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Ideally, a pervasive location‐based system should allow mobile users to go anywhere and benefit from personalized and pro‐active services tailored for their current activity. However, existing location‐based systems are still far from this vision, as they are either aimed at very specific activities or too generic to provide real value to specific user activities. The objective of this work is to identify and characterize the most fundamental challenges involved in the design of pervasive location‐based systems. The approach is based on the idea that such challenges will correspond to the key design tradeoffs for location‐based systems. Building on what is believed to be the high‐level requirements for a truly pervasive locationbased system, this paper proposes a design space with four design dimensions: functional scope, added‐value, pro‐activity, and adaptability. After analyzing a representative set of location‐based systems under that design space, the combinations between functional scope and any of the other dimensions are identified as the main contradictions in the design of such systems. The paper finally discusses the research challenges associated to the identified tradeoffs.

With rapid advances in wireless portable devices, ubiquitous computing seems becoming a reality everyday. The paper aims to explore the possibility of offering real‐time content adaptation on set of data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.

With different relative importance among the data sets, traffic control and discrimination with different operations on content adaptation are examined. Piggyback extension to users' preferences messages is proposed to smoothly enhance the active pervasive network infrastructure design.

Content adaptation is achieved transparently to both clients and server systems. Real‐time delivery services overcome stochastic network situations and abruptly changing bottleneck link bandwidth problem while retaining information integrity and preserving critical data at the best of the limit of an environment.

The paper explores real‐time content adaptation on data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.

With the development of machine learning techniques, the artificial intelligence systems such as crowd networks are becoming more autonomous and smart. Therefore, there is a growing demand for developing a universal intelligence measurement so that the intelligence of artificial intelligence systems can be evaluated. This paper aims to propose a more formalized and accurate machine intelligence measurement method.

This paper proposes a quality–time–complexity universal intelligence measurement method to measure the intelligence of agents.

By observing the interaction process between the agent and the environment, we abstract three major factors for intelligence measure as quality, time and complexity of environment.

This paper proposes a calculable universal intelligent measure method through considering more than two factors and the correlations between factors which are involved in an intelligent measurement.

Pervasive environments are mostly based on the ad hoc networking paradigm and are characterized by ubiquity in both users and devices and artifacts. In these inherently unstable conditions and bearing in mind the resource’s limitations that are attributed to participating devices, the deployment of Knowledge Management techniques is considered complicated due to the particular requirements. Security considerations are also very important since the distribution of knowledge information to multiple locations over a network, poses inherent problems and calls for advanced methods in order to mitigate node misbehaviour and in order to enforce authorized and authenticated access to this information. This paper addresses the issue of secure and distributed knowledge management applications in pervasive environments. We present a prototype implementation after having discussed detailed design principles as far as the communications and the application itself is regarded. Robustness and lightweight implementation are the cornerstones of the proposed solution. The approach we have undertaken makes use of overlay networks to achieve efficiency and performance optimization, exploiting ontologies. The work presented in this paper extends our initial work to tackle this problem, as this was described in (28).

The paper's aim is to present a novel anonymity quantification method, LooM (loosely managed privacy protection method) for achieving privacy protection in pervasive computing environments.

The main feature is that the method quantitatively controls anonymity by a single value (disclosure threshold value) using a classification algorithm of the decision tree. The value is not affected by the set size of users or the distribution of users' private information. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed by simulation using sample databases of attribute‐value pairs. Proposes a model of privacy information disclosure that achieves a balance between users' privacy protection requirements and service providers' disclosure requirements and applies web questionnaire survey data to this model.

LooM can be applicable to a variety of pervasive computing and communication services handling a huge amount of data containing privacy information.

The paper proposes a model of privacy information disclosure that achieves a balance between users' privacy protection requirements and service providers' disclosure requirements.

Ever since Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing” (ubicomp) in 1988, there has been a general interest in proposing various solutions that would support his vision. However, attacks targeting devices and services of a ubicomp environment have demonstrated not only different privacy issues, but also a risk of endangering user’s life (e.g. by modifying medical sensor readings). Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of security challenges of ubicomp environments and the corresponding countermeasures proposed over the past decade.

