Suparna De

Dr Suparna De

Senior Research Fellow
Ph.D, MSc, MIT, B.Sc. (honours)
+44 (0)1483 689071
04 CII 01

Academic and research departments

Institute for Communication Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

Biography

Areas of specialism

Internet of Things; Cyber-Physical-Social systems; Semantic Web; Large-scale discovery and reasoning algorithms; Big Data analysis

Affiliations and memberships

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Professional member
IEEE
Member

Academic networks

    Research

    Research interests

    Research projects

    Indicators of esteem

    • Scholarships:
      • Overseas Research Student Sponsorship for PhD research (October 2005 - September 2009): University of Surrey and MobileVCE Core 4 programme
      • DFIDSSS Scholarship (September 2004 - September 2005): jointly funded by the University of Surrey and the British Commonwealth Scholarship Commission for MSc programme.
    • Awards:
      • Cable and Wireless Award (2005): University of Surrey, for the best overall performance from a student graduating with an MSc in Satellite Communication Engineering or Communications Networks and Software
      • IET Certificate (2009) in recognition of significant contribution to IET On Campus at the University of Surrey
      • K. Meera Memorial Scholarship (1999): St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India, for the best overall performance by a BSc. (H) Physics student
      • Science Meritorious Student Award (1998): University of Delhi, India

    Research Themes

    Data analytics for Cyber-Physical and Social Streams

    This research theme focusses on deriving latent patterns in CPSS data streams by developing novel ML algorithms; as well as fusion of social network data with sensor data streams. Our work looks at analysing social network data to extract real-world event information and human movements, in conjunction with sensor data and open datasets, to achieve outcomes related to quantifying their influence on smart city dynamics, such as traffic flows, measured pollution levels, redefining inner-city boundaries etc.

    Related publications:

    • Exploring the Effectiveness of Service Decomposition in Fog Computing Architecture for the Internet of Things, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, March 2019
    • A Survey on an Emerging Area: Deep Learning for Smart City Data, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, May 2019
    • Data-driven Air Quality Characterisation for Urban Environments: a Case Study, IEEE Access, December 2018
    • Missing Data Estimation in Mobile Sensing Environments, IEEE Access 6(1), October 2018 
    • Cyber–Physical–Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey. MDPI Applied Sciences, 2017, 7 (10) (slideshare)
    • Real world city event extraction from Twitter data streams, Procedia Computer Science, 2016, 98, pp. 443-448 (dataset)

    Large scale sensor and data discovery and ranking

    This research theme focuses on scalable, distributed discovery mechanisms supporting the sensor-as-a-service paradigm. Based on the particular localization characteristics of IoT deployments, our work has developed novel methods using geospatial indexing techniques and semantic service technologies for both sensor and sensor data discovery.

    Related publications:

    • Designing the Sensing as a Service Ecosystem for the Internet of Things, IEEE Internet of Things Magazine,1(2), December 2018
    • Spatial Indexing for Data Searching in Mobile Sensing Environments. Sensors 2017, 17(6), 1427
    • Search Techniques for the Web of Things: A Taxonomy and Survey, Sensors 2016, 16(5), 600
    • An Experimental Study on Geospatial Indexing for Sensor Service Discovery, Expert Systems with Applications, Elsevier, May 2015 (ontology, dataset)
    • A Ranking Method for Sensor Services based on Estimation of Service Access Cost, Information Sciences, Elsevier, October 2015 (code and dataset)
    • Enabling Query of Frequently Updated Data from Mobile Sensing Sources, The 13th IEEE International Conferences on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications (IUCC2014), December 2014.

    Semantic Models for the Internet of Things

    This research theme focusses on semantic models for the main abstractions and concepts that underlie the IoT domain. The developed ontologies enable fine-grained semantic annotations, and to create Linked sensor data for service and data discovery.

