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ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen a confluence of two major trends -- the increase of mobile devices such as smart phones as the primary access point to networked information and the rise of social media platforms that connect people. Their convergence supports the emergence of a new class of context-aware geosocial networking applications. While existing systems focus mostly on location, our work centers on models for representing and reasoning about a more inclusive and higher-level notion of context, including the user's location and surroundings, the presence of other people and devices, and the inferred activities in which they are engaged. A key element of our work is the use of collaborative information sharing where devices share and integrate knowledge about their context. This introduces the need for privacy and security mechanisms. We present a framework to provide users with appropriate levels of privacy to protect the personal information their mobile devices are collecting, including the inferences that can be drawn from the information. We use Semantic Web technologies to specify high-level, declarative policies that describe user information sharing preferences. We have built a prototype system that aggregates information from a variety of sensors on the phone, online sources, and sources internal to the campus intranet, and infers the dynamic user context. We show how our policy framework can be effectively used to devise better privacy control mechanisms to control information flow between users in such dynamic mobile systems.
Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2011 Fifth IEEE International Conference on; 10/2011
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ABSTRACT: Security is emerging as an important requirement for a number of distributed applications such as online banking, social networking etc. due to the private nature of the data being involved. Further more, the wide spread use of portable devices such as laptops, PDAs etc. allows users to make meaningful ad hoc collaborations. Traditional security solutions are not feasible for these scenarios due to the varying nature of the collaborations in terms of entities involved and their roles, available resources etc. Under these circumstances, we need generic solutions that take into account the semantics of the collaborations in determining the set of allowable operations. In this paper, we propose an extensible framework that uses semantics driven policies for enforcing security. Our policies are rooted in semantic web languages which makes amenable to interoperability, and also enables high level reasoning for conflict resolution and policy adaptation. We describe our policy based network that uses packet content semantics to best handle different streams, and show how our framework can be used to secure enterprise networks and the BGP routing process.
Data Engineering Workshop, 2008. ICDEW 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on; 05/2008
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ABSTRACT: The age of technology has changed the way that surgeons are being trained. Traditional methodologies for training can include lecturing, shadowing, apprenticing, and developing skills within live clinical situations. Computerized tools which simulate surgical procedures and/or experiences can allow for "virtual" experiences to enhance the traditional training procedures that can dramatically improve upon the older methods. However, such systems do not to adapt to the training context. We describe a ubiquitous computing system that tracks low-level events in the surgical training room (e.g. student locations, lessons completed, learning tasks assigned, and performance metrics) and from these derive the training context. This can be used to create an adaptive training system.
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking & Services, 2007. MobiQuitous 2007. Fourth Annual International Conference on; 09/2007
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ABSTRACT: In vehicular ad hoc networks individual vehicles can help each other locate resources and establish trustworthiness under highly dynamic conditions, lacking any centralized trust authority. To ascertain the accuracy and reliability of data aggregated in a distributed manner, we present a reputation management system for such networks that enables devices to quickly adapt to changing local conditions and provides a bootstrapping method for establishing trust relationships where only a few may exist a priori. Our scheme considers cooperativeness and accuracy of peer-provided data as two aspects of trust when evolving trust relationships and managing reputations. We use an epidemic data exchange protocol that incorporates reputation and agreement to ensure high reliability of data and stimulate proactive collaboration above and beyond stipulation, to enhance availability and reliability of data. We present preliminary simulation results which demonstrate the effectiveness of our data intensive reputation management scheme
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, Annual International Conference on. 07/2006;
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ABSTRACT: Policy enabled applications are being increasingly employed to support responsive information technology services. In competitive business environments, such services increase adaptability of both software and the processes they implement through externalized business and security logic. Over the last decade this has driven both industry and academia to contribute to policy research and engineering, by developing specification languages, frameworks and toolkits. Since this work has typically been applied to and evaluated using new enterprise solutions, policy management for existing applications has been less well studied. In this paper we share our experiences on policy enabling an existing Web based solution, together with identifying new policy enabling requirements from a specific class of enterprise systems
Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2006. Policy 2006. Seventh IEEE International Workshop on; 07/2006
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Boston, MA, USA; 07/2006
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ABSTRACT: Information system security and privacy, once narrow topics primarily of interest to IS designers, have become critically important to society at large. The scope of associated challenges and applications is broadening accordingly, leading to new requirements and approaches. Information networks are evolving into more open and dynamic systems. Security and privacy enforcement is problematic in these systems due to the lack of a common understanding of requirements and information as well as user unpredictability. Shared ontologies, declarative policies, and trust models offer the most promising approaches to meet these challenges
Computer 07/2006; · 1.47 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The paper proposes a novel distributed service discovery protocol for pervasive environments. The protocol is based on the concepts of peer-to-peer caching of service advertisements and group-based intelligent forwarding of service requests. It does not require a service to be registered with a registry or lookup server. Services are described using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We exploit the semantic class/subClass hierarchy of OWL to describe service groups and use this semantic information to selectively forward service requests. OWL-based service description also enables increased flexibility in service matching. We present simulation results that show that our protocol achieves increased efficiency in discovering services (compared to traditional broadcast-based mechanisms) by efficiently utilizing bandwidth via controlled forwarding of service requests.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 03/2006; 5(2):97- 112. · 2.28 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We discuss the challenges involved in adapting the OntoSem natural language processing system to the Web. One set of tasks involves processing Web documents, translating their computed meaning representations from the OntoSems native KR language into the Semantic Web language OWL, and publishing the results as Web pages and RSS feeds. Another set of tasks works in reverse — querying the Web for facts needed by OntoSem, translating them from OWL into OntoSems native KR language and importing the results. A central problem underlying both sets of tasks is that of translating knowledge between OntoSems KR language and ontologies and those of the Semantic Web. OntoSem2OWL has been developed as a translation system to support these translations. We describe SemNews, an implemented prototype application that demonstrates the process. It monitors RSS feeds of news stories, applies OntoSem to understand the text, and exports the computed facts back to the Web in OWL.
System Sciences, 2006. HICSS '06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on; 02/2006
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ABSTRACT: We propose a trust-based data management framework for enabling individual devices to harness the potential power of distributed computation, storage, and sensory resources available in pervasive computing environments. Available resources include those currently present in the fixed surrounding infrastructure as well as those resources made available by other mobile devices in the vicinity. We take a holistic approach that considers trust, security, and privacy issues of data management in these environments. We focus on collaborative mechanisms to provide a platform for trustworthy data management for devices in ad hoc networks. A fundamental aspect of our framework is a pack formation mechanism for enabling collaborative peer interaction in the pervasive computing environments based on context information and landmarks. A pack provides a routing substrate for enabling devices to find reliable sources of information. A pack also provides a platform for coordinated pro-active and reactive mechanisms that can detect and respond to malicious activity. Consequently, a pack can be used for providing a foundation to distributed trust management and data intensive interactions. We describe our proposed data management framework with an emphasis on forming packs in mobile ad-hoc networks and present preliminary results from our simulation of collaborative data management using packs.
Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems Conference, 2005. IEEE International Conference on; 12/2005
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M.N. Huhns,
M.P. Singh,
M. Burstein,
K. Decker,
K.E. Durfee, T. Finin,
T.L. Gasser,
H. Goradia,
P.N. Jennings,
Kiran Lakkaraju,
H. Nakashima,
H. Van Dyke Parunak,
J.S. Rosenschein,
A. Ruvinsky,
G. Sukthankar,
S. Swarup,
K. Sycara,
M. Tambe,
T. Wagner,
L. Zavafa
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ABSTRACT: Today's service-oriented systems realize many ideas from the research conducted a decade or so ago in multiagent systems. Because these two fields are so deeply connected, further advances in multiagent systems could feed into tomorrow's successful service-oriented computing approaches. This article describes a 15-year roadmap for service-oriented multiagent system research.
IEEE Internet Computing 12/2005; · 2.00 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: To help human users and software agents find relevant knowledge on the Semantic Web, the Swoogle search engine discovers, indexes, and analyzes the ontologies and facts that are encoded in Semantic Web documents.
Computer 11/2005; · 1.47 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The semantic Web services initiative architecture (SWSA) committee has created a set of architectural and protocol abstractions that serve as a foundation for semantic Web service technologies. This article summarizes the committee's findings, emphasizing its review of requirements gathered from several different environments. We also identify the scope and potential requirements for a semantic Web services architecture.
