Abstract Notifications provide a unique mechanism for increasing the effectiveness of real-time information delivery systems. However, notifications that demand users' attention at inopportune mome...

Fueled by falling display hardware costs and rising demand, digital signage and pervasive displays are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Such systems have traditionally been used for advertising and information dissemination, with digital signage commonplace in shopping malls, airports and public spaces. While advertising and broadcasting announcements remain important applications, developments in sensing and interaction technologies are enabling entirely new classes of display applications that tailor content to the situation and audience of the display. As a result, signage systems are beginning to transition from simple broadcast systems to rich platforms for communication and interaction. In this lecture, we provide an introduction to this emerging field for researchers and practitioners interested in creating state-of-the-art pervasive display systems. We begin by describing the history of pervasive display research, providing illustrations of key systems, from pioneering work on supporting collaboration to contemporary systems designed for personalized information delivery. We then consider what the near future might hold for display networks -- describing a series of compelling applications that are being postulated for future display networks. Creating such systems raises a wide range of challenges and requires designers to make a series of important trade-offs. We dedicate four chapters to key aspects of pervasive display design: audience engagement, display interaction, system software, and system evaluation. These chapters provide an overview of current thinking in each area. Finally, we present a series of case studies of display systems and our concluding remarks.

This lecture provides an introduction to cyber foraging, a topic that lies at the intersection of mobile and cloud computing. Cyber foraging dynamically augments the computing resources of mobile computers by opportunistically exploiting fixed computing infrastructure in the surrounding environment. In a cyber foraging system, applications functionality is dynamically partitioned between the mobile computer and infrastructure servers that store data and execute computation on behalf of mobile users. The location of application functionality changes in response to user mobility, platform characteristics, and variation in resources such as network bandwidth and CPU load. Cyber foraging also introduces a new, surrogate computing tier that lies between mobile users and cloud data centers. Surrogates are wired, infrastructure servers that offer much greater computing resources than those offered by small, battery-powered mobile devices. Surrogates are geographically distributed to be as cl se as possible to mobile computers so that they can provide substantially better response time to network requests than that provided by servers in cloud data centers. For instance, surrogates may be co-located with wireless hotspots in coffee shops, airport lounges, and other public locations. This lecture first describes how cyber foraging systems dynamically partition data and computation. It shows how dynamic partitioning can often yield better performance, energy efficiency, and application quality than static thin-client or thick-client approaches for dividing functionality between cloud and mobile computers. The lecture then describes the design of the surrogate computing tier. It shows how strong isolation can enable third-party computers to host computation and store data on behalf of nearby mobile devices. It then describes how surrogates can provide reasonable security and privacy guarantees to the mobile computers that use them. The lecture concludes with a discussion of d ta staging, in which surrogates temporarily store data in transit between cloud servers and mobile computers in order to improve transfer bandwidth and energy efficiency. Table of Contents: Introduction / Partitioning / Management / Security and Privacy / Data Staging / Challenges and Opportunities

Mobile platform development has lately become a technological war zone with extremely dynamic and fluid movement, especially in the smart phone and tablet market space. This Synthesis lecture is a guide to the latest developments of the key mobile platforms that are shaping the mobile platform industry. The book covers the three currently dominant native platforms -- iOS, Android and Windows Phone -- along with the device-agnostic HTML5 mobile web platform. The lecture also covers location-based services (LBS) which can be considered as a platform in its own right. The lecture utilizes a sample application (TwitterSearch) that the authors show programmed on each of the platforms. Audiences who may benefit from this lecture include: (1) undergraduate and graduate students taking mobile computing classes or self-learning the mobile platform programmability road map; (2) academic and industrial researchers working on mobile computing RD (3) mobile app developers for a specific platform who may be curious about other platforms; (4) system integrator consultants and firms concerned with mobilizing businesses and enterprise apps; and (5) industries including health care, logistics, mobile workforce management, mobile commerce and payment systems and mobile search and advertisement.

This Synthesis Lecture presents a discussion of Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless networks over unlicensed spectrum. The topic is presented from the point of view of protocols for wireless networks (e.g., 802.11) rather than the physical layer point of view usually discussed for cellular networks in the licensed wireless spectrum. A large number of mobile multimedia wireless applications are being deployed over WiFi (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth wireless networks and the number will increase in the future as more phones, tablets, and laptops are equipped with these unlicensed spectrum wireless interfaces.

This lecture presents a first compendium of established and emerging standards in pervasive computing systems. The lecture explains the role of each of the covered standards and explains the relationship and interplay among them. Hopefully, the lecture will help piece together the various standards into a sensible and clear landscape. The lecture is a digest, reorganization, and a compilation of several short articles that have been published in the “Standards and Emerging Technologies” department of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. The articles have been edited and shortened or expanded to provide the necessary focus and uniform coverage depth.

Testing applications for mobile phones is difficult, time-consuming, and hard to do effectively. Many people have limited their testing efforts to hands-on testing of an application on a few physical handsets, and they have to repeat the process every time a new version of the software is ready to test. They may miss many of the permutations of real-world use, and as a consequence their users are left with the unpleasant mess of a failing application on their phone. Test automation can help to increase the range and scope of testing, while reducing the overhead of manual testing of each version of the software. However automation is not a panacea, particularly for mobile applications, so we need to pick our test automation challenges wisely. This book is intended to help software and test engineers pick appropriately to achieve more; and as a consequence deliver better quality, working software to users. This Synthesis lecture provides practical advice based on direct experience of using software test automation to help improve the testing of a wide range of mobile phone applications, including the latest AJAX applications. The focus is on applications that rely on a wireless network connection to a remote server, however the principles may apply to other related fields and applications. We start by explaining terms and some of the key challenges involved in testing smartphone applications. Subsequent chapters describe a type of application e.g. markup, AJAX, Client, followed by a related chapter on how to test each of these applications. Common test automation techniques are covered in a separate chapter, and finally there is a brief chapter on when to test manually. The book also contains numerous pointers and links to further material to help you to improve your testing using automation appropriately.

Advances in electronic location technology and the coming of age of mobile computing have opened the door for location-aware applications to permeate all aspects of everyday life. Location is at the c