Research Projects

National Chengchi University (2014-now)

MOST=Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan NSTC=National Science and Technology Council

NSTC Project: Supporting Distributed Multi-Level Isolation Transactions in MQTT based on Coordination Kernel

PI, 2023.8 - 2024.7

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a popular industrial standard that specifies a message-oriented application layer protocol designed for the publish/subscribe style of communications among IoT devices. Because of the nature of the message-oriented architectural style, MQTT systems are flexible and robust. However, the architectural style also brings challenges to the design of distributed transactions on MQTT. A transaction refers to a unit of work groping a set of operations, where these operations are either all committed or aborted. Also, ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) properties must be ensured when processing transactions. Compared to the traditional RPC-based distributed transaction technology, there is little literature that focuses on this topic and the queued transaction technology is less mature and incomplete. We have identified several research issues (mainly isolation issues) based on the findings of the previous project on MQTT transactions. The objective of this proposal is to deal with the isolation issues by introducing the concept of a “Coordination Kernel.” The research results will be implemented as a prototype system and design cases/scenarios to be referenced by future researchers or industry R&D teams. We will also conduct a set of experiments on the performance of transaction processing based on the prototype system.

NSTC Project: WeBLE: Interoperable Management Schemes for BLE Devices as Web of Things

PI, 2022.8 - 2023.7

Web of Things (WoT) refers to a “Web-ify” Internet of Things (IoT) environment designed based entirely on the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture, where all devices have URIs that can be used not only for addressing but also for interacting with the resources. The main reason for applying the WoT concept to an IoT system is to take advantage of the well-developed Web technologies as well as the high flexibility and scalability of the Web. Meanwhile, although BLE is a widely adopted non-IP network protocol, developing BLE systems is not easy for most application developers. This project proposes a mechanism to transparently weave BLE devices into the WoT environment, called WeBLE (Web of BLE devices), so that the application developers can access and manage BLE services the same way as they are accessing WoT services, reducing the development efforts and management burden. WeBLE can be searched, managed, and accessed by WoT applications on IP networks through the WeBLE Gateway. During the research period of the project, we will focus on the two main issues: Findability and Accessibility. The research team will explore the design mechanisms including internal and external service management, directory services, IP-BLE address mapping, service mapping, and call forwarding, etc. We will implement the design prototype and conduct experiments to verify the design. The outcome of this project can be a baseline reference for researchers or R&D teams of related topics.

MOST Project: "Freeperson" program – The Digital-twins machine

Co-PI, 2022.1 - 2023.12

“Surveillance capitalism” have human unconsciously become lost the freedom to be human. People believe that they can operate a machine under will. Yet, the logic of surveillance capitalism and instrumentarianism power actually has controlled people's behavior in an illegible way and has people become lost their solid sense of self. The implications of this project include the true reflection of society and the age of surveillance capitalism, and the realization of the politics of space in cyberspace. Two ways of this project are being investigated. One of them is to explore “the politics of space” in cyberspace, the other is to explore the “body politics” of virtual reality. This project is divided into three subprojects. I am in charge of the sub-project 3:Implementation of “The Digital-twins machine”: key technology in software engineering. As the hardware and software complexity of Technology Art creation increases, the artists need to invest a considerable amount of time and resources to complete their creations. When time and resources are limited, the artists can only modify their original design, resulting in the sacrifice of creativity. As a result, this sub-project focuses on seeking the general solutions for the software engineering challenges that emerge from the process of realizing these artworks. After the initial analysis of the experimental prototypes constructed by the project team, we will develop three technologies, namely “Systematic Planning of Mixed Media Streaming,” “Multi-Modal Integration System,” and “Monitoring and Maintenance of Decentralized Art Installations,” during the three-year project period to assist in the realization of the creative works proposed by Subproject 1.

MOST Project: MQTT Extensions for Multi-mode Transactions in Smart Environments

PI, 2021.8 - 2022.7

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a message-oriented communication protocol designed for IoT devices. From the perspective of software architecture, MQTT adopts the Message-Oriented architectural style, which decouples temporal and spatial relationships among messaging endpoints. On one hand, the decoupling enhances system flexibility and robustness, on the other hand, decoupling brings challenges to the design of message-oriented transactions. Compared to the general RPC-based distributed transaction technology, there is little literature that focuses on this topic and the message-oriented transaction technology is less mature and incomplete. The objective of this proposal is therefore to propose a flexible message-oriented transaction scheme for IoT environments. Specifically, in response to the variation of device capability in IoT environments, we propose a multi-mode approach to support different situations. Also, to improve the versatility of the design, the scheme will be built based on MQTT 5. The research results will be implemented as a prototype system and design cases/scenarios to be referenced by future researchers or industry R&D teams.

