The concept of present population is gaining increasing attention in official statistics. One possible approach to measure present population exploits data collected by Mobile Network Operators (MNO), from simple Call Detail Records (CDR) to more informative and complex signalling records. Such data, collected primarily for network operation processes, can be repurposed to infer patterns of human mobility

Achieving advanced Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) services such as dynamic resource assignment and slicing, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS), and enabling heterogeneous virtual functions are some of the technical challenges associated with edge-cloud enhanced 5G architectures now under consideration. This paper proposes a named-object based virtual network (NOVN) architecture to support low-latency

Maintaining a food journal can allow an individual to monitor eating habits, including unhealthy eating sessions, food items causing severe reactions, or portion size related information. However, manually maintaining a food journal can be burdensome. In this paper, we explore the vision of a pervasive, automated, completely unobtrusive, food journaling system using a commodity smartwatch. We present

This paper presents an opportunistic sensing based solution to detect crowdedness in public transportation buses. The solution uses data of accelerometer and Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors available in smartphones carried by the commuters. These data are used to accurately identify bus boarding event and whether a commuter got a seat during his/her trip. The solution is energy efficient as

This paper presents a participatory framework to improve the reliability of sensor emulation by using non-dedicated and crowdsourced sensory data to cover several dedicated sensors in smart environments. To this end, GPS-less vehicle localization in a public transportation network by vehicular crowd-sensing and machine intelligence is considered as a potential use case. Our proposed architecture aims

Critical urban events take places at a random way and they need to be dealt with by public authorities quickly to maintain the proper operation of cities. The main challenges for an efficient handling fall in the random nature of the event, and in the speed and accuracy of its notification to the authority. The pervasiveness of vehicles in the cities, and their communication and monitoring capabilities

Music can produce a positive effect in runners’ motivation and performance. Nevertheless, these effects vary depending on the user’s location, the emotions that she/he feels at each moment or the type of training session. In this paper, a context and emotion-aware system for the recommendation and playing of Spotify songs is presented. It consists in a location-based mobile application that interacts

Mobile crowdsensing is a people-centric sensing system based on users’ contributions and incentive mechanisms aim at stimulating them. In our work, we have rethought the design of incentive mechanisms through a game-theoretic methodology. Thus, we have introduced a multi-layer social sensing framework, where humans as social sensors interact on multiple social layers and various services. We have proposed

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm increases the computational capabilities of distributed sensing architectures, such as Mobile CrowdSensing platforms, which are designed to collect heterogeneous data from the crowd by exploiting mobile devices. In this context, our work focusses on the impact of three community detection algorithms to our edge selection strategy. In particular, we study

To achieve trust and continuity in the smart contracts-based business process execution, the verification of such smart contracts is mandatory. A blockchain-based smart contract should work as intended before using it. Due to the immutable nature of blockchain, any bugs or errors will become permanent once published and could lead to huge economic losses. To avoid such problems, verification is required

In the last few years, classical social networking is turning into the more complex social internetworking and is extending from human users to objects. Indeed, objects are becoming increasingly complex, smart and social so that several authors have recently started to investigate the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and the Multiple IoT (MIoT) paradigms. SIoT is more oriented to the technological

Indoor localization has attracted increasing attention due to demands for location awareness, where GPS (global positioning system) does not work. Fingerprint-based indoor localization is one of standard approaches, but it does not gain recognition as a practical technique due to labor-intensive database maintenance. To protect the degradation of localization accuracy caused by the environmental variations

People involved in mass emergencies increasingly publish information-rich contents in Online Social Networks (OSNs), thus acting as a distributed and resilient network of human sensors. In this work we present HERMES, a system designed to enrich the information spontaneously disclosed by OSN users in the aftermath of disasters. HERMES leverages a mixed data collection strategy, called hybrid sensing

Accurate and efficient estimation of caloric expenditure during daily activities is desirable in tracking personal activity and health. Kinetic energy harvesting (KEH) has created an opportunity for wearable devices with limited battery power to realize long-term human health monitoring. We postulate to utilize KEH device for calorie estimation instead of accelerometer considering that the kinetic

The evolution of Location Based Services (LBS) is expected to play a significant role in the future smart city. The ever-increasing amount of data produced, along with the emergence of next-generation computationally intensive applications, requires new service delivery models. Such models should capitalize on the Edge Computing (EC) paradigm for supporting the data offloading process, by considering

Smart cities represent an archetypal example of infrastructures where the fog computing paradigm can express its potential: we have a large set of sensors deployed over a large geographic area where data should be pre-processed (e.g., to extract relevant information or to filter and aggregate data) before sending the result to a collector that may be a cloud data center, where relevant data are further

Wearable sensing devices can provide high-resolution data useful to characterise and identify complex human behaviours. Sensing human social interactions through wearable devices represents one of the emerging field in mobile social sensing, considering their impact on different user categories and on different social contexts. However, it is important to limit the collection and use of sensitive information

