Advances in interconnectivity between vehicles, vehicle fleets and infrastructures led to opportunities of interoperability and systems-of-systems (SoS). Several challenges emerge that put on requirements on dealing with the vast amount of data generated by modern vehicles and their actuation with higher-level commands and controls. They have naturally created opportunities for the development of sophisticated, powerful, generic platforms to support ingestion, storage, processing, management, operation and orchestration of data and processes in SoS. A prominent example is the scenario of vehicle fleets and more precisely, on how to engineer the SoS so that the collaboration among various constituent systems will achieve the SoS goals. Several challenges cap the extent of opportunities, such as determining the business and functional requirements, as well as technical: constructing and operating an independent, scalable, and flexible platform ensuring e.g., privacy and accountability. In this work, we discuss these concerns and challenges from a technical perspective.

Advances in interconnectivity between vehicles, vehicle fleets and infrastructures led to opportunities of interoperability and systems-of-systems (SoS). Several challenges emerge that put on requirements on dealing with the vast amount of data generated by modern vehicles and their actuation with higher-level commands and controls. They have naturally created opportunities for the development of sophisticated, powerful, generic platforms to support ingestion, storage, processing, management, operation and orchestration of data and processes in SoS. A prominent example is the scenario of vehicle fleets and more precisely, on how to engineer the SoS so that the collaboration among various constituent systems will achieve the SoS goals. Several challenges cap the extent of opportunities, such as determining the business and functional requirements, as well as technical: constructing and operating an independent, scalable, and flexible platform ensuring e.g., privacy and accountability. In this work, we discuss these concerns and challenges from a technical perspective.

Advances in the field of engineering have resulted in vehicles becoming a digitised source of data from which scenarios of Quantified Vehicles emerge. Even though the benefits and range of emerging services are ample, several challenges cap the extent of opportunities, such as determining the business benefits, as well as constructing and operating an independent, scalable, and flexible platform ensuring e.g., privacy, accountability. In our work in progress paper, we propose a conceptual architecture of a generic IoT platform for enabling such data-driven services for the vehicle domain, while considering important characteristics, such as data security and privacy, improved service operations, safety and value creation for end-users. We then describe how this platform can be demonstrated, including the vehicle gateway device (Vehicle Data Logger) capturing the vehicle data, to finally enable a set of useful and usable data-driven services for vehicle drivers and other stakeholders.

In this paper we describe a novel technological framework for capture and analysis of both objective measurement data and subjective user experience data for automotive applications. We also investigate how the framework can be extended to address privacy issues by enforcing a rigorous privacy model called differential privacy. The system under development integrates a telematics system with a smartphone app service architecture and a data-driven analytics framework. The hypothesis is that the framework will improve the opportunities of conducting large scale user trials of automotive functions and services, while improving the quality of collected data. To achieve this, a number of challenges are addressed in the paper, including how to design the subjective data capture mechanisms to be both simple to use yet powerful, how to correlate subjective data with objective measurement data, and how to protect the privacy of users.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a wireless monitoring and actuation network for residential and commercial buildings that was carried out as part of the ARTEMIS funded project ME3gas. The aim of this deployment is to demonstrate that low cost wireless sensor networks can be used in situations where a full building management system may not be suitable technically or commercially either in residential home applications or commercial enterprises. This work focuses not just on electricity consumption but also on gas consumption into the building. The current deployment consists of a number of wireless sensor motes retrofitted throughout a residential building converted for office use. The WSN nodes are based on the Tyndall modular mote platform running the Contiki operating system and communicating with a mesh network running IPV6 through 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 at 2.4GHz. Each node is configured for a specific task within the framework of enabling energy efficiency and these tasks can be broadly described as, environmental sensing, metering (gas and electricity) and actuation. The motes are controlled through the LinkSmart middleware platform which is an open source hardware agnostic system for building energy management, which hides the underlying physical layer allowing ease of development for web based applications, which is also demonstrated as part of this work.

