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The aim of this research is to investigate how virtual reality, with emphasis on pervasive environments, might affect tourism choice of a destination, in order to exploit it as a marketing tool to promote tourism destination in a global perspective. In particular, the paper analyzes the case of Calabrian territory (Southern Italy), due to the high archaeological value, heritage of the ancient Magna Graecia culture (VIII cent. B.D.‐I cent. A.D.). Despite this heritage, Calabria has been not fully exploited its resources in a tourism perspective.

The research methodology is based on a qualitative approach, focused on a questionnaire promoted along with tourists. In particular, the authors asked them to explore the pervasive environments which reproduce some Calabrian scenarios, and answer some specific questions related to the experience. The interviews have been processed with the MaxQDA software for the content analysis.

Two aspects of the results emerge from a theoretical standpoint: the role of pervasive environments for improving tourism contents communication; and the influence of pervasive environments on the tourists' destination choice. Furthermore, the use of pervasive environments is efficient especially for the territories with a high archaeological value.

The increasing competition among territories forces the tourism industry to develop new strategies for enhancing competitive advantages. This paper studies how pervasive environments might have an impact on the promotion of tourism destinations, which have not been yet fully appraised by the current literature.

Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.

The paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.

The framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.

The main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

As Pervasive Computing environments become more richly populated with sensors and computing power it may be possible for the environment to observe and interpret user actions and pre‐emptively provide accurate support for those actions. This requires accurate inference of user intent. Though individual user acts may be inferable from environmental context sensing, the inference of intent for which appropriate support might be offered is more challenging. Numerous researchers have used probabilistic techniques such as Bayesian Analysis techniques to attempt such inference. Unlike a desktop environment, however, pervasive computing environments are extremely heterogeneous, so any heuristics used must be tailored to the physical environment and the users in question. Thus these techniques are only likely to be accurate if configured with accurate knowledge of routine user behavior. Many existing approaches attempt to learn such knowledge from operational data, but this often requires user involvement in training and expert configuration of probabilistic processing structure. In this paper we examine a complimentary approach where users are presented with an intuitive interface to support the direct configuration of probabilistic structure by users with appropriate knowledge. By treating an intent inference system for a particular pervasive computng environment as an autonomic system, we approach the problem as the design of an intuitive governance interface for this system. We then present the design and usability evaluation of this governance interface.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

The challenge of pervasive computing consists in offering access to computing services anywhere and anytime with any devices. However, before it becomes a reality, the problems of access control and authentication have to be solved, among others. Existing solutions are inadequate without adaptation to this specific environment. Among the promising approaches, the trust paradigm seems to be more flexible than others. We base this proposal on this paradigm to implement a distrust model, so‐called APC (Access Pass Certificate). The main objective of this model is to enable authorized user to roam and to access trusted sites though they are not known locally. A user can claim two kinds of APCs provided by two kinds of sites: the home site (where the user has an account) and the trusted site (that trusts the user). Using these certificates, the user can progressively extend her access scope. This model implements a decentralized mapping policy, where the correspondence between the user’s home profile and her rights in the trusted sites is determined by the trusted site. This distrust model and its implementation are presented in this article where we exhibit its importance for large but controlled access in pervasive environments.

Starting from the premise that digital screens are pervading our everyday urban and social environments to serve a variety of purposes, the purpose of this paper is to show how screens can be made aware of what is happening around them and – based on specific strategies – adapt accordingly the advertisement flow to supply to users more engaging contents.

The paper presents an overview of future pervasive advertisement scenarios, and sketches the architecture and implementation of a system for adaptive context‐aware pervasive advertisement. Subsequently, with the help of a simulation environment, the paper evaluates the performances of several adaptive context‐aware advertisement strategies, and compares them against non‐adaptive ones.

The paper demonstrates that, in a wide range of conditions, an advertisement system based on adaptive context‐aware strategies leads to a gain in terms of commercial value with respect to traditional non‐adaptive strategies for advertisement broadcasting.