The results of this paper are based on a literature review method originally used in evidence-based medicine called systematic literature review (SLR), which identifies, filters, classifies and summarizes the findings.

Starting from the bibliometric results that clearly show an increasing interest in the topic of ubicomp security worldwide, the findings reveal specific types of attacks and vulnerabilities that have motivated the research over the past decade. This review describes most commonly proposed countermeasures – context-aware access control and authentication mechanisms, cryptographic protocols that account for device’s resource constraints, privacy-preserving mechanisms, and trust mechanisms for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SLR on security challenges in ubicomp. The findings should serve as a reference to an extensive list of scientific contributions, as well as a guiding point for the researchers’ novel to the security research in ubicomp.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate concepts that are used in depicting future visions of society, as afforded by technology, to map the extent of their use, examine the level of their dominance in different research areas and geographic boundaries, identify potential overlaps, analyse their longitudinal growth, and examine whether any of the identified concepts has assumed an overarching position.

In total, 14 concepts, each of which is used to depict visions of future information infrastructures, were identified. More than 20,000 scholarly documents related to 11 of these concepts (those with 20 or more documents) are analysed by various qualitative/quantitative methods.

The concepts most referred to are semantic web and ubiquitous computing (all years), and internet of things (Year 2013). Publications on some newer concepts (e.g. digital living, real world internet) are minimal. There are variations in the extent of use and preferred concepts based on geographic and disciplinary boundaries. The overlap in the use of these terms is minimal and none of these terms has assumed an overarching umbrella position.

This study is limited to scholarly publications; it would be relevant to also study the pattern of usage in governmental communications and policy documents.

By mapping multiplicity of concepts and the dispersion of discussions, the authors highlight the need for, and facilitate, a broader discussion of related social and societal implications.

This paper is the first to present a collective of these related concepts and map the pattern of their occurrence and growth.

It is essential for professionals to have flexible access to information sources and interaction with clients and colleagues. Mobile phones, e‐mail, pagers, laptops, and PCs all aim to facilitate the flexibility necessary for conducting their work. Ideally, professionals with intense demands on their time should not be supported by various information and interaction technologies, they should embed core domesticated technologies. This paper examines how the vision of iniquitous ICT support for professional work meets the harsh realities through interviews with 16 individual professionals from 16 different organisations. The paper aims to answer the question of the applicability and reality of ubiquitous computing in today's work environment and where technology is in terms of limitations for the professional. The study demonstrates that the joint life of professionals and their technologies is not one best characterised by the technical and the social merging seamlessly. It is instead one burdened by constant attention.

Context‐awareness is an essential property of any pervasive system perceiving its environment. Such a system captures and processes context, i.e. the features describing the relevant aspects of environment state and user behaviour. However, development of these systems still requires solving a number of research and engineering challenges. The purpose of this paper is to propose perception framework, a RESTful middleware which simplifies and accelerates the development of pervasive systems. Perception framework allows constructing services' application logic using rules and context. Moreover, it collects sensor data and produces the context information that is required for the rules. The authors present the architecture, design, complete implementation, and prototype‐based verification of perception framework.

Development of context‐aware services is achieved with a novel architecture supporting building of the logic of web services using rules which directly manipulate the available elementary context represented with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology. These rules are described using the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) with support for different rule languages. The implementation of this framework is aligned with RESTful principles, providing a lightweight and flexible solution for large‐scale context‐aware systems.

The fully implemented prototype verifies the feasibility of constructing the logic of context‐aware web services with the rules supported by perception framework.

The contributions of this paper include: the requirement specification for a generic context‐aware pervasive middleware; and the design and implementation of the framework (i.e. perception framework) supporting the development of context‐aware web services. The perception framework includes a generic rule‐based reasoner allowing developers to use several RIF‐compliant rule description languages.