    Related publications:

    • SmartTags: IoT Product Passport for Circular Economy Based on Printed Sensors and Unique Item-Level Identifiers, Sensors 2019, 19(3), 586.
    • Knowledge Representation in the Internet of Things: Semantic Modelling and its Applications. Automatika – Journal for Control, Measurement, Electronics, Computing and Communications, December 2013. 
    • An Internet of Things Platform for Real-World and Digital Objects'. Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, May 2012. (platform demo)
    • Service modelling for the Internet of Things, IEEE Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (FEDCSIS), September 2011 (ontology)

    Supervision

    Completed postgraduate research projects I have supervised

    Postgraduate research supervision

    My teaching

    My publications

    Publications

    De S, Elsaleh T, Barnaghi P, Meissner S (2012) An Internet of Things Platform for Real-World and Digital Objects,Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience13(1)pp. 45-57 West University of Timisoara
    The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) relies on the provisioning of real-world services, which are provided by smart objects that are directly related to the physical world. A structured, machine-processible approach to provision such real-world services is needed to make heterogeneous physical objects accessible on a large scale and to integrate them with the digital world. The incorporation of observation and measurement data obtained from the physical objects with the Web data, using information processing and knowledge engineering methods, enables the construction of ?intelligent and interconnected things?. The current research mostly focuses on the communication and networking aspects between the devices that are used for sensing amd measurement of the real world objects. There is, however, relatively less effort concentrated on creating dynamic infrastructures to support integration of the data into the Web and provide unified access to such data on service and application levels. This paper presents a semantic modelling and linked data approach to create an information framework for IoT. The paper describes a platform to publish instances of the IoT related resources and entities and to link them to existing resources on the Web. The developed platform supports publication of extensible and interoperable descriptions in the form of linked data.
    De S, Moessner K (2008) Method and apparatus for producing an ontology representing devices and services currently available to a device within a pervasive computing environment, USPTO 12/062,794
    De S, Moessner K (2009) Rule-based Reasoning Mechanism for Context-aware Service Presentation,eChallenges e-2009 Conference Proceedings IIMC International Information Management Corporation Ltd
    With universal usability geared towards user focused customisation, a context reasoning engine can derive meaning from the various context elements and facilitate decision-taking for applications and context delivery mechanisms. The heterogeneity of available device capabilities means that the recommendation algorithm must be in a formal, effective and extensible form. Moreover, user preferences, capability context and media metadata must be considered simultaneously to determine appropriate presentation format. Towards this aim, this paper presents a reasoning mechanism that supports service presentation through a rule-based mechanism. The validation of the approach is presented through application use cases.
    De S, Meissner S, Kernchen R, Moessner K (2008) A Semantic Device and Service Description Framework for Ubiquitous Environments, ICT-MobileSummit 2008 Conference Proceedings IIMC International Information Management Corporation
    Wang W, De S, Cassar G, Moessner K (2015) An Experimental Study on Geospatial Indexing for Sensor Service Discovery, Expert Systems with Applications42(7)pp. 3528-3538 Elsevier
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2014.11.058
    The Internet of Things enables human beings to better interact with and understand their surrounding environments by extending computational capabilities to the physical world. A critical driving force behind this is the rapid development and wide deployment of wireless sensor networks, which continuously produce a large amount of real-world data for many application domains. Similar to many other large-scale distributed technologies, interoperability and scalability are the prominent and persistent challenges. The proposal of sensor-as-a-service aims to address these challenges; however, to our knowledge, there are no concrete implementations of techniques to support the idea, in particular, large-scale, distributed sensor service discovery. Based on the distinctive characteristics of the sensor services, we develop a scalable discovery architecture using geospatial indexing techniques and semantic service technologies. We perform extensive experimental studies to verify the performance of the proposed method and its applicability to large-scale, distributed sensor service discovery.
    De S, Moessner K (2007) Context gathering in Ubiquitous Environments: Enhanced Service Discovery,3rd Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems (CAPS'2007) Proceedings
    Delivering individualized services that conform to the user?s current situation will form the focus of ubiquitous environments. A description of the networked environment at a semantic level will necessitate contextually oriented knowledge acquisition methods. This then engenders unique challenges for the crucial step of resource discovery. A number of service discovery protocols exist to perform this role. In this paper, we identify the requirements inherent for such an environment and investigate the suitability of the available protocols against these. A suitable candidate solution is proposed with an implementation with semantic extensions and reference points for further enhancements.
