Mobile Crowd Computing (MCC) leverages the collaborative power of nearby devices to solve resource-intensive tasks, offering transformative potential across various fields. However, ensuring device reliability—which directly impacts the trustworthiness of devices in MCC environments—poses a significant challenge. Balancing validation accuracy with performance and energy efficiency is particularly difficult due to MCC’s dynamic and resource-constrained decentralized nature. Existing validation methods are not feasible in MCC, as they can negatively affect speed and energy consumption. This paper introduces the Honeybee-RS framework, a novel approach for validating offloaded computational results in MCC environments. Honeybee-RS provides delegator-based validation mechanisms and derives reliability scores from the validation process. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these mechanisms, significantly enhancing reliability in MCC while maintaining performance.

Mobile devices are ubiquitous, heterogeneous and resource constrained. Execution of complex tasks in mobile devices are resource demanding and time-consuming, forcing developers to offload portions of the complex task to cloud or edge computing resources. Task offloading becomes increasingly challenging due to intermittent Internet connectivity, remote resource unavailability, high costs, latency, and limited energy of the mobile device. A mobile device user is typically surrounded by other mobile devices, which can be leveraged to collaboratively compute a resource-intensive task. With the help of a work sharing framework, it is feasible for devices to communicate and collaborate. However, some mobile devices are incapable of computing complex portions of the task, and some can compute in accelerated mode. In this demonstration, we introduce Honeybee-T a collaborative mobile crowd computing framework that uses a work-stealing algorithm. The algorithm allows work sharing with collaborating devices based on devices' computational ability and task-dependencies. The experiments show that by employing Honeybee-T framework, when compared to monolithic execution of a large compute-intensive task, there is a considerable performance gain, as well as energy savings.

Data scientists, like software engineers, use search engines, code repositories, tutorials, and question and answer sites for finding code snippets. The objective of this study is to understand what information can be extracted from data science experiment repositories for quicker availability of relevant information when data scientists search for information. In this paper, we investigated a set of notebooks to identify recurring data science techniques for efficient information retrieval and easy adaptation from online solutions to support their search during experimentation. From the manual annotation of 57 natural language processing notebooks, a taxonomy on 106 data science techniques was developed, grouped by data science workflow stages. The preliminary evaluation shows that our constructed taxonomy is relevant to retrieve information that data scientists are searching for. Future work will continue to investigate the creation of a context aware code snippet engine designed for data scientists.

This paper explores a possible use-case of creating an integrated multiuser-multidevice interaction (2MUDI) model in IoT collectives, in particular, in an aged care centre environment. A prototype has been designed and developed, which has given a name KATE. The system comprises Internet-connected robot(s), multiple mobile devices and multiple users. Family members of the seniors admitted to aged care centres can monitor the seniors via the robot. Staff members, including doctors and nurses, who look after these seniors can also interact with and use the robot(s). This data can also be accessible by family members via an application on their mobile devices. This work has modelled complex interactions and considered the implementation challenges, societal implications in a 2MUDI system and demonstrate its applicability with the KATE system.

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is a demand for technologies to support high-velocity, dynamic resource provisioning to provide secure, cost-efficient, and real-time IoT services in resource-constrained environments. Conventional fog computing by itself cannot address such requirements and needs to be complemented with opportunistic fog computing, by providing mobile fog resources on-demand. In this paper, we discuss key issues in this area, and investigate potential solutions from existing work. We conclude this paper with a summary of gaps, and propose an opportunistic architecture for future work.

As mobile devices evolve to be powerful and pervasive computing tools, their usage also continues to increase rapidly. However, mobile device users frequently experience problems when running intensive applications on the device itself, or offloading to remote clouds, due to resource shortage and connectivity issues. Ironically, most users’ environments are saturated with devices with significant computational resources. This paper argues that nearby mobile devices can efficiently be utilised as a crowd-powered resource cloud to complement the remote clouds. Node heterogeneity, unknown worker capability, and dynamism are identified as essential challenges to be addressed when scheduling work among nearby mobile devices. We present a work-sharing model, called Honeybee, using an adaptation of the well-known work stealing method to load balance independent jobs among heterogeneous mobile nodes, able to accommodate nodes randomly leaving and joining the system. The overall strategy of Honeybee is to focus on short-term goals, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise, based on the concepts of proactive workers and opportunistic delegator. We evaluate our model using a prototype framework built using Android and implement two applications. We report speedups of up to four with seven devices and energy savings up to 71 percent witheight devices.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, and their increasingly powerful embedded processors and storage, vast resources increasingly surround users. We have been investigating the concept of on-demand ad hoc forming of groups of nearby mobile devices in the midst of crowds to cooperatively perform computationally intensive tasks as a service to local mobile users, or what we call mobile crowd computing. As devices can vary in processing power and some can leave a group unexpectedly or new devices join in, there is a need for algorithms that can distribute work in a flexible manner and still work with different arrangements of devices that can arise in an ad hoc fashion. In this article, we first argue for the feasibility of such use of crowd-embedded computations using theoretical justifications and reporting on our experiments on Bluetooth-based proximity sensing. We then present a multilayered work-stealing style algorithm for distributing work efficiently among mobile devices and compare speedups attainable for different topologies of devices networked with Bluetooth, justifying a topology-flexible opportunistic approach. While our experiments are with Bluetooth and mobile devices, the approach is applicable to ecosystems of various embedded devices with powerful processors, networking technologies, and storage that will increasingly surround users.