In this paper we study and implement real-time adaptation schemes for video encoding and channel selection that work in tandem to facilitate HD and 360° video streaming for secondary users in a dynamic spectrum access network. Out-of-band feedbacks on instantaneous pathloss of the signal between the transmitter and the receiver, the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) at the receiver, and the

The wearable devices market has been growing exponentially in the last few years and it is expected to count up to 930 million devices by the end of 2021. A common application of wearable devices is Human Activity Recognition (HAR), i.e., the ability of using the sensing capabilities of these devices to monitor and infer human activities. However, Animal Activity Recognition (AAR) has received significantly

An increased modal share of bicycle traffic is a key mechanism to reduce emissions and solve traffic-related problems. However, a lack of (perceived) safety keeps people from using their bikes more frequently. To improve safety in bicycle traffic, city planners need an overview of accidents, near miss incidents, and bike routes. Such information, however, is currently not available. In this paper,

Home Voice Assistants (HVAs) like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home are increasingly being used to control smart devices in a smarthome. A HVA device takes in a spoken command (“Turn off the living-room lights and television”), and converts it into commands for respective devices. This paper presents CANVAS system, an Context AwareNess for Voice ASsistants system designed for multi-occupant smarthomes

The Internet of Things technology allows devices automatically connect with others or a server for the purposes of exchanging data. People can conveniently integrate data from those devices for a smart home, vehicular ad-hoc network, e-Health, etc. In 2017, Wang et al. proposed a simple authentication scheme for the Internet of Things. Although they formally proved that their scheme is secure, they

Despite continuous efforts, designing both a resource-efficient and secure authentication protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices is still a great challenge for the industry. To address these concerns, in this paper, we present a new and more efficient method of providing secure communication between IoT edge devices and cloud servers, using a secure Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based

Recent years have seen a widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the implementation of smart city applications. A key enabler in the smart city paradigm is the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which facilitates automated real-time sensing, communication, and actuation, assisting in unmanned monitoring of physical phenomenon and supports intelligent decision making. Nevertheless

In this paper, we investigate machine learning approaches addressing the problem of geolocation. First, we review some classical learning methods to build a radio map. These methods are split in two categories, which we refer to as likelihood-based methods and fingerprinting methods. Then, we provide a novel geolocation approach in each of these two categories. The first proposed technique relies on

In a disaster or battlefield zone, rescue workers, soldiers, and other survivors (referred to as nodes) may need to survey damages and send images to the command and control center (the server) in a hop-by-hop fashion in the absence of any communication infrastructure. The server considers some area/landmark as the point of interest (POI) and distributes a request to the nodes to collect more information

For task allocation of mobile crowd sensing, aiming at the problem that the task cannot​ be completed normally due to the change of sensing state and the data quality is reduced because the sensor willingness is not satisfied, a task allocation method with active learning ability based on the normal cloud model is proposed. Firstly, the data quality, sensing environment and network state of sensors

Air pollution is a major concern worldwide due to its significant impacts on the global environment and human health. The conventional instruments used by the air quality monitoring stations are costly, bulkier, time-consuming, and power-hungry. Furthermore, due to limited data availability and non-scalability, these stations cannot provide high spatial and temporal resolution in real-time. Although

While vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) have earned the stature of a mobile sensing paradigm utilizing sensors built into cars, they have limited sensing scopes since car drivers only opportunistically discover new events. Conversely, social sensing is emerging as a new sensing paradigm where measurements about the physical world are collected from humans. In contrast to VSNs, social sensing is more

The combination of Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) with Opportunistic Networking (OppNet) allows mobile users to share sensed data easily and conveniently without the use of fixed infrastructure. OppNet is based on intermittent connectivity among wireless mobile devices, in which mobile nodes may store, carry and forward messages (sensing information) by taking advantage of wireless ad hoc communication

The voluminous amount of data generated by individuals’ mobile sensors and wearable devices is considered of a great value for the benefits of patients and clinical research. Recent advances incorporating data mining and cloud computing have leveraged the great potential of these data. However, the introduction of such technologies in the process of mobile crowd sensed data mining and analytics could

The ubiquity of mobile technology has opened the door to the new era of mobile sensing. Through this new paradigm, physical phenomena can be observed in a distributed way, crowd-sourcing the data measurement tasks to smartphones and/or other popular smart wearables. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can hence be employed to gather data and generate new information and services, benefiting

We propose a novel approach for textual input which is based on air-writing recognition using smart-bands. The proposed approach enables the user to hand-write in the air in an intuitive and natural way, where text is recognized by analyzing the motion signals captured by an off-the-shelf smart-band worn by the user. Unlike existing studies that proposed the use of motion signals to recognize written

Knowing in real-time the position of objects and people, both in indoor and outdoor spaces, allows companies and organizations to improve their processes and offer new kind of services. Nowadays Location-based Services (LBS) generate a significant amount of data thank to the widespread of the Internet of Things; since they have been quickly perceived as a potential source of profit, several companies

The increased maturity level of technological achievements towards the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision allowed sophisticated solutions to emerge, offering reliable monitoring in highly dynamic environments that lack well-defined and well-designed infrastructures. In this paper, we use a bio-inspired IoT architecture, which allows flexible creation and discovery of sensor-based services