    Zhou Y, De S, Wang W, Moessner K (2014) Enabling Query of Frequently Updated Data from Mobile Sensing Sources, IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/CSE.2014.190
    The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm connects everyday objects to the Internet and enables a multitude of applications with the real world data collected from those objects. In the city environment, real world data sources include fixed installations of sensor networks by city authorities as well as mobile sources, such as citizens? smartphones,¬ taxis and buses equipped with sensors. This kind of data varies not only along the temporal but also the spatial axis. For handling such frequently updated, time-stamped and structured data from a large number of heterogeneous sources, this paper presents a data-centric framework that offers a structured substrate for abstracting heterogeneous sensing sources. More importantly, it enables the collection, storage and discovery of observation and measurement data from both static and mobile sensing sources.
    Li N, Attou A, De S, Moessner K (2008) Device and service descriptions for ontology-based ubiquitous multimedia services, Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing and Multimediapp. 370-375
    DOI: 10.1145/1497185.1497265
    Multimedia services are becoming increasingly popular among mobile users. Ontology and related technologies have been introduced into the multimedia domain as a means to provide declarative formal representations of the domain knowledge and thus to enable intelligent multimedia processing, such as media format adaptation. The range of devices available to access media content becomes increasingly heterogeneous and at the same time ubiquitous. Users expect to access their services and content without restrictions in time or location. Users have many and different gadgets/devices with network connectivity at their disposal to receive content, ranging from their smart phones, car audio systems to laptops, or office PCs, etc. Hence there is a need to link the discovery and the description of these ambient device with multimedia domain knowledge representations in order to facilitate a ubiquitous multimedia experience. The contribution of this work is an approach for mapping device descriptions, which are leveraged on the resource discovery protocol UPnP to OWL ontology instances. The ontology instances chosen are compliant with the MPEG-21 DIA OWL-formatted ontology. This approach bridges the gap between non-semantic description mechanisms of the legacy device/services discovery protocol with the semantic multimedia domain knowledge representation.
    De S, Moessner K (2008) Semantic Description of Multimodal Devices: Modelling and Evaluation,Collaboration and the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications and Case Studies5pp. 1439-1446 IOS Press
    The heterogeneous, dynamic nature of current communication environments necessitates that all system components that form part of a personalisation framework should be context aware. To ensure context enabled interoperation, a shared, formalised specification of devices and services in the ambient environment is a must. With this aim, this paper presents an ontology model that captures the semantics of the multimodal devices and services in the mobile ad-hoc environment. The approach is validated using available metrics and compared to existing approaches, both through subjective feature-based evaluation and metrics? calculations. This paper also extends the metrics? usability by extending the analysis to interoperability with application logic and domain capture.
    De S, Barnaghi P, Bauer M, Meissner S (2011) Service modelling for the Internet of Things,2011 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS 2011pp. 949-955 IEEE
    The Internet of Things envisions a multitude of heterogeneous objects and interactions with the physical environment. The functionalities provided by these objects can be termed as `real-world services' as they provide a near real-time state of the physical world. A structured, machine-processible approach to provision such real-world services is needed to make heterogeneous physical objects accessible on a large scale and to integrate them with the digital world. This paper presents a semantic modeling approach for different components in an IoT framework. It is also discussed how the model can be integrated into the IoT framework by using automated association mechanisms with physical entities and how the data can be discovered using semantic search and reasoning mechanisms.
    De S, Moessner K (2008) Ontology based context inference and query for mobile devices,IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, PIMRC
    DOI: 10.1109/PIMRC.2008.4699602
    -The VISIon of service personalization for mobile communication environments entails context sensitive service provisioning. The realization of such customizable smart spaces necessitates acquisition and processing of modality context information from a variety of devices in the ambient environment. The heterogeneity of available device capabilities and description formats brings new challenges for a context reasoning engine that formulates content delivery decisions. Specifically, to ensure interoperability with existing application logic, the enabling components should support semantic queries. Secondly, situations where variously formatted context input may not provide enough information to answer queries, should be intelligently handled. Towards this aim, this paper discusses a context reasoning and query interface component as part of a Service Context Manager (SCM) framework that supports semantic querying and handles incomplete context information through a rule-based mechanism. The validation of the approach is provided by showing the mapping of disparate UAProf and UPnP descriptions into the framework and querying of supported modality services.