MOST Project: MQTT Extensions for End-to-End Guaranteed Message Delivery in Smart Environments

PI, 2020.8 - 2021.10

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), a message-oriented application layer protocol designed for limited network bandwidth and resource-constrained devices, has received considerable attention and is widely adopted in the Internet of Things industry and the smart environments. The QoS (Quality of Service) mechanism of MQTT facilitates the applications to dynamically change the strategy of transmission impromptu. However, instead of end-to-end delivery guarantee, the QoS mechanism in the current version of MQTT only ensures the quality of delivery among the broker and endpoints. Besides, there is no way for the publishing endpoints to get the results of delivery. Also, the specification does not address the messaging retain policy when an endpoint is reconnected. The problems mentioned above lead to an unstable MQTT system and make the applications hard to debug. This proposal aims to deal with the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we extend MQTT (without modifying the packet format) so that it supports end-to-end guarantee delivery, receipt acknowledgment, and recovery mechanisms for the re-connect endpoints. Finally, the research results will be implemented as a prototype system and design cases/scenarios to be referenced by future researchers or industry R&D teams.

MOST Project: Service Management Schemes based on mDNS/DNS-SD for Web of Things in the Smart Home

PI, 2019.8 - 2020.7

Due to the popularity of the Web, Web and related technologies have a profound impact on the research and development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Environments. Consequently, the concept of WoT (Web of Things) emerges by combining the Web, REST (Representational State Transfer), and IoT. Similar to other service-oriented systems, it is also essential to manage and coordinate software and hardware components dynamically. Among the existing service management mechanisms, the mDNS/DNS-SD specification developed by the IETF is considered to be promising as a service management mechanism for WoT, because it extends the DNS packet format and mechanisms and can be used without additional configuration of other system components. Also, the encoding scheme of DNS is relatively compact and thus requires less memory. However, mDNS/DNS-SD lacks many core service management functions such as service description and service invocation. Besides, the query mechanism in DNS-SD in inflexible and inefficient. As a result, this project aims to propose an integrated solution to deal with the problems mentioned above. We are going to design a mechanism that embeds the W3C WTM standard into DNS-SD, provides service access based on the REST principle to implement WoT service invocation mechanism, and develop flexible preference expression service search. Finally, we are going to optimize the performance of interactions among service components and verify the functionality, performance and practical feasibility through experiments and application scenarios. Finally, the research results will be implemented as a prototype system and design cases/scenarios to be referenced by future researchers or industry R&D teams.

MOST Project: Horizontal Service Integration Gateway Architectures for Connecting Low Power and Lossy Network Endpoints and MQTT Brokers

PI, 2018.8 - 2019.7

Recently, Data-centric and MOM (Message-Oriented Middleware) architectural styles have been widely adopted when designing Pervasive systems and IoT (Internet of Things) applications. As a result, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), a compact and efficient data exchange protocol for devices with limited computing capability and network bandwidth, receives considerable attention both in academia and industry. A Pervasive system relies on environmental data collected by the wireless sensors inter-connected by LLN (Low-power and Lossy Networks). Appearently, the data must be transferred from LLN to the IP network. Apparently, a gateway is the key to cope with the impedance mismatch between heterogeneous networks. In this project, we propose two architectures, namely, the Generic Gateway Integration and the Customized Gateway Integration for dealing with common issues when designing MQTT-LLN gateways. Specifically, we will investigate the efficient mechanisms for gateway discovery and binding, adapting MQTT protocol features, and deal with the issues caused by transmitting data between MQTT and LLN. The proposed designs will be realized as reference implementations of MQTT-LLN gateway prototypes. Validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MOST Project: Toward a RESTful Smart Home Service Operations Management Mechanism

PI, 2017.8 - 2018.7

Until recently, Smart Home technologies are still not widely deployed in most people’s living spaces. The main reason is that operations management mechanisms for Smart Home such as remote deployment, monitoring, and maintenance are not well-studied and only a few attempts have so far been made toward this aspect. CWMP, proposed by Broadband Forum, is a promising standard for realizing a Smart Home operations management platform. Last year, we investigated critical real-world operations issues of Smart Home, namely, newly installed, module purchasing and download, service starting, service update, service diagnosis, failure recovery, usage statistics, and billing. Based on these experiences, several design issues, namely, poor performance and scalability, poor domain model design and inappropriate web callback architecture, have been identified. The objective of this proposal is, therefore, to deal with the issues mentioned above by suggesting a set of new ways to design CWMP functionalities. The overall approach is based on the RESTful architectural style. Finally, the proposed designs will be realized as an operations management platform prototype. Validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MOST Project: Technical Strengthening and Promotion of Wearable Interactive Performance Platform

Co-PI, 2017.8 - 2020.7

As technology progresses, various types of wearable devices have surfaced in recent years and found practical applications in different areas. In a previous 3-year project titled “Interactive Performance Using Wearable Devices: Technology and Innovative Applications”, we have applied wearable technologies to assist the design and implementation of digital interactive performance from different perspectives, including platform infrastructure, network communication, interface design, and application development. Three different categories of interactive performances, namely, concert, dance and mobile virtual reality, have been conducted from 2015 to 2016. All performances have received positive acclaims. However, the tools that we have developed are not yet readily available to directors or performers with little background in computer hardware/software. In this project, we propose to extend and promote our previous research results by constructing a user-friendly platform that integrated essential components for scripting digital interactive performances with low entry barrier. The integrated tool, along with the instruction materials, will be tested and validated by arranging experiments in selected elementary or junior high schools.

MOST Project: Research and Development of Key Technologies for Blcokchain Payment Network

Co-PI, 2017.6 - 2020.5

The importance of blockchain technologies and applications has been mounting rapidly in recent years. In light of this trend, we are going to work with Fubon Financial Holding Co., a domestic pioneer in this field, to develop critical technologies and tools of blockchain technologies and applications. First, we aim to improve the transaction throughput of the blockchain in a permissioned system. In such system, it is reasonable to consider faults weaker than Byzantine fault so that we can design more efficient consensus protocols. Meanwhile, we will design a distributed fault detection algorithm. Due to the nature of permissioned consensus protocols like PBFT, the less the number of faulty nodes is, the better the throughput is. However, most of the permissioned consensus protocols have assumptions on the number of faulty nodes. Hence, after the number of faulty nodes decreases, these assumptions can be further refined. Finally, we will design a public benchmark to evaluate the performance of various consensus protocols. Second, from a software engineering's perspective, the developers of blockchain applications are burdened with too many complicated and duplicated tasks. Because of the lack of architectural design guideline, most of the current on-chain and off-chain components are integrated based on an ad hoc style causing architectures to be inflexible and insecure. Also, there still no complete solution for integrating testing. As a result, we will design a middleware for managing smart contracts so that the development of blockchain applications is easier than before. Next, we will investigate the impacts of NFRs based on different architectural styles so that we can come up with a helpful design guideline of blockchain applications. Finally, we will design a set of automatic integration testing tools for smart contracts. In the financial market, we cannot afford to waste a single minute. The advantages and convenience of digital currencies such as bitcoin are difficult to be replaced by cash. However, in most countries, Bitcoin is not a fiat money. It is a dilemma to take into account the privacy of users and the monitoring of financial transactions to prevent illegal transactions such as money laundering. On the other hand, Know Your Customer (KYC) also plays a major role in financial services. Thus, we plan to design a cryptocurrency basing on the blockchain and several cryptographic technologies.

MOST Project: Design and Implementation of Core Operations Technologies for Smart Home Service Providers

PI, 2016.8 - 2017.7

The vision of Smart Home has been depicted clearly in 1995 by Bill Gates and the technologies that facilitate Smart Home services have also been researched and developed for over 20 years. Nevertheless, these technologies are still not widely deployed in most people’s living spaces. The main reason is that operations management such as remote deployment, monitoring, and maintenance are not well studied and developed, and only few attempts have so far been made toward this aspect. Moreover, most of the related works either focuses solely on home-related or on service-provider-side-related issues. In this project we aim to investigate six most critical real-world operations issues of Smart Home, namely, newly installed, module purchasing and download, service starting, service update, service diagnosis, failure recovery, usage statistics and billing. The proposed approaches will be realized in a real home network. Formal validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MOST Project: A state-aware TAP language extension for end-user programming in smart home

Co-PI, 2016.8 - 2017.7

In recent years, with all kinds of embedded computing and sensing device miniaturization, we are able to have the device of a variety of embedded computing power in everyday items, furniture and household appliances. The so-called Smart Home vision is now considered practical gradually. As a result, the programming models and tools for Smart Home are also emerging on the research agenda for software researchers these days. Among other things, trigger-action programming (TAP) is a simple yet popular programming model that enables users to create rules that automate behavior of smart homes, devices, and online services. However, existing TAP systems trade expressivity for simplicity and thus lack the capability to support state manipulation often required in Smart Home context. In this two-year project, we aim to develop a state-aware TAP tool (S-TAP) by combining the approach of domain-specific languages and end-user programming. In the first year, we shall design and implement S-TAP in software using the functional language Haskell and the functional reactive programming library, Reactive Banana. The main goal is to explore the design space of S-TAP to get a balance between expressivity and ease of use. In the second year, we shall develop a programming environment for S-TAP that facilitates end-user programming via a drag-and-drop S-TAP rule editor and an execution engine. Besides, we shall also build a testing environment with a middleware that coordinates the interaction between our execution engine and external embedded device to demonstrate the feasibility of S-TAP.