During the last couple of decades, a growing body of research has provided insights into the complex processes of learning that take place in museums. Interestingly, museum-related learning is not limited to the actual visit: what takes place before and afterwards has a profound effect on the learning outcome. The study presented in this paper focuses on the post-visit aspects of the learning process. Previous research shows that visitors make connections between their experiences in the museum and experiences that happen after the visit. Sometimes these connections can occur weeks or months (or even years) after the visit, depending on when the visitor happens upon a situation that allows the connection to be made. Documenting these events is obviously quite difficult. Even though it is possible to re-establish contact with visitors after a few weeks or months (e.g., through telephone or e-mail), the information obtained is not in situ. The goal of the present study is to attempt to acquire and analyze more data from these in situ situations, and to re-present the data in an exhibition. To this end, we have designed a system that allows visitors to send images and text messages to a central server through e-mail, SMS or MMS. The data from the server can then be visualized as a weblog (blog) or in some other suitable form. We collaborated with the Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. A large part of the Museum's Science Centre is devoted to five mechanical principles: the screw, the plane slope, the lever, the wheel and the wedge. We have designed an exhibit that utilizes our system to present messages (images and text) from visitors on the subject of the five principles in the science centre itself. It is also possible to access the messages through a public Web page. From the Museum's perspective, our exhibit not only provides new opportunities for documenting post-visit learning processes, but also has the potential to provide new forms of evaluation data that might be difficult to obtain through other means. Furthermore, it allows Museum visitors to extend the original scope of the mechanical principles exhibition by allowing them to provide their own content (and reflections upon the existing content), a re-occurring theme in many recent technology-based exhibits. The paper provides a description of our system, the exhibit we have built, how the exhibit is managed, and how it has worked in practice.

A few years ago, Virtual Reality technologies and Virtual Environments were seen by some as a panacea and the computer interface of the future. VR received a lot of attention in the media and devices such as head mounted displays or data gloves have become widely recognised. Of particular interest was the ability to realise a vision that had been described in a number of science fiction novels: providing a parallel world in which it would be possible to be present, interact and feel as if in the real world. This vision is realised by Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). CVEs are three-dimensional computer-generated environments where users are represented by avatars and can navigate and interact in real-time independently of their physical location. While the technology has not lived up to early expectations, real niched applications and the success of networked games have shown its viability and promises. This report summarises a number of the technologies that are commonly used to interface with virtual environments. Additionally, it presents some of the major CVE systems to date and isolates a number of trends when it comes to network architectures, protocols and techniques and to software choices.

In this chapter, we give an overview of some of the issues that face programmers and designers when building collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). We do this by highlighting three aspects of CVE system software: the environment model (data structures, behaviour description) that the system provides, the data-sharing mechanism (how he model is shared), and the implementation framework (the structure of a typical client or platform in terms of the services it provides to the user). When a CVE system is designed, choices have to be made for each of these aspects, and this then constrains how the designers and programmers o about constructing the CVE worlds themselves. We present the main body of the overview by using examples that highlight many important differences between CVE systems. We will also relate our discussion to the common topics of network topology and awareness management.

This article presents the Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) system, a software architecture for the realization and implementation of wide-area Internet-based multi-user virtual environments. Over the years, DIVE has evolved into a generic tool that supports a wide range of applications and situations. The article focuses on the networking aspects that allow deployment of multi-user virtual environments on the Internet. Additionally, it presents the palette of programming interfaces and techniques offered by the system. This is highlighted by some example applications. Our experience has proven that DIVE's ability to mix interfaces has made it a system of choice for the implementation of distributed applications.

This dissertation reports research and development of a platform for Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). It has particularly focused on two major challenges: supporting the rapid development of scalable applications and easing their deployment on the Internet. This work employs a research method based on prototyping and refinement and promotes the use of this method for application development. A number of the solutions herein are in line with other CVE systems. One of the strengths of this work consists in a global approach to the issues raised by CVEs and the recognition that such complex problems are best tackled using a multi-disciplinary approach that understands both user and system requirements. CVE application deployment is aided by an overlay network that is able to complement any IP multicast infrastructure in place. Apart from complementing a weakly deployed worldwide multicast, this infrastructure provides for a certain degree of introspection, remote controlling and visualisation. As such, it forms an important aid in assessing the scalability of running applications. This scalability is further facilitated by specialised object distribution algorithms and an open framework for the implementation of novel partitioning techniques. CVE application development is eased by a scripting language, which enables rapid development and favours experimentation. This scripting language interfaces many aspects of the system and enables the prototyping of distribution-related components as well as user interfaces. It is the key construct of a distributed environment to which components, written in different languages, connect and onto which they operate in a network abstracted manner. The solutions proposed are exemplified and strengthened by three collaborative applications. The Dive room system is a virtual environment modelled after the room metaphor and supporting asynchronous and synchronous cooperative work. WebPath is a companion application to a Web browser that seeks to make the current history of page visits more visible and usable. Finally, the London travel demonstrator supports travellers by providing an environment where they can explore the city, utilise group collaboration facilities, rehearse particular journeys and access tourist information data.