    Zhou Y, De S, Wang W, Moessner K (2016) Search Techniques for the Web of Things: A Taxonomy and Survey,SENSORS16(5)ARTN 600 MDPI AG
    DOI: 10.3390/s16050600
    De S, Moessner K (2007) Device and service descriptions in personal distributed environments,2007 2nd International Conference on Digital Information Management, ICDIM2pp. 695-700 IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ICDIM.2007.4444305
    The current research on context-aware systems in ubiquitous environments opens a number of interlinked research challenges. On the lowest level of such systems, discovery mechanisms and flexible semantic descriptions of available devices and services form the basis for end-user service personalization. The challenge is to design a description model that leverages implicit semantic information obtained, while being cognizant of resource constraints of a device. To encounter the different device characteristics and personalization challenges, this paper proposes a device and service description approach that provides a high level contextual view of device information. The work has been performed as part of the Personal Distributed Environment concept, also described in the paper. Further, a user-centric view of multiple user interface devices to access services in a heterogeneous and dynamic networked environment has been implemented by extending UPnP device discovery. A comparison with existing state of the art approaches concludes the work.
    De S, Moessner K (2009) A Framework for Mobile, Context-Aware Applications,2009 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS (ICT)pp. 232-237 IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ICTEL.2009.5158650
    The heterogeneous, dynamic nature of current mobile environments necessitates that all system components that form part of a personalization framework should be context aware. This necessitates the development of a framework of distributed context handlers to derive meaning from context and combine it with application logic. Towards this aim, this paper presents a Service Context Manager (SCM) framework that handles all the stages of context gathering, processing and reasoning to enable personalized service presentation. The validation of the approach is shown through application use cases.
    Poncela J, Vlacheas P, Giaffreda R, De S, Vecchio M, Nechifor S, Barco R, Aguayo-Torres MC, Stavroulaki V, Moessner K, Demestichas P (2014) Smart Cities via Data Aggregation,Wireless Personal Communications76(2)pp. 149-168 Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/s11277-014-1683-5
    Cities have an ever increasing wealth of sensing capabilities, recently including also internet of things (IoT) systems. However, to fully exploit such sensing capabilities with the aim of offering effective city-sensing-driven applications still presents certain obstacles. Indeed, at present, the main limitation in this respect consists of the vast majority of data sources being served on a ?best effort? basis. To overcome this limitation, we propose a ?resilient and adaptive IoT and social sensing platform?. Resilience guarantees the accurate, timely and dependable delivery of the complete/related data required by smart-city applications, while adaptability is introduced to ensure optimal handling of the changing requirements during application provision. The associated middleware consists of two main sets of functionalities: (a) formulation of sensing requests: selection and discovery of the appropriate data sources; and (b) establishment and control of the necessary resources (e.g., smart objects, networks, computing/storage points) on the delivery path from sensing devices to the requesting applications. The middleware has the intrinsic feature of producing sensing information at a certain level of detail (geographical scope/timeliness/accuracy/completeness/dependability) as requested by the applications in a given domain. The middleware is assessed and validated at a proof-of-concept level through innovative, dependable and real-time applications expected to be highly reproducible across different cities.
    Dudycz H, Dyczkowski M, Korczak J, Abramowicz W, Alt R, Andres F, Chmielarz W, Cypryjanski J, Czarnacka C, Damiani E, De S, Dufourd JF, Kannan R, Kersten G, Kowalczyk R, Ligeza A, Magoni D, Owoc M, Pankowska M, Sikorski M, Stanek S, Teufel S, Ziemba E (2013) 11th conference on advanced information technologies for management, 2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS 2013
    De S, Carrez F, Reetz E, Toenjes R, Wang W (2013) Test-Enabled Architecture for IoT Service Creation and Provisioning, In: Galis A, Gavras A (eds.), The Future Internet. Future Internet Assembly 2013: Validated Results and New HorizonsLNCS7858pp. 233-245 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38082-2_20
    The information generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) potentially enables a better understanding of the physical world for humans and supports creation of ambient intelligence for a wide range of applications in different domains. A semantics-enabled service layer is a promising approach to facilitate seamless access and management of the information from the large, distributed and heterogeneous sources. This paper presents the efforts of the IoT.est project towards developing a framework for service creation and testing in an IoT environment. The architecture design extends the existing IoT reference architecture and enables a test-driven, semantics-based management of the entire service lifecycle. The validation of the architecture is shown though a dynamic test case generation and execution scenario.
    Wang W, De S, Toenjes R, Reetz E, Moessner K (2012) A Comprehensive Ontology for Knowledge Representation in the Internet of Things,pp. 1793-1798 IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/TrustCom.2012.20