Small, low-cost, wireless cameras are becoming increasingly commonplace making surreptitious observation of people more difficult to detect. Previous work in detecting hidden cameras has only addressed limited environments in small spaces where the user has significant control of the environment. To address this problem in a less constrained scope of environments, we introduce the concept of similarity

Vehicular Cloud (VC) improves the utilization of idle resources in vehicles by providing data services for other vehicles or entities such as data computing and storage. However, the vehicles in the VC still face privacy and security issues, especially when querying data from the road side unit. To this end, in this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving data query and dissemination scheme

This paper addresses the problem of joint multicast routing, channel selection, scheduling, and call admission control in multi-cell multi-channel multi-radio cognitive radio wireless mesh networks. The applied model relies on the QoS sessions, where each one is expressed with a bandwidth requirement. We propose a cross-layer algorithm named “Multicast Routing, Channel selection, Scheduling, and Call

The high performance of mobile devices has enabled deep learning to be extended to also exploit its strengths on such devices. However, because their computing power is not yet sufficient to perform on-device training, a pre-trained model is usually downloaded to mobile devices, and only inference is performed on them. This situation leads to the problem that accuracy may be degraded if the characteristics

Text input is a very challenging task in the constrained screen real-estate of Augmented Reality headsets. Typical keyboards spread over multiple lines and occupy a significant portion of the screen. In this article, we explore the feasibility of single-line text entry systems for smartglasses. We first design FITE, a dynamic keyboard where the characters are positioned depending on their probability

Sensor-based human activity recognition is to recognise human daily activities through a collection of ambient and wearable sensors. It is the key enabler for many healthcare applications, especially in ambient assisted living. The advance of sensing and communication technologies has driven the deployment of sensors in many residential and care home settings. However, the challenge still resides in

One key challenge for sensor networks is to provide the real-time high reliable sensor measurements with the minimum resource consumption. Outlier clearance in sensor networks can ensure the quality of sensor measurements and dependable monitoring. In this paper, we propose two online distributed outlier clearance approaches with low computational complexity and memory usage that can identify and remove

One important promise of the blockchain technology is the concept of smart contracts. They offer means for the secure execution of procedures that no entity can manipulate. This enables applications like the automation of business processes, i.e. entire business relationships in peer-to-peer collaborations can be automated securely. While the blockchain guarantees proper execution it assures the correctness

Sensitive inferences and user re-identification are major threats to privacy when raw sensor data from wearable or portable devices are shared with cloud-assisted applications. To mitigate these threats, we propose mechanisms to transform sensor data before sharing them with applications running on users’ devices. These transformations aim at eliminating patterns that can be used for user re-identification

The capacity and coverage needs of 5G NR (New Radio) networks are satisfied by deploying a high number of small cells in the coverage area of a macro cell. In 5G Dual Connectivity (DC), these small cells are represented as eNBs with 4G characteristics different from the macro cells which are the 5G NR gNBs. The mobile node (MN) can establish a connection with these cells in different technologies at

While activity recognition has been shown to be valuable for pervasive computing applications, less work has focused on techniques for forecasting the future occurrence of activities. We present an activity forecasting method to predict the time that will elapse until a target activity occurs. This method generates an activity forecast using a regression tree classifier and offers an advantage over

Pervasive computing offers an unprecedented opportunity to unobtrusively monitor behavior and use the large amount of collected data to perform analysis of activity-based behavioral patterns. In this paper, we introduce the notion of an activity curve, which represents an abstraction of an individual's normal daily routine based on automatically-recognized activities. We propose methods to detect changes

Time series subsequence matching has importance in a variety of areas in healthcare informatics. These include case-based diagnosis and treatment as well as discovery of trends among patients. However, few medical systems employ subsequence matching due to high computational and memory complexities. This manuscript proposes a randomized Monte Carlo sampling method to broaden search criteria with minimal

This work describes an automatic method to recognize the position of an accelerometer worn on five different parts of the body: ankle, thigh, hip, arm and wrist from raw accelerometer data. Automatic detection of body position of a wearable sensor would enable systems that allow users to wear sensors flexibly on different body parts or permit systems that need to automatically verify sensor placement

Many real-world applications that focus on addressing needs of a human, require information about the activities being performed by the human in real-time. While advances in pervasive computing have lead to the development of wireless and non-intrusive sensors that can capture the necessary activity information, current activity recognition approaches have so far experimented on either a scripted or

In this paper, we present a technique to recognize the position of sensors on the human body. Automatic on-body device localization ensures correctness and accuracy of measurements in health and medical monitoring systems. In addition, it provides opportunities to improve the performance and usability of ubiquitous devices. Our technique uses accelerometers to capture motion data to estimate the location

Work towards the development of a handheld health counseling agent designed to promote physical activity is described. Previous work on automated health counselors is discussed, along with the affordances of mobility and context awareness for health behavior interventions. We present a general-purpose software architecture for the rapid design and deployment of mobile health counseling agents. We also