IEEE Internet Computing 10/2005; · 2.00 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The platform for privacy preferences (P3P) is a W3C framework for Web privacy management. It provides a standard vocabulary that Websites can use to describe their privacy practices. The presence of Web site published P3P policies enable users to configure Web browsers to allow, block or warn users during access and data exchange with Websites. It's a good idea that unfortunately is rarely used. We identify three primary reasons: (i) the languages available to describe user privacy preferences are not sufficiently expressive, (ii) P3P policies published by Web sites are not trusted by users and (iii) P3P framework does not provide a coherent view of available privacy protection mechanisms to the user towards addressing these issues; we present enhancements to the P3P framework. We use a more expressive policy language based on deontic concepts to describe user privacy-related policies, constraints and preferences. We introduce a new trust model for Websites and describe its use in user privacy preferences. Finally, we present sample policies to demonstrate the relevance of our work and offer it as an effective starting point towards enhancing Web privacy management.
Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2005. Sixth IEEE International Workshop on; 07/2005
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ABSTRACT: A new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting explores the use of multi-agent systems, Semantic Web ontologies, reasoning, and declarative policies for security and privacy. Building on an earlier pervasive computing system, EasyMeeting provides relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. The system also exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (Cobra). Cobra's intelligent broker agent maintains a shared context model for all computing entities in the space and enforces user-defined privacy policies.
IEEE Internet Computing 12/2004; · 2.00 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The ultimate goal of service matching is to find the service provider(s) that would perform tasks of given description with the best overall degree of satisfaction. However, service description matching solves only part of the problem. Agents that match a given request may vary greatly in their actual capabilities to perform the tasks, and an agent may have strong and weak areas. In this work, we take a quantitative approach in which performance rating is considered an integral part of an agent's capability model and service distribution is taken into account in determining the degree of match. With the dynamic refinement of the agent capability model, the broker captures an agent's performance levels as well as its strong and weak areas. An experimental system has been designed and implemented within the OWL/OWL-S framework and the results statistics show significant advantage over other major levels of brokers.
Web Intelligence, 2004. WI 2004. Proceedings. IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on; 10/2004
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ABSTRACT: We describe a shared ontology called SOUPA - standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. SOUPA is designed to model and support pervasive computing applications. This ontology is expressed using the Web ontology language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desires, and intentions, time, space, events, user profiles, actions, and policies for security and privacy. We discuss how SOUPA can be extended and used to support the applications of CoBrA, a broker-centric agent architecture for building smart meeting rooms, and MoGATU, a peer-to-peer data management for pervasive environments.
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, 2004. MOBIQUITOUS 2004. The First Annual International Conference on; 09/2004
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ABSTRACT: Research on data management in mobile ad-hoc networks focuses on discovering sources and acquiring information. Mobile devices assume answers to be correct and do not verify the veracity of the information or the providers. This assumption is suitable for most client-server environments; however, peer-to-peer environments lack the intrinsic stability of "anchored" sources. In mobile ad-hoc networks, sources may provide faulty information, which can lead to incorrect conclusions. Consequently, devices need a mechanism to evaluate the integrity of their peers and the accuracy of peer provided information. To address this problem we propose a query processing model that relies on distributed trust and belief. Each device maintains and shares beliefs regarding the degree of trust it has for its peers - where trust is determined by experience and reputation. Additionally, each device associates a value indicating its belief in the accuracy of the information it holds. This knowledge is used by devices to determine the reliability of query responses. We implement our model in GloMoSim and provide experimental results for different combinations of trust and accuracy algorithms.
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, 2004. MOBIQUITOUS 2004. The First Annual International Conference on; 09/2004
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ABSTRACT: Web services will soon handle users' private information. They'll need to provide privacy guarantees to prevent this delicate information from ending up in the wrong hands. More generally, Web services will need to reason about their users' policies that specify who can access private information and under what conditions. These requirements are even more stringent for semantic Web services that exploit the semantic Web to automate their discovery and interaction because they must autonomously decide what information to exchange and how. In our previous work, we proposed ontologies for modeling the high-level security requirements and capabilities of Web services and clients.1 This modeling helps to match a client's request with appropriate services-those based on security criteria as well as functional descriptions.
Intelligent Systems, IEEE 08/2004; · 2.15 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: This paper presents a framework to address new data management challenges introduced by data-intensive, pervasive computing environments. These challenges include a spatio-temporal variation of data and data source availability, lack of a global catalog and schema, and no guarantee of reconnection among peers due to the serendipitous nature of the environment. An important aspect of our solution is to treat devices as semiautonomous peers guided in their interactions by profiles and context. The profiles are grounded in a semantically rich language and represent information about users, devices, and data described in terms of "beliefs," "desires," and "intentions." We present a prototype implementation of this framework over combined Bluetooth and Ad Hoc 802.11 networks and present experimental and simulation results that validate our approach and measure system performance.
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 06/2004; · 1.66 Impact Factor