    Semantic modeling for the Internet of Things has become fundamental to resolve the problem of interoperability given the distributed and heterogeneous nature of the ?Things?. Most of the current research has primarily focused on devices and resources modeling while paid less attention on access and utilisation of the information generated by the things. The idea that things are able to expose standard service interfaces coincides with the service oriented computing and more importantly, represents a scalable means for business services and applications that need context awareness and intelligence to access and consume the physical world information. We present the design of a comprehensive description ontology for knowledge representation in the domain of Internet of Things and discuss how it can be used to support tasks such as service discovery, testing and dynamic composition.
    Cassar G, Barnaghi P, Wang W, De S, Moessner K (2013) Composition of Services in Pervasive Environments: A Divide and Conquer Approach,
    Zhou Y, De S, Wang W, Moessner K, Palaniswami M (2017) Spatial Indexing for Data Searching in Mobile Sensing Environments,Sensors MDPI
    DOI: 10.3390/s17061427
    Data searching and retrieval is one of the fundamental functionalities in many Web of Things applications, which need to collect, process and analyze huge amounts of sensor stream data. The problem in fact has been well studied for data generated by sensors that are installed at fixed locations; however, challenges emerge along with the popularity of opportunistic sensing applications in which mobile sensors keep reporting observation and measurement data at variable intervals and changing geographical locations. To address these challenges, we develop the Geohash-Grid Tree, a spatial indexing technique specially designed for searching data integrated from heterogeneous sources in a mobile sensing environment. Results of the experiments on a real-world dataset collected from the SmartSantander smart city testbed show that the index structure allows efficient search based on spatial distance, range and time windows in a large time series database.
    De S, Attou A, Moessner K (2009) Service and Content Presentation in Ubiquitous Environments,pp. 61-64 Springer
    The heterogeneous, dynamic nature of ubiquitous environments necessitates that all system components that form part of a personalisation framework should be context aware. Personalised service delivery requires that the system must detect and interpret device modality contexts in real time and provide automated adaptation on behalf of the user. Towards this aim, this paper presents the design and implementation of a demonstrator that offers personalised, context sensitive, service and content delivery.
    Wang W, De S, Cassar G, Moessner K (2013) Knowledge Representation in the Internet of Things: Semantic Modelling and its Applications,Automatika ? Journal for Control, Measurement, Electronics, Computing and Communications54(4)pp. 388-400 KoREMA
    DOI: 10.7305/automatika.54-4.414
    Semantic modelling provides a potential basis for interoperating among different systems and applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, current work has mostly focused on IoT resource management while not on the access and utilisation of information generated by the ?Things?. We present the design of a comprehensive and lightweight semantic description model for knowledge representation in the IoT domain. The design follows the widely recognised best practices in knowledge engineering and ontology modelling. Users are allowed to extend the model by linking to external ontologies, knowledge bases or existing linked data. Scalable access to IoT services and resources is achieved through a distributed, semantic storage design. The usefulness of the model is also illustrated through an IoT service discovery method.
    Chen Yu, De Suparna, Kernchen R, Moessner Klaus (2012) Device discovery in future service platforms through SIP,pp. 1-5
    DOI: 10.1109/VTCFall.2012.6399380
    This paper proposes an extension to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for contextualized service delivery in a service delivery platform (SDP) that enables device specific multimedia delivery. SIP separates between session establishment and description and is thus, amenable to be extended for advanced implementations which make it an ideal platform for service creation. Device specific multimedia delivery needs rich and flexible device descriptions, and our approach proposes advanced device descriptions through semantic technologies. The proposed SIP extensions have been implemented on a SIP Application Server which functions as SDP in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The validation of the proposed extensions is shown through an Android SIP client application that acts as a device browser and recommender for different multimedia services to users. An example device user agent (UA) application has also been implemented on a laptop.
    De S, Zhou Y, Moessner K (2017) Ontologies and context modeling for the Web of Things,In: Sheng M, Qin Y, Yao L, Benatallah B (eds.), Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web(1)pp. 3-36 Morgan Kaufmann
