Pervasive systems

Sapere project comes to a successful end

Over the past three years the School has been involved in the Sapere project, funded by the European Commission. Sapere has been looking at new ways to build large-scale pervasive systems, moving away from traditional client/server approaches to explore biochemically-inspired system models in which services and users can “bond” spontaneously as they encounter each other in the real world. Sapere was co-ordinated by the University of Modena Reggio Emilia and — as well as St Andrews — involved the University of Bologna, University of Geneva, and Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Sapere had its final review this week and was ranked as “excellent … the project has even exceeded expectations”.

The project achieved considerable visibility by being deployed at the Vienna City Marathon to provide services including runner tracking and guiding spectators to possible viewing opportunities. The deployment had several thousands users downloading and using a smartphone app throughout the event, as well as several large attention-sensing public displays that responded directly to people stopping to look at them.

The scientific highlights of Sapere include developing a formal model of spontaneous interactions; building a middleware platform based on these ideas; developing a catalogue of useful patterns that describe co-ordinated interactions at a high level; and creating several exciting new algorithms for context awareness and situation recognition. This last activity was led from St Andrews by Simon Dobson, Juan Ye, and Graeme Stevenson, and allowed us to recognise activities going on in “busy” spaces where multiple things are happening simultaneously — a problem that has been extremely resistant to solution until now.

Sapere shows that pervasive systems are now “ready for prime time,” and that even research that seems highly speculative and challenging can lead to results that affect people’s lives directly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with our collaborators, and we’ll certainly be looking to take these ideas forward in new projects and directions.

Here’s a non-technical overview video introducing Sapere:

 

System Seminar: Understanding Ethical Concerns in Social Media Privacy Studies, by Luke Hutton, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Understanding privacy in social network sites (SNSs) is an area of intense interest in computer science and many other fields. The ethical considerations of such research are numerous and complicated. Our position is that understanding how to address such considerations will improve measurement, and therefore our understanding, of networked social privacy.

In this talk we discuss some empirical work that we have conducted to replicate two existing studies in an attempt to understand SNS users’ privacy concerns about sharing data with researchers, rather than with other SNS users. We will introduce an architecture we are developing to support the execution of privacy-aware social network studies. Finally, we will discuss some of the outstanding challenges in this space, including the difficulty of establishing meaningful cross-study metrics, whether we can apply Nissenbaum’s model of contextual integrity to minimise ethical concerns, and the implications of our results for sharing social network data with other researchers.

Bio of the Speaker:

Luke Hutton is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Tristan Henderson. His research aims to improve understanding of people’s privacy-preserving behaviour through the lens of contextual integrity, with user studies leveraging social network sites, location-based services, and ubiquitous computing environments. Additionally, his research explores the methodological challenges associated with research of this nature, developing tools to support the conduct of privacy-aware social network experiments.

Event details

  • When: 12th February 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers

Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions: