Jorge Gomez-Montalvo

Une Architecture Multimédia Dirigée par les Ontologies pour la Gestion Autonome de la Qualité de Service dans les Réseaux Domestiques: Dans le contexte actuel de l’Internet, un enjeu de recherche majeur est de permettre aux applications et à leurs utilisateurs de disposer de systèmes de communication offrant une qualité de service (QdS) optimale. Ceci en fonction des ressources machine et réseau disponibles, dont les capacités et les performances, hétérogènes et variables, ne sont pas connues à l’avance. Le provisionnement optimal de la QdS dans ces futurs systèmes de communication autonomes nécessite d’une part la caractérisation des services et des ressources de communication disponibles, et d’autre part la prise en compte des expressions des besoins et des préférences des différents acteurs du système (utilisateurs, fournisseurs des services, etc.). Le sujet de la thèse porte sur la définition d’un cadre sémantique de QdS basé sur les ontologies pour la caractérisation des ressources et des services de communication dans le but de fournir la meilleure QdS au regard des besoins et des préférences des utilisateurs. Ce cadre sera utilisé dans la définition des objectifs et des contraintes de QdS et dans l’élaboration de modèles de décision. L'ensemble sera utilisé pour la mise en œuvre de QdS dans les systèmes de communication autonomes situés dans un contexte de réseaux domestiques

In this paper, we introduce a Platform for Non-Intrusive Assistance (named PIANI), as an assistance platform for elderly people able to do activities in outdoor environments without strict supervision. PIANI includes an ontology used to characterize outdoor activities of interest (activities to be observed). PIANI also defines a risk level of the activity that an elderly person is currently doing out of his home by comparing such activity to its characterization. In addition, the proposed platform uses the smartphone of the person in order to collect geographic and time information, which is used by PIANI to infer activity risk and send alert notifications based on semantic knowledge base. An experimental test was developed as a proof of concept about the utilization of PIANI to identify outdoors activities of elderly people, compute a level of risk and finally send non intrusive alert notification to the user.

Recently, the sector of the population older than 60 years of age is growing. The assistance for the elderly at their home allows to increase their autonomy and independence while they are living alone. Several fields have emerged to improve the quality of life of the elderly, and to develop environments that offer help, support and assistance during the realization of their daily activities. The identification of activities is a key piece for the provision of assistance to seniors who live alone. This work is focused on the activity recognition of the elderly who live independently at home. Here is presented OPAIEH, an ontology-based platform for activity identification of the elderly at home. The platform includes the ontological model, which allows a new activity characterization. Also, the platform includes a sensors network, a client device, and web server to perform the recognition of different activities that the elderly do inside their home. Furthermore, the platform generates a set of graphs that shows different statistics and behaviours of the users. In order to perform an experimental test on OPAIEH, a case study was developed as a proof of concept about the use of ontologies for the activity recognition task. The results encourages us to continue our work.

Over time, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been used for a variety of applications. Extensive work has been dedicated to various WSN applications. It is important to note that, due to their physical limitations, the sensors are prone to several types of faults. These restrictions can pose serious problems in event detection applications. Especially if the WSNs are deployed in hostile environments, such as the industrial or environmental sector. The detection of anomalies has recently attracted the attention of the scientific community, due to its relevance in real-world applications. The proposed solutions depend to a large extent on supervision and communication, using techniques based on tools such as Machine Learning and Neural Networks. In this context, we introduce the most commonly used anomaly detection techniques in WSN. Compiling and comparing the main methods applied in specific scenarios, we analyze the advantages and conveniences of using any of them.

The applications based on Web services (WS) composition are gaining momentum as an approach to build autonomous, heterogenous and distributed applications. Often a unique WS does not provide the required funcionality, therefore it is necessary to carry out a composition of WS in order to get the expected results. Optimizing the WS composition requires an efficient way to select the best Web services. Solving this problem can be a very complex task involving many criteria. In this work an approach is proposed to accomplish the WS selection from services previously registered and classified according to their quality of service (QoS) parameters. QoS parameters are characterized by an ontology and their values stored in a semantic database. The values of QoS corresponding to providers are collected automatically by an evaluation agent of QoS. In this way the service composition benefits from this proposal being easier and more efficient, taking into account only the best services and respecting the quality of service requirements established by the user. The results from the experiments performed with data involving real WS and artificially created data show that the proposed method is a feasible option to do a better selection of WS in the context of a WS composition.

SummaryObjectives: 1) To enhance the content of an ontology for designing virtual environments (VEs) for upper limb motor rehabilitation of stroke patients according to the suggestions and comments of rehabilitation specialists and software developers, 2) to characterize the perceived importance level of the ontology, 3) to determine the perceived usefulness of the ontology, and 4) to identify the safety characteristics of the ontology for VEs design according to the rehabilitation specialists.Methods: Using two semi-structured Web questionnaires, we asked six rehabilitation specialists and six software developers to provide us with their perception regarding the level of importance and the usability of the ontology. From their responses we have identified themes related to perceived and required safety characteristics of the ontology.Results: Significant differences in the importance level were obtained for the Stroke Disability, VE Configuration, Outcome Measures, and Safety Calibration classes, which were perceived as highly important by rehabilitation specialists. Regarding usability, the ontology was perceived by both groups with high usefulness, ease of use, learnability and intention of use. Concerning the thematic analysis of recommendations, eight topics for safety characteristics of the ontology were identified: adjustment of therapy strategies; selection and delimitation of movements; selection and proper calibration of the interaction device; proper selection of measuring instruments; gradual modification of the difficulty of the exercise; adaptability and variability of therapy exercises; feedback according to the capabilities of the patient; and real-time support for exercise training.Conclusions: The rehabilitation specialists and software developers confirmed the importance of the information contained in the ontology regarding motor rehabilitation of the upper limb. Their recommendations highlight the safety features and the advantages of the ontology as a guide for the effective design of VEs.

Today, the development of virtual reality (VR) applications for upper limb motor rehabilitation is still a difficult and time-consuming task. It requires developers to be skilled in motor rehabilitation, interaction devices, and stroke survivor characteristics, among others, to be able to develop a virtual environment (VE). In the literature there are several recommendations to aid in the design of VEs. However, to integrate the recommendations it is necessary to understand key domain concepts in motor rehabilitation. In this paper, we introduce VEULMoR, an ontology-based approach for designing VEs for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation. This approach uses the domain expertise coded into the ontology to shorten and facilitate the design of a VE. The information contained in the ontology can be used to denote the design factors that integrate the VE.

Heterogeneous networks, including personal, home and collaborative enterprise networks are aimed at interconnecting diverse communities of users. In the case of large communities of mobile, distributed and collaborating users sharing their multimedia content, scalable and semantic approaches are needed to facilitate the efficient publication and discovery of data. In this work, we propose an approach aimed at efficiently providing the required functionalities for dynamically managing the resources and the multimedia content of interconnected home networks, as well as providing the required community sharing capabilities. Our solution consists in combining the benefits of both ontologies and peer-to-peer approaches, by taking advantage of the semantic capabilities of ontologies at local domain level and the scalable P2P solutions at inter-domains level. Our proposed framework is founded on a new architecture based on peer-to-peer event-based communication system and using mainly a home box entity based on a global multimedia ontology. This domain ontology allows publishers and subscribers to use a common semantic space to characterise production and consumption of resources and services. Our approach can also be applied for similar large interconnected systems scenarios such as topic discovery with JNDI and service exchange with UDDI.