MOST Project: Innovative Mobile Living Technology for Dementia Care

Co-PI, 2015.8 - 2018.7

The number of dementia patients increases rapidly in Taiwan recently. Dementia has great impact on personal healthy, families’ and the national economy. Caregivers have to not only care daily living and social functioning of patients, but also to respond to the individual and demand of patients. As a result, caregivers are usually exhausted due to the pressure and burden of dementia patients. Based on the above observations, we propose an innovative dementia care environment to reduce the high cost of caring for dementia patients and also reduce the burden on caregivers. The proposed system integrates mobile technology, smart home, and robotics technology to provide the patients demand analysis and automatic living assistance. It monitors the patient’s activities and analyzes the degree of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. In addition, it also infers which devices give patient service better by using heuristic optimization algorithm. Smart appliances and a robot can interact with patients to reduce the burden on caregivers so that they can cooperatively enhance the quality of life of both dementia patients and caregivers. Next, we also provide a platform for collecting personal living and social information. We focus on establishing a personalized social environment by technology-mediated social support intervention service for the elderly with dementia. We will implement a wearable device to detect physical functions of the elderly and provide rehabilitative suggestions. By collecting and analyzing all kind of social data, we will build a personal social interaction model for dementia patients. Dementia patient often has bad memory, and the discontinuous memory causes the generation of repeating behavior. Therefore, we also propose a wearable device with embedded camera that allows patients to record their daily lives with first-person view. The system detects their behaviors and the changes of scenarios, and creates their personal diaries by capturing images. The record helps to delay the process of memory loss and enhances the connectivity of memories. Through behavior recognition, the system also identifies the common events among dementia patients. Facing gradual degradation course of the dementia, caregivers often report heavy care burden, poor quality of life, and physical and psychological symptoms. Care burden can be affected by individual and interpersonal factors. Due to the emphasis on family relationship, family members may perceive various degrees of stress as a result of different familial roles and sense of filial obligations. However, the emphasis on the cultural value of family harmony and enhancement of connection between family members may cultivate, and be affected by as well, psychological resilience and positive response when coping with care burden that they have experienced. In particular, given that technology-based interventions have been found to be effective to reduce the burden of dementia caregiver, the aims of this study will investigate whether technology-based interventions will influence family resilience and in turns whether intervention effect may be resulted from the promotion of family resilience. It is expected that the psychological processing of family facing dementia patient in Taiwan as well as the intervention effect of mobile technology on mental health of dementia caregiver can be deliberately understood through qualitative and quantitative analyses in the present study. To sum up, the objective of this project is therefore to develop innovative mobile technologies that assist both dementia patients and caregivers. More concretely, we want to develop mobile technologies that “observe”, “aware”, “empathize”, “prevent crisis” and “promote doing health behavior of patients with dementia”. By constructing smart healthcare environment and by recording the view with first-person perspective camera. In addition, we also propose a social care information platform to assist dementia patient. Our research results are able to reduce the pressure and cost of caring to patients with dementia and improve the quality of life of patients with dementia. Finally, we also investigate “sense of obligation” and “family resilience” that may cause impact to families care dementia patient in order to further understand whether development of mobile technology really improves quality of lives of the caregivers and patients with dementia.

MOST Project: Design and Implementation of the Bootstrapping and Robust Service Management Mechanism of a Smart Home System: a Hybrid Architecture

PI, 2015.8 - 2016.7

We can perceive the advent of the Smart Environments attributed to rapid emerging of embedded and tiny intelligent devices and sensors. However, due to the significant complexity of deployment and maintenance efforts, the degree of market acceptance is still low. Specifically, there is little research addressing the robustness and failsafe issues for Smart Home systems. Consequently, the research paradigm in this field has been migrating from prototyping smart homes to daily maintenance issues in real-world scenarios. In this project, we aim to investigate two of the most critical real-world issues of Smart Home deployment, namely, the bootstrapping and robustness of the system. We propose a bootstrapping procedure and an enhanced hybrid failure detection and recovery architecture. These schemes will be realized based on a popular service management protocol in home network, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). Formal validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MOST Project: Developing a Scala-Based Functional Reactive Domain-Specific Language for Programming Smart Environments

