Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.

Public display technology (like digital signage) and private one (like smartphones) has advanced significantly in capacity, capability and spread over the past years. For the provision of information services in display technology rich settings we draw the analogy to biological ecosystems as a community of living organisms together with nonliving components of the environment, linked together through information flows, and by that acting as a global system. We identify individuals in the information society with their situational information demands and their implicit and explicit interaction styles as the living, and the plethora of display devices as the non-living part of an information ecosystem. A local interactions oriented service architecture is developed, the SAPERE pervasive service substrate. A situation aware social feedback mechanism is proposed and implemented in the SAPERE architecture, demonstrating how incentivizing local interactions can stand as a principle to attain desirable global information balance.

As pervasive computing meets social networks, there is a fast growing research field called pervasive social computing. Applications in this area exploit the richness of information arising out of people using sensor-equipped pervasive devices in their everyday life combined with intense use of different social networking services. We call this set of information pervasive social context. We provide a taxonomy to classify pervasive social context along the dimensions space, time, people, and information source (STiPI) as well as commenting on the type and reason for creating such context. A survey of recent research shows the applicability and usefulness of the taxonomy in classifying and assessing applications and systems in the area of pervasive social computing. Finally, we present some research challenges in this area and illustrate how they affect the systems being surveyed.

Web communities are making available an increasing volume of free, fresh, detailed and powerful information about living people. Among them, the Flickr photo-sharing service offers to researchers a database of several millions of geotagged pictures from users all around the world. Working on that opens the door to the study of meaningful mobility data, where title and description of a geotagged picture represent a mine from which extract labels to detect places and events, and useful information about user trends, behaviors and tastes. Our approach goes in the direction of developing an intelligence and unattended system able to extract and take advantage of up-to-date and spontaneous information embedded with pictures, making cities intelligent and able to reach user expectations. Such system, learning from past touristic user experiences, could make customized recommendations on “where to go”, and “what to see”, to people going to visit touristic places for the first time.

We describe a prototype of trading system platform populated by agents who autonomously decide to buy and/or sell items according to a set of local needs which arise dynamically (also by possibly accessing information provided by pervasive devices) by in the process of fulfilling a given overall utility. The market has combinatorial nature in a way that items to be traded are combined into packages, in accordance with a principle that drives the nature of many current markets. However, differently from these, items belong to a number of distinct sellers distributed in the platform, and are chosen singularly on the basis of buyers preferences and needs. Agents are thus situation-aware, with sellers coming acquainted of the market demand, and buyers price offers, through a Knowledge Network. This latter drives the way market offers balance the demand by gathering the needed information in an autonomous way and taking advantage of pervasive devices. Packaging is realized by agent aggregation into Virtual Sellers, in an autonomous fashion, and we propose an opportunistic policy whereby aggregation is governed by a Combinatorial Auction. The market is studied through proof-of-concept simulation, where the efficiency deriving from the opportunistic aggregation based on Combinatorial Auctions and the influence of contextual self-awareness are studied.

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it