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This article presents summaries of five of the UbiComp 2006 Workshops: System Support for Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing, Usable Ubiquitous Computing in Next-Generation Conference Rooms, Nurturing Technologies in the Domestic Environment, and UbiHealth. The other summaries appeared in the January--March 2007 issue.

This article presents summaries of five of the UbiComp 2006 Workshops: System Support for Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing, Usable Ubiquitous Computing in Next-Generation Conference Rooms, Nurturing Technologies in the Domestic Environment, and UbiHealth. The other summaries appeared in the January--March 2007 issue.

International audience; Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous entities, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. We present DiaSuite, a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing system. This tool suite comprises a domain-specific design language, a compiler for this language, which produces a Java programming framework, an editor to define simulation scenarios, and a 2D-renderer to simulate pervasive computing applications. We have validated our tool suite on a variety of comprehensive applications in areas including telecommunications, building automation, and health-care.

This paper contributes a novel component model (called MidGate) that enables behavioral adaptation of pervasive middleware services and applications as part of a reflective middleware platform. The component model applies the concept of middleware reflection to dynamically varying computing resources. The research problem addressed in the paper is how to support a pervasive computing environment's dynamic adaptation requirements for middleware services and applications in a software component architecture. A component model, referred to as the MidGate component model, is presented as a solution to the research problem. The component model has been validated by a prototype system, given as an example in this paper.

The LIWAS traffic warning system aims at providing early warning to vehicles about road conditions, such as whether the road is slippery. The LIWAS system is currently being developed and consists of two main parts: sensors for determining the state of the road and a communication infrastructure supporting inter-vehicle communication. This paper presents our results on requirements identification, design, and prototyping of the infrastructure. The infrastructure combines communication via mobile phones with communication based on the principles of ad-hoc networking, and it supports units in being updated during operation. The presented prototypes and associated experimental results demonstrate the main functionalities of the communication infrastructure, and have led to the initial deployment of LIWAS units.

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the integration of different wireless and fixed networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Also, increasing user expectations of personalizable, adaptive, and context-aware mobile services bring complexity to the development of future mobile services. The distributed and heterogeneous computing environment, together with increasing user expectations, set requirements for future mobile services that are difficult to meet without service platform support alleviating service development. In this work, a lightweight distributed service platform that has been designed with a practical design approach to support the adaptation of mobile services, and partly also personalization and context-aware functionalities of the services, is presented. A requirement analysis for future mobile services is carried out by an extensive literature review. The mobile service adaptation support functionality of the service platform is designed based on the identified requirements. Further architecture based on the concept of Generic Service Elements is designed for the service platform. The validation of the architecture is achieved by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation. It also proved the service platform's applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments as the prototype resulted in an overall size of less than 360 KB, of which approximately one third is allocated to the mobile terminal domain.

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the integration of different wireless and fixed networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Also, increasing user expectations of personalizable, adaptive, and context-aware mobile services bring complexity to the development of future mobile services. The distributed and heterogeneous computing environment, together with increasing user expectations, set requirements for future mobile services that are difficult to meet without service platform support alleviating service development. In this work, a lightweight distributed service platform that has been designed with a practical design approach to support the adaptation of mobile services, and partly also personalization and context-aware functionalities of the services, is presented. A requirement analysis for future mobile services is carried out by an extensive literature review. The mobile service adaptation support functionality of the service platform is designed based on the identified requirements. Further architecture based on the concept of Generic Service Elements is designed for the service platform. The validation of the architecture is achieved by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation. It also proved the service platform's applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments as the prototype resulted in an overall size of less than 360 KB, of which approximately one third is allocated to the mobile terminal domain.