Co-PI, 2015.8 - 2016.7

In recent years, with the rapid development of ICT technology, all kinds of embedded computing and sensing device miniaturization, we were able to have the device of a variety of embedded computing power in everyday items, furniture and household appliances. These miniature-sensing devices can sense the environment and user-related information to form the so-called context. With the context information, we can develop application systems that will infer from the context the presumed intention of the user to provide appropriate services, thus forming the so-called context-aware smart environment. However, due to the distributed and concurrent nature of the devices operating in a smart environment, it is not easy to develop such context-aware applications using traditional imperative programming. Developers have to deal with many complex issues such as asynchronous events and temporal requirements, which are tedious and error-prone. Indeed, many researchers have proposed to follow the reactive programming style to develop applications for smart environments. This project aims to develop a Scala-based domain-specific reactive language for programming smart environments that supports functional reactive programming. In this project, we shall first formulate the domain-specific abstractions appropriate for programming smart environments based on functional reactive programming. Then we shall implement these domain abstractions and their associated operations into Scala using language-embedding techniques, thus resulting in a domain-specific embedding language (DSEL) in Scala. In the meantime, we shall also develop a middle-level facility based on Scala Akka library to provide the interface between our language and the underlying smart environments that works as a simulation environment for our project. Finally, we shall implement a few applications using sensors on top of the simulation environment to demonstrate and evaluate our language and its facilities.

MOST Project: Novel Applications and Key Technologies Development of 3D Printing in Elementary and High School Education

Co-PI, 2014.11 - 2017.11

The surging wave of maker movement enthused by technological advances in 3D printing has gained the attention of policy makers around the globe. Publics sectors are beginning to invest in additive manufacturing to bring access of these tools to their citizens and secure a leading position in customized fabrication. One fascinating nature of 3D printing is the low entry barrier for personalized design and creation of artifacts. The decreasing cost of printers and materials has unleashed the creativity of designers and average users alike, making self-fabrication an affordable, enjoyable and educational activity. Introducing 3D printing technology to the classroom is now a consensus among educators and government officials. The current tools available on the market, however, are not designed for educational purposes in classroom settings. A stable software platform with low maintenance cost and friendly user interface should be devised to suit the needs of the target users: middle and elementary students. Toward this objective, we have formed an interdisciplinary research team comprised of experts from computer science and instructional technology. Our mission is to design and implement an integrated solution consisting of the following components: 3D scanning, intuitive 3D modeling, editing and merging, model searching, file sharing, 3D caricature generation and 3D printing. Curriculum will be created and activities will be planned according to the functionalities provided by our platform. We will perform user study and gather feedback and comments during the field test phase. The results of user evaluation will be utilized to improve interface design and enhance usability. The software tools and teaching materials developed in this project will be released to the public at no cost in the hope that they can become active catalysts for accelerating the widespread adoption of 3D additive manufacturing curriculum in our educational systems.

MOST Project: Interactive Performance Using Wearable Devices: Technology and Innovative Applications

Co-PI, 2014.9 - 2017.7

It is commonly agreed that Taiwan’s performance art and culture industry is in the leading position of the Chinese culture area. However, the position is being challenged in recent years due to the raise of China’s culture industry and the lack of economies of scale in the domestic market. Because of the popularity of digital technologies, the sale of sound records is significantly decreased. On the other hand, concert-like performance has become the main source of profits of the performance art and culture industry. In traditional concerts, the audiences play passive roles since they just sit and watch the performance. However, in modern concerts, interacting with the audience has become one of the critical factors of a successful performance. Recent trends suggest that wearable computing technologies can be massively used to promote the degree of interaction and to make a performance more attractive. For instance, motion capture technologies have been widely used in accurately capturing the postures of performers in the movie, game and computer animation industries. More recently, some researchers also propose to use wearable computing devices in the real-time interactive performance. Taking the opening show of the 2014 Winter Olympics for an instance, the dancers wear a lot of sensing devices which fit them to the background snow leopard animation characters. To sum up, the objective of this project is to investigate the approaches that are able to combine wearable computing technologies with the digital interactive performance from the platform, network, interface, and application’s perspectives. The results of this project are able to help Taiwan’s performance art and culture industry to survive and success in the keen competition.

MOST Project: Design and Implementation of a Resource-Oriented Plug-and-Play Service Administration Protocol for Smart Environments

PI, 2014.8 - 2015.7

A Pervasive-computing-enriched smart environment, which contains hundreds of embedded and tiny intelligent devices and sensors coordinated by service management mechanisms, is capable of anticipating intensions of occupants and providing appropriate services accordingly. Although there is a wealth of research achievements in recent years, the degree of market acceptance is still low. The main reason is that most of the devices and services in such environments depend on specific platform or technology, making it hard to develop an application by composing the devices or services. Meanwhile, the concept of Web of Things (WoT) is becoming popular recently. Based on WoT, the developers are able to build applications based on well-known web tools or technologies. Consequently, the objective of this project is to design and to implement a WoT-driven service management mechanism for a small scale smart environment. Formal validations and experiments will also be conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We expect that the results of this project can be a solid foundation of realizing the vision of “end user programmable smart environments”.

