicit, at the periphery of human attention, rather than explicit, i.e. at the focus of human attention. Socio-inspired ICT assumes that future, globe scale ICT ...

Due to ever-increasing information overload, human attention has evolved to the most critical parameter in the successful design of pervasive display systems. This article aims at the validation of physical effort as a suitable descriptor for attentional and perceptional behavior in interactive public display scenarios. For this purpose, we integrated our qualitative effort-based behavior description approach into Wickens’ established Saliency-Effort-Expectancy-Value (SEEV) attention model to compare predicted and observed attentional behavior and demonstrate its significance for attention mechanisms. The SEEV attention model is adapted to a public display scenario, with analysis focused on Minimum Required Effort (MRE) for the assessment of information. This attention modeling approach is evaluated based on data collected in an empiric study in an exhibition setting and is based on a database of 188 visitors. We employ different approaches of correlation analysis to evaluate the de...

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible resources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper, we have proposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal. Towards this, we have integrated an established cultural evolution model to achieve desired flexibility of resources and acceptable routing time. Promising results are evidenced through a simple proof-of-concept simulation.