Forming friendship with peers from diverse backgrounds is key to children’s social emotional development. In this study, we explored the use of social robot, Haru, as mediator for remote communication in children group, to support connection and friendship building. We invited children from different countries aged from 10 to 15 to participate in two interaction sessions with peers from other countries, after which we conducted interviews with children from three countries, focusing on their experiences, and perceptions of the robot’s roles in the process. The findings indicated that social robot Haru effectively served as an icebreaker and entertainer; However, improvements are needed in conversation flow, transitions between different roles, and supporting children’s autonomy in guiding the conversation and the depth of their communication.

Social robots for children have focused mainly on conventional education domains such as teaching language, science, and math, while applications focusing on the enhancement of cultural competency are quite scarce. In this paper, we present a prototype of a robot-mediation framework for cross-cultural communication. This framework paves the way for a social robot to act as a mediator between groups of schoolchildren from different countries. First, we conducted a participatory design activity by an interdisciplinary team, resulting in the extraction of the design, robot’s roles, and technical requirements. Based on these requirements, we built the robot-mediation system prototype. We conducted a pilot study using the system with groups of high school children in Japan and Australia and our results show the potential of the system to drive children’s interest in communicating, sharing, and discussing cultural themes with their remote peers through the social robot.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have been commonly used as a source for global localization in autonomous systems, including autonomous vehicles and robots. Different GNSS-based techniques exist to compute the position, velocity and time (PVT) of a moving rover, differing in the level of precision and complexity. The expected performance for each technique is well-studied but it is highly-dependant on the surrounding conditions and local effects such as occlusion or multipath. This paper presents the results after evaluating multiconstellation single-frequency data obtained from an extensive field campaign carried out in the port of Thessaloniki over several months, as part of the European GSA project LOGIMATIC. The paper, furthermore, focuses on the GNSS performance in container terminals, considered different from common urban and suburban scenarios and a potentially challenging environment due to the presence of containers, cranes, hangars and proximity to water. Analysis results show that the accuracy of the standalone PVT estimation methods for GPS and Galileo separately matched the expected performance numbers, with Galileo slightly outperforming GPS. The analysis also illustrated the effects of multipath and signal denial when operating in the proximity of cranes and hangars. Furthermore, the application of EGNOS/SBAS introduced a significant improvement, demonstrating the added value of EGNOS and Galileo over a traditional GPS only solution in these scenarios.

One of the major problems in pattern mining is still the problem of pattern explosion, i.e., the large amounts of patterns produced by the mining algorithms when analyzing a database with a predefined minimum support threshold. The approach we take to overcome this problem aims for automatically inferring variables from the patterns found, in order to generalize those patterns by representing them in a compact way. We introduce the novel concept of meta-patterns and present the RECAP algorithm. Meta-patterns can take several forms and the sets of patterns can be grouped considering different criteria. These decisions come as a trade-off between expressiveness and compaction of the patterns. The proposed solution accomplishes good results in the tested dataset, reducing to less than half the amount of patterns found.

Agent-based computing represents a promising paradigm for distributed computing. Unfortunately the lack of security is hindering the application of this paradigm in real world applications. The protection of malicious hosts is considered the most difficult security problem to solve in mobile agent systems. In this paper we provide a mechanism that aims to solve the problem of the malicious hosts. The core of our work is a new agent migration protocol based on the use of tamper resistant cryptographic hardware. Concretely, we base our work on the use of the Trusted Computing technology. Our protocol has been validated using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) model checking tool. As a result we have a library built on JADE that implements the secure migration for agents named Secure Migration Library for Agents (SecMiLiA). This library provides a friendly use of the Trusted Computing technology for agent based system developers.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to an environment that is sensitive, responsive, interconnected, contextualized, transparent, intelligent, and acting on behalf of humans. AmI environments impose some constraints in the connectivity framework, power computing as well as energy budget. This makes of AmI a significantly different case within distributed systems. The combination of heterogeneity, dynamism, sheer number of devices, along with the growing demands placed on software security and dependability, make application development vastly more complex. Also, the provision of security and dependability for applications becomes increasingly difficult to achieve with the existing security engineering mechanisms and tools. Furthermore the validation of these mechanisms is even a hard task. In this paper we present an approach to model dynamic changes in ambient intelligence scenarios using the Avispa (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) model-checking tool suite. The main goal ofour approach consists on providing a starting point in the use of Formal Description Techniques (FDM) for AmI scenarios. The paper studies and assesses the suitability of the Avispa tool for security validation in Ambient Intelligent environments and proposes mechanisms to capture the dynamic context changes in these environments.

Software agents are a promising computing paradigm. Scientific community has devoted important efforts to this field [1]. Indeed, several important applications exist based on this technology. Despite of their benefits, the lack of the appropriate security mechanisms for agent based systems represents a barrier for the widespread use of this technology. Additionally, the application of the current security techniques is not trivial for agent based system developers, which are usually not security experts. This paper presents a hardware based protection infrastructure that takes advantage of the recent advances in trusted hardware in order to solve the problem known as the malicious host in mobile agent systems. This infrastructure is composed of extensions to the JADE framework and the Trusted Computing technology. Additionally, the protocol used in this implementation has been validated using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) as we described in the paper.