MOST Project: Theory and Practice of SQL Rewriting for Multi-tenant SaaS Applications

Co-PI, 2014.8 - 2015.7

Software as a service (SaaS) is an emerging service model of cloud computing. Its central defining characteristic is the ability for clients to use a software application on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis. However, to be economically sustainable, a SaaS application must leverage resource sharing to a large degree by accommodating different clients of the application while making it appear to each that they have the application all to themselves. In other words, a SaaS application must be a multi-tenant application. There are many facets in the design of multi-tenant SaaS applications. In this project, we focus on developing multi-tenant data architecture that not only enables sharing database among tenants but also allows tenants to customize their table schema, which is a non-trivial task. A general approach to support such architecture is a middleware-level facility that supports the mapping of multiple single-tenant logical schemas in the application to one multi-tenant physical schema in the database. We follow this approach and propose to develop a SQL rewriting mechanism that can transparently transform tenant-specific logical queries into corresponding physical queries for Universal Table, a widely adopted and industry verified schema-mapping technique. Our SQL rewriting rules will be formalized in terms of standard operations in relation algebra so that it will be easy to formulate analytical complexity metrics for predicting the overhead of schema mapping in the engine. We shall conduct a series of performance experiments to evaluate the proposed schemes. The performance results will be compared with the analytical complexity results derived from the formalized SQL rewriting rules. Besides, as object-relational mapping (ORM) tools are the mainstream tools in application development, we shall integrate our SQL rewriting engine into an open source ORM tool to form a data management framework for multi-tenant SaaS applications. A salient feature of this framework will be the support of user customization of domain. Finally, we shall develop a multi-tenant SaaS application using our framework to demonstrate our approach. Performance overhead of this application will also be measured and reported.

Feng Chia University (2012-2014)

NSC Project: Temporal and Causal Stream-Oriented Complex Event Analysis in Smart Environments

PI, 2013.8 - 2014.7

A Pervasive-computing-enriched smart environment, which contains hundreds of embedded and tiny intelligent devices and sensors coordinated by “service management mechanisms”, is capable of anticipating intensions of occupants and providing appropriate services accordingly. Based on the experiences of realizing several real-world smart environments, it is observed that to acquire high-level contexts, the key to provide attentive services such as human activities, usually involves analyzing and identifying “causality” and “temporal ordering” relationships among a bulk stream of sensor readings. Besides, there are relatively few researchers in this field investigating the issue. We notice that Complex Event Processing (CEP) useful for dealing with the issues mentioned above. From CEP’s point of view, incoming sensor data is a stream of events, the logical units for analyzing and transforming events form a Complex-event Processing Network (CPN). In this project, we aim to investigate both theoretical as well as empirical aspects for integrating CEP concepts with PerSAM, a formal service application management model. Formal validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MOE (Ministry of Education) Project: Social Oriented Mobile-Cloud Integration Platform for Improving Fitness

PI, 2013.2 - 2014.1

NSC Project: Ambient-Oriented Service Management in Smart Environments

PI, 2012.9 - 2013.7

We can perceive the advent of the Smart Environments attributed to rapid emerging of embedded and tiny intelligent devices and sensors. However, most of current systems for Smart Environments are still being developed based on the so-called “the system is the application” philosophy, causing the developers to take care of all technical details from ground up. There is relative few research focuses on the middleware aspects, so that the independent research achievements or results are not interoperable. In addition, the concept of the “Ambient”, which refers to a bounded place with computing capability, is one of the most important issues when implementing a system for Smart Environments. An Ambient is typically composite-capable (i.e. an Ambient can be embedded within one another) and has complex structure. Residents may have different preferences when they are located in different Ambient. Hence, the results of a service composition are not optimized if the concept of Ambient is not taken into account. As a result, we aim to investigate an Ambient-oriented service management issues systematically from both theoretical and practical aspects. After the issues have been clarified, we will propose a new Ambient-oriented service management scheme and then realize the scheme based on a popular service management protocol in home network, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). Formal validations and experiments will also be performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

NSC Cross-Discipline Integration Project: Elderly Cancer-survivor HEalth Enhancing and Recovery System(Elderly CHEERS)

