Editorial preface

Citation

Khalil, I. (2014), "Editorial preface", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 10 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPCC-07-2014-0043

Editorial preface

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 10, Issue 3

Mobile computing has established itself both as a fruitful research discipline and a means of accessing information services for a significant portion of world-wide users.

This issue of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications consists of seven selected high-quality papers from MoMM2013. These selected papers represent and reflect the latest, state-of-the-art research and development in these related areas, which help to identify opportunities and challenges for interested researchers and technology and system developers and inspire and provoke follow-up research in the time to come.

The paper “A crowdsourcing framework for the management of mobile multimedia nature observation” perfectly combines mobile computing and mobile multimedia issues by proposing, specifying and implementing a shared service for collaboratively capturing and tagging observations. The use of cross-platform mobile client applications enables immediate usability by a potentially large number of enthusiasts, and this extended journal version of the MoMM 2013 paper therefore documents the state of the art for one class of frameworks that can assist in building future distributed mobile applications.

The paper “Synthetic Individual Binaural Audio Delivery by Pinna Image Processing” represents the multimedia end of the spectrum of papers presented at MoMM 2013 with a novel combination of using imaging to parameterize binaural audio delivery. By extracting relevant features from 2D representations of the listener’s ears, the authors derive a model for spatializing sound delivery. One of the most compelling aspects of this work is that the model complexity is sufficiently low to enable live execution on a mobile device, potentially enabling future mobile applications that make use of spatial audio delivery to their users.

The paper “Enhancing the position estimates of unmanned aerial vehicles by cooperation” is a prime example of research from the mobility end of the spectrum. Well-known inaccuracies of GPS localization are especially problematic for unmanned aerial vehicles. This extended article presents a method how multiple such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can cooperatively improve their location estimates by augmenting them with ranging and communication based on mobile ad hoc networks. Depending on specific ranging methods, vehicle speeds and error estimates, this method can significantly improve the localization error.

The paper “mtaPIN: multi-touch key input enhances security of PIN authentication while keeping usability” is a specifically invited extension of a MoMM 2013 short paper and marks one novel approach to user authentication on mobile devices, thus addressing the security aspect within mobile computing. By extending the standard PIN entry authentication method towards concurrent multi-touch input, the authors show that security can be increased in the form of a larger number of combinations for entering the PIN while keeping usability in the form of input time at comparable levels. It is interesting because this method could be immediately applied to current off-the-shelf smartphones without any changes to the existing hardware.

The paper “Managing the life-cycle of Java card applets in other Java virtual machines” focuses primarily on the security aspect of mobile devices. Some current smartphones are or can be equipped with an embedded smart card, often in the form of a programmable Java card. However, this support is not (yet) ubiquitous, and applications wanting to make use of this infrastructure are therefore restricted to a subset of devices. In this extended article, the author describes how the different Java card life cycle can be implemented on top of standard Java virtual machines to enable both deployment of Java card applets on normal Java devices and provide better development and debugging tooling for application developers.

The paper “User modelling for people with special needs” presents an approach where a novel user modelling wizard for people with motor impairments is used to gain a deeper understanding of very specific interaction patterns leading to a user model, which allows us to automatically derive an application- and user-specific configuration for natural user interfaces. An evaluation with a group of people with motor disabilities showed promising results.

In the last paper in this issue, “A duration-based online reminder system”, an online framework, based on incomplete durations and partially observed sensor sequences, was developed which can be used in building an intervention framework for a potentially online support tool. Incorporating such durations into the framework has the potential to increase the performance of a prompting system for persons with cognitive impairment. The work demonstrated in this paper shows the advantage of using duration information in activity recognition and in building an adaptive online reminder system that changes its predictions based on the observation made in the environment. The results confirm that duration information along with other observed sensor data can increase the accuracy of activity recognition.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors and the program committee chairs of MoMM2013 for their valuable contributions.

Ismail Khalil, Editor-in-chief