Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Pervasive services

Abstract

On behalf of the organizing committee of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS 2008), we are pleased to welcome you to Sorrento, Italy. This is the 5th ICPS and it has become one of the premier conferences to bring together researchers from all over the world to meet, discuss and collaborate to bring about our collective vision of a Pervasive Computing reality. Our aim is to create systems and tools that are ubiquitously and unobtrusively embedded into our very environment. To achieve this we require systems combining connectivity, intuitiveness, effortlessness and reliability bringing us many exciting research challenges. This vision of pervasive systems has brought about a paradigm shift in computer science, as well as other areas of research such as electronic engineering, building architecture, bio-engineering and even the arts. This inter-disciplinary effort has reemphasised older topics in the area of autonomy, ad hoc networking, user-interfacing, security etc and bring a focus to new topics such as context-awareness, self-management, smart objects, smart spaces and energy efficiency. We hope you agree that ICPS 08 reflects this vibrancy. ICPS 2008 is sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP) and Consorizio Interuniversitario Nazionale per L'Informatica. The proceedings, published by the ACM, constitute the 17 full papers, 8 short papers, 4 workshops, demo and poster sessions all presented by people from over 17 countries world wide. There continues to be a strong body of research focusing on Middleware support for pervasive and mobile computing. Here we see Service Oriented Architectures amongst others, handling decentralisation and heterogeneity of not only sensor devices but the more recent advances in actuator technology. The very nature of a pervasive computing brings issues of trust and engagement to the fore and these are covered in the Security services and Mobile Computing sections. In particular we examine data management and routing for these devices and how we would handle multiple identities in ubiquity. Environments & algorithms for pervasive application development presents two sessions including the areas of location and context-awareness from the point of view of transport navigation, multi-sensor systems, as well as smart museum and home spaces. We also see context-awareness and adaptivity for improved performance in the Middleware support and Wireless & Sensor Networks section. Finally, our Pervasive computing and Management session encompasses context uncertainty and fault detection.