A system for pervasive advertisement could be easily brought to life, leading advertisement companies to a much more targeted exploitation of the screen resource and, eventually, to higher revenues.

Adaptive advertisement systems can offer notable commercial advantages over traditional advertisement systems even when visitors demonstrate poor collaboration towards the system.

To be successful, pervasive computing requires a balance of computing, design, and business requirements to be considered throughout the design process. Achieving this synthesis requires a level of interdisciplinary design that is not present in current pervasive design tools. To understand the state of the art and provide insight to future tool designers, the purpose of this paper is to present a survey of design tools for pervasive computing and consider their ability to be used in interdisciplinary design.

The authors have performed a survey of tools covering many areas within pervasive computing and have evaluated the abilities of each tool with established metrics for pervasive design tools.

While the paper has found many design tools are available for constructive pervasive applications, few are suitable through all phases of the design cycle or useful across all the intended application domains of pervasive computing.

This survey provides an understanding of the state of pervasive design tools, with regards to interdisciplinary design, which has not previously been performed. Additionally, the authors provide evaluations of the pervasive tools when used in an interdisciplinary setting. These evaluations provide insight to key metrics and allow tool designers to understand the needs of their intended audience.

One of the open questions is how to ensure the conceptual adaptation in the pervasive system. To answer this question, the authors needed to propose a generic model and a mechanism to describe this system and also need generic and semantic rules to ensure the adaptation. This paper aims to propose a model to describe the pervasive information system. Second, the authors suggest an approach to divide this model so as to describe each category of contextual information separately and ensure the adaptation in the pervasive system. Finally, the authors present examples of semantic rules executed in the pervasive system.

This paper proposes an approach to ensure the conceptual adaptation in the pervasive system. To do it, the authors proposed a model to design the pervasive system and used semantic Web services. They proposed to divide the model to six descriptions related to the pervasive system categories information.

Pervasive information system, conceptual adaptation, semantic Web services and OWL-S are presented in this paper.

The originality of this paper is presented in the purpose of the pervasive information system conceptual adaption in the pervasive system. In this, later, semantic Web services were used to ensure the adaptation by the adding of contextual information in the semantic Web service description.

Pervasive computing environment allows the users to access the services anywhere and anytime. Due to the dynamicity, mobility, security, heterogeneity, and openness have become a major challenging task in the Pervasive computing environment. To solve the security issues and to increase the communication reliability, an authentication-based access control approach is developed in this research to ensure the level of security in the Pervasive computing environment.

This paper aims to propose authentication-based access control approach performs the authentication mechanism using the hashing, encryption, and decryption function. The proposed approach effectively achieves the conditional traceability of user credentials to enhance security. Moreover, the performance of the proposed authentication-based access control approach is estimated using the experimental analysis, and performance improvement is proved using the evaluation metrics. It inherent the tradeoff between authentication and access control in the Pervasive computing environment. Here, the service provider requires authorization and authentication for the provision of service, whereas the end-users require unlinkability and untraceability for data transactions.

The proposed authentication-based access control obtained 0.76, 22.836 GB, and 3.35 sec for detection rate, memory, and time by considering password attack, and 22.772GB and 4.51 sec for memory and time by considering without attack scenario.

The communication between the user and the service provider is progressed using the user public key in such a way that the private key of the user can be generated through the encryption function.

Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated and self‐adaptive behaviors, and supporting diversity in services and long‐term evolvability. This suggests adopting a nature‐inspired approach, where pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. However, there are many possibly nature‐inspired metaphors that can be adopted, and choosing one may require a careful analysis of the pros and cons of the different metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key requirements and desiderata for next generation pervasive computing services and associated infrastructures.

In this paper, the authors introduce and critically analyze a number of natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize these concepts and survey relevant proposals in the area.

The key result of this survey is that a uniform reference architecture can be a useful guide when framing the challenges involved in the design and implementation of future self‐adaptive pervasive service ecosystems.

The survey in this paper, along with the proposed reference architecture, can be effective starting points towards the definition and implementation of general‐purpose nature‐inspired pervasive service ecosystems.