    The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm enables access to physical world things and their data through standard Web protocols. This provides interoperability at the hardware and communication protocol level, but does not add intelligence to the things or facilitate unambiguous interpretation of their data. The evolution of the WoT towards the semantic WoT offers the promise of meeting the interoperability challenge through the use of semantic Web technologies. The W3C Web of Things initiative encourages the use of common vocabularies to ensure interoperability and a common understanding of the domain knowledge. Ontologies provide a structured, common formalism to the disparate elements of the WoT and can form the basis of a common knowledge base. The research community and standardisation bodies have developed numerous ontologies describing the elements of the WoT and associated domains. A comprehensive review of the various proposed ontologies is needed to facilitate the adoption and reuse of the available models. This survey reviews the current state-of-the-art in WoT ontologies, which are presented from two perspectives: cross-domain ontologies which are classified into device, service, data and localisation models, and domain ontologies, which are presented from an environmental and user-oriented perspective.
    De S, Zhou Y, Moessner K (2016) Real world city event extraction from Twitter data streams,Procedia Computer Science98pp. 443-448
    DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2016.09.069
    The immediacy of social media messages means that it can act as a rich and timely source of real world event information. The detected events can provide a context to observations made by other city information sources such as fixed sensor installations and contribute to building ?city intelligence?. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised method to extract real world events that may impact city services such as traffic, public transport, public safety etc., from Twitter streams. We also develop a named entity recognition model to obtain the precise location of the related events and provide a qualitative estimation of the impact of the detected events. We apply our developed approach to a real world dataset of tweets collected from the city of London.
    Wang W, De S, Zhou Y, Huang X, Moessner K (2017) Distributed Sensor Data Computing in Smart City Applications,Proceedings of WoWMoM 2017
    DOI: 10.1109/WoWMoM.2017.7974338
    With technologies developed in the Internet of Things, embedded devices can be built into every fabric of urban environments and connected to each other; and data continuously produced by these devices can be processed, integrated at different levels, and made available in standard formats through open services. The data, obviously f a form of ?big data?, is now seen as the most valuable asset in developing intelligent applications. As the sizes of the IoT data continue to grow, it becomes inefficient to transfer all the raw data to a centralised, cloud-based data centre and to perform efficient analytics even with the state-ofthe- art big data processing technologies. To address the problem, this article demonstrates the idea of ?distributed intelligence? for sensor data computing, which disperses intelligent computation to the much smaller while autonomous units, e.g., sensor network gateways, smart phones or edge clouds in order to reduce data sizes and to provide high quality data for data centres. As these autonomous units are usually in close proximity to data consumers, they also provide potential for reduced latency and improved quality of services. We present our research on designing methods and apparatus for distributed computing on sensor data, e.g., acquisition, discovery, and estimation, and provide a case study on urban air pollution monitoring and visualisation.
    Wang W, Yao F, De S, Moessner K, Sun Z (2015) A Ranking Method for Sensor Services based on Estimation of Service Access Cost,Information Sciences319pp. 1-17 Elsevier
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2015.05.029
    The concept of sensing-as-a-service is proposed to enable a unified way of accessing and controlling sensing devices for many Internet of Things based applications. Existing techniques for Web service computing are not sufficient for this class of services that are exposed by resource-constrained devices. The vast number of distributed and redundantly deployed sensors necessitate specialised techniques for their discovery and ranking. Current research in this line mostly focuses on discovery, e.g., designing efficient searching methods by exploiting the geographical properties of sensing devices. The problem of ranking, which aims to prioritise semantically equivalent sensor services returned by the discovery process, has not been adequately studied. Existing methods mostly leverage the information directly associated with sensor services, such as detailed service descriptions or quality of service information. However, assuming the availability of such information for sensor services is often unrealistic. We propose a ranking strategy by estimating the cost of accessing sensor services. The computation is based on properties of the sensor nodes as well as the relevant contextual information extracted from the service access process. The evaluation results demonstrate not only the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of ranking quality measure, but also the potential for preserving the energy of the sensor nodes.
    De S, Zhou Y, Abad I, Moessner K (2017) Cyber?Physical?Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey,MDPI Applied Sciences7(10)101017 MDPI AG
    DOI: 10.3390/app7101017
    The integration of things? data on the Web and Web linking for things? description and discovery is leading the way towards smart Cyber?Physical Systems (CPS). The data generated in CPS represents observations gathered by sensor devices about the ambient environment that can be manipulated by computational processes of the cyber world. Alongside this, the growing use of social networks offers near real-time citizen sensing capabilities as a complementary information source. The resulting Cyber?Physical?Social System (CPSS) can help to understand the real world and provide proactive services to users. The nature of CPSS data brings new requirements and challenges to different stages of data manipulation, including identification of data sources, processing and fusion of different types and scales of data. To gain an understanding of the existing methods and techniques which can be useful for a data-oriented CPSS implementation, this paper presents a survey of the existing research and commercial solutions. We define a conceptual framework for a data-oriented CPSS and detail the various solutions for building human?machine intelligence.