Co-PI, 2012.8 - 2015.7

Despite the prolonging of citizens’ life expectancy, the elderly cancer survivors still need to face disease itself and the discomfort and stress brought by the treatment. How to use emerging technology to enhance the quality of life for elderly cancer survivors in Taiwan is obviously one of the most important issues in the next few decades. Among them, physical activity and health management, social activity, and quality of sleep are the key points to determine the quality of life of elderly cancer survivors. This project aims to integrate the experts from the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, cancer medicine, nursing and psychology to build a Cancer-survivor HEalth Enhancing and Recovery System (CHEERS) focusing on “Physical Activity and Health Management”, “social mobility,” and “sleep quality” which are the key topics for the quality of life of elderly cancer survivors. First we focus on the construction of a friendly home long-term care system for elder cancer survivors, which is capable of gather bio and context information faster and more accurate. Based on the information mentioned above, the system then infers Health Alert Context (HAC) which helps care workers determine if the treatment is harmful or being invalid. We will develop a private cloud analysis mechanism to support care workers performing decision-making and to improve the understanding of long-term history of cancer evolution and statistics. Elderly cancer survivors after surgery and chemotherapy, in addition to worry about the illness, are more likely to be faced the frustration, disappointment, depression, and other psychosocial problem. The side effect of chemotherapy may bring fatigue, hair loss, and even restrict the mobility of elderly, further impact the social skills of them. Our second goal is to enhance the social support among elderly and their family and friends and to promote the mobility of the elderly through social network, mobile devices, and interactive multimedia. We propose three social interactive interventions, including web-based interaction, group interaction, and out-side interaction. We aim to lead the elderly to go out-side and face the crowd. It provides a channel for the elderly and their family and let them could communicate and care about each other and will strengthen the social support and pursue to a better quality of life. Cancer survivors usually suffer from the side-effects of the treatment. Sleeping problem is among them the most serious one. Therefore, we propose two systems to deal with this problem: Breath Relaxation Multimedia system and Intelligent Sleep Diary System (i-Sleep Diary). Breath Relaxation Multimedia system assists the patients to practice breath relaxation exercise before sleeping; i-Sleep Diary can help the doctors monitor patients through their sleeping cycle and give advices to improve their sleeping quality. In order to evaluate the effect of the developed CHEERS technologies on promoting the quality of life (QoL) and to explore the associations among “attitude toward aging,” “attitude toward cancer,” and QoL, we also establish three measurement tools such as the “Taiwanese Cancer Survivors Quality of Life” scale. We plan to initiate a clinical application model that integrates the CHEERS technologies, the QoL evaluation tools, and a clinical feedback-consultation process, attempting to maximize the enhancement of QoL of the elderly cancer survivors. The model could not only monitor and improve the related symptoms, but the valuable observation data could also help the clinical professions while discussing with the survivors. By combining the subjective data measured by the QoL evaluation tools and the observational data, clinical professions could help the survivors to clarify their problems and to enhance their QoL more effectively.

MOE Project: Flexible and Re-con gurable Service Platform for Multi-user Mobile Games

Co-PI, 2012.2 - 2013.1

Industrial Collaborative Research Project: Research and Development on Smart Treadmill

Co-PI, 2012.9 - 2013.3

In NTU (National Taiwan University)

Intel Project: M2M-Based Context-Aware Home Energy Saving System

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2011.1 - 2012.1

In recent years, there has been renewal of interest in green technologies due to increasing energy costs and global warming. Energy saving (ES) can be achieved by means of behavioral, technological, or organizational changes. For instance, turning off an appliance that is not currently used is a behavioral change. A technological change refers to increasing energy efficiency via technical assistance. For example, using rechargeable batteries instead of ordinary ones or incorporating low power consumption chips belongs to this category. An organizational change is usually realized by the enforcement of government laws and decrees.

By considering the potential merits of behavioral, technological, and organizational changes, in this project, we plan to optimize context-aware energy saving policies while maintaining user comfort requirements for a single or multi-user environment with M2M infrastructure. The challenges of applying M2M to achieve energy saving can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the system must be easily deployable so that we can collect and infer all related contexts for optimizing energy usage, especially in a real environment involving multiple users. Secondly, the system should try to optimize energy saving while maintaining the acceptable level of human comfort. Thirdly, the M2M-enabled system should be efficiently reconfigurable in response to a dynamically changing environment with little or no user intervention. Finally, we will cope with the challenges of processing large amount of data to generate scalable and collaborative ES policies through exploiting the strength of cloud computing. As a result, this project suggests a set of new approaches to deal with these challenges.

