Cloud based Smart City hubs are an attractive approach to addressing some of the complex issues faced when deploying PaaS infrastructure for Smart Cities. In this paper we introduce the general notion of IoT hubs and then discuss our work to generalize our IoT hub as a Smart City PaaS. We briefly describe our approach and discuss our experiences deploying two cloud-based Smart City hubs, one in the UK and the other in Canada.

Having the notion of services brought into the domain of component based software design has enriched the domain of modular self-contained components with support for loose coupling, dynamic runtime discovery, and late binding. However, loose coupling, runtime discovery, and composition for a service-oriented component model in its current scale mostly applies to homogeneous services that admit to the specifications of the original service component model. This design is in conflict with the initial outlook of SOA in which reusability of existing services is considered a primary goal. In this paper, we discuss ReCoIn, a remote service composition and integration framework, which aims to bring functionalities of traditional Web services into the local repository of a service oriented component model. We discuss how ReCoIn enables remote Web services to be properly discovered, encapsulated, and used in a service oriented component model framework, offering better service reuse and fault tolerance. In this paper, we layout the overall architectural design for ReCoIn and present its initial prototype.

In densely packed 802.11 environments, access-point domains significantly overlap and wireless hosts interfere with each other in complex ways. Knowing which devices interfere is an essential first step to minimizing this interference, improving efficiency and delivering quality connectivity throughout the network. This knowledge, however, is extremely difficult to obtain without either taking a running network offline for measurements or having client hosts monitor and report airspace anomalies, something typically outside the control of network administrators.

In this paper, we reflect on the design and deployment process of MAGICBoard, a public display deployed in a university setting that solicits the electronic votes and opinions of bystanders on trivial but amusing topics. We focus on the consequences of our design choices with respect to encouraging bystanders to interact with the public display. Bystanders are individuals around the large display who may never fully engage with the application itself, but are potential contributors to the system. Drawing on our recent experiences with MAGICBoard, we present a classification of bystanders, and then discuss three design themes relevant to the design of systems for bystander use: graduated proximal engagement, lowering barriers for interaction and supporting covert engagement.

Large screen displays are being increasingly deployed in public areas for advertising, entertainment, and information display. Recently we have witnessed increasing interest in supporting interaction with such displays using personal mobile devices. To enable the rapid development of public large screen interactive applications, we have designed and developed the MAGIC Broker. The MAGIC Broker provides a set of common abstractions and a RESTful Web services protocol to easily program interactive public large screen display applications with a focus on mobile device interactions. We have carried out a preliminary evaluation of the MAGIC Broker via the development of a number of prototypes and believe our toolkit is a valid first step in developing a generic support infrastructure to empower developers of interactive large screen display applications.