NSC Project: A High-quality Recovery Environment for Revitalizing Post-surgery Elders' Physiological and Psychological Functions

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2008.1 - 2011.10

According to the data from Council for Economic Planning and Development, the aging rate of population in our country is the 2nd place in the world. In 2005, one survey also pointed out that there are about 580,000 person-time of hospitalization of elders aged 65 or more in one year. Persistent or transient decline of cognitive, nutritional, and physical status was noted in elder patients during hospitalization or six months post hospitalization. Declines of cognition and ADL functions also lead to increase of average stay days in hospitals, increase of re-admission rate, and increase of death rate, especially for the elder patients requiring gastrointestinal surgery. The research team led by Prof. Li-Chen Fu in National Taiwan University has built great partnership over various domains in our previous project, in which a human-centric recovery environment was constructed for several kinds of patients. In our new project, we further target elder (aged 65 or more) patients who receive gastrointestinal surgery. We aim at developing effective intervention plans to prevent declines of their physical, cognition, and nutrition functions so that the quality of their life will be highly improved. Subproject I will build an intelligent care environment composed of two components: In the intelligent environment, we will establish a non-invasive wireless sensor network system to collect information about elders and environments for behavior and emotion recognition. The other component, intelligent caring robot, will play the role of a “digital carer,” who always accompanies the elders, provides suitable services, and even serves as an agent for family, doctors, and nurses at the remote site. Subproject II, intelligent cognitive multimedia, proposes the concept of a “traveling ward,” which consists of virtual carriage, reminiscence multimedia, and reminiscence network. Virtual carriage will make the patient feel as if he is driving for a trip. During the virtual trip, we can do the reality orientation. Reminiscence multimedia will collect users’ memories through an interactive story editing platform, and then the organized contents will be presented by our developed eFovea display system to help the nurses to do reminiscence therapy. Based on reminiscence multimedia, reminiscence network will provide an intuitive interaction interface to facilitate communication between patients in different places so as to maintain their social relationship. The physician, nursing, psychosocial, and physical therapy specialists of our sub-project III will evaluate the cognitive, nutritional, and physical changes in the above-mentioned patients. The risk factors will be examined, and then effective prevention plans and post-surgery therapy will be proposed. Meanwhile, a prototype of persuasive mug for hydration of elderly patients and a prototype of persuasive brush for oral health of elderly patients will be created to enhance the postoperatively nutritional status. The robotic and multi-media technology from the other two sub-projects, the persuasive objects, and physical therapy will cooperate to construct a clinical care system for postoperatively elder patients. Finally, we will verify the achievement through clinical evaluation by the specialists in this project.

NSC Project: Center of Innovation and Synergy for Intelligent Home Technology (INSIGHT) , Core Research Axis 1: the Attentive Home

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2008.2–2012.1

Website: http://insight.ntu.edu.tw/

ITRI Project: Cloud Integration with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2010.11 - 2011.6

ITRI Project: Cloud-enabled ADL Recognition and Service Inference Technology

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2010.1 –2010.12

ITRI Project: Intelligent GLIF-Based Home Healthcare Service Platform

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2009.1 –2009.12

The purpose of this project is commissioned by the GLIF and Smart home integration Platform to provide the best care services. The care experts establish GLIF medical guidelines, in according to the relationship between customary care and the symptom of disease, through Protégé which is developed by SMI (Stanford Medical Information). The family of care will be installed on integration platform which contain context-aware and reasoning abilities. Based on the physiological information, habits, and the surrounding environment information form sensors, the platform will make the appropriate care and alerts after the information is observed. Furthermore, the smart integration platforms can feedback the reaction following collecting the implementation of the guidelines by monitoring system. It helps physicians to monitor and to retrace the care more effective. In an emergency, the platform can use the short message system to sent message to inform the relevant units immediately. The smart home integration platform can reduce the burdens of care and unexpected events with effectiveness; therefore it enhances the quality of family care.

CHT Project: Integrating Wireless Sensor Network and Web Services Technologies

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2008.3–2009.2

Smart, Sustainable, and Human-centric Home, Sub-project 1: The Attentive Home

Doctoral Research Assistant, 2006.8–2009.7

Other Projects

Period Project Name Institutions Position
2006.10–2006.12 Portable UPnP AV Intelligent Multimedia Playback System ITRI and NTU Principle RA; implement a OSGi-based UPnP AV stack and library. Project website: http://www.attentivehome.org/itri-upnpav/
2005.5–2005.12 Scenario-Based Validation of Web Service Integration Institute for Information Industry (III) and NTU RA, Write part of proposal and part of progress reports; present in the regular meeting; implement part of prototype system
2004.4–2008.3 Content Science for a Media Rich Life, Sub-project 4: Human-Centric Interactive Media NSC, Program for Promoting Academic Excellence of University RA, Write part of proposal and part of progress reports
 
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