    De S, Moessner K, Christophe B (2014) Semantic enablers for dynamic digital-physical object associations in a federated node architecture for the Internet of Things,Ad Hoc Networks18pp. 102-120
    DOI: 10.1016/j.adhoc.2013.02.003
    The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm aims to realize heterogeneous physical world objects interacting with each other and with the surrounding environment. In this prospect, the automatic provisioning of the varied possible interactions and bridging them with the digital world is a key pertinent issue for enabling novel IoT applications. The introduction of description logic-based semantics to provide homogeneous descriptions of object capabilities enables lowering the heterogeneity and a limited set of interactions (such as those with stationary objects with fixed availability) to be deduced using classical reasoning systems. However, the inability of such semantics to capture the dynamics of an IoT system as well as the scalability issues that reasoning systems encounter if too many descriptions have to be processed, necessitate that such approaches should be used in conjunction with others. Towards this aim, this paper proposes an automated rule-based association mechanism for integrating the digital IoT components with physical entities along temporal-spatial-thematic axes. To address the scalability issue, this mechanism is distributed over a federated network of nodes, each embodying a set of objects located in the same geographical area. Nodes covering nearby geographical areas can share their object descriptions while all nodes are capable of deducing interactions between the descriptions that they are aware of.© 2013 Elsevier B.V.
    Zhou Y (2018) Data-driven cyber-physical-social system for knowledge discovery in smart cities.,
    Investigation of the state-of-the-art in Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) reveals that significant work has been done in interpreting data from different sources in isolation, performing correlations for numerical observations across one or two domains, or to provide simple textual explanations from social networks content for analysed physical world data. Existing works also work with ideal sets or already cleaned data that does not provide the same real-world insight into working with big data in cities. Thus, there is a need for integrated solutions that address the complete data flow; from data acquisition to processing and knowledge representation. This thesis presents a data-centric framework for CPSS that contains management and processing capabilities for knowledge discovery from mobile sensing data and social networks content, by mainly addressing challenges from mobile sensing scenarios in CPSS, including: 1) interoperability issues caused by the vast amount of heterogeneous data sources; 2) thematic-spatial-temporal information retrieval of opportunistic mobile sensing; 3) incomplete datasets generated from noisy data sources of mobile sensing techniques; 4) different scales/types of data and information, which cannot be correlated directly. The contributions of the thesis include 1) a data retrieval method that addresses the issue of searching for both current and historical sensor measurement values from the heterogeneous data sources; 2) a novel spatio-temporal model for regression analysis that can perform missing data estimation in the incomplete datasets; 3) a knowledge discovery mechanism that merges and correlates physical and social sensing data, enabling links between different scales/types of data: numeric values of sensor observation data and textual content of social networks? messages. The above contributions were evaluated through experimentation on real smart city datasets and data collected from the Twitter social network to prove their accuracy and reliability, as well as to show the applicability of the proposed approaches to existing smart cities.
    Cassar Gilbert, Barnaghi Payam, Wang Wei, De Suparna, Moessnek Klaus (2013) Composition of Services in Pervasive Environments: A Divide and Conquer Approach,IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications
    In pervasive environments, availability and reliability of a service cannot always be guaranteed. In such environments, automatic and dynamic mechanisms are required to compose services or compensate for a service that becomes unavailable during the runtime. Most of the existing works on services composition do not provide sufficient support for automatic service provisioning in pervasive environments. We propose a Divide and Conquer algorithm that can be used at the service runtime to repeatedly divide a service composition request into several simpler sub-requests. The algorithm repeats until for each sub-request we find at least one atomic service that meets the requirements of that sub-request. The identified atomic services can then be used to create a composite service. We discuss the technical details of our approach and show evaluation results based on a set of composite service requests. The results show that our proposed method performs effectively in decomposing a composite service requests to a number of sub-requests and finding and matching service components that can fulfill the service composition request.
    Zhou Yuchao, De Suparna, Wang Wei, Wang Ruili, Moessner Klaus (2018) Missing Data Estimation in Mobile Sensing Environments,IEEE Access6(1)pp. 69869-69882 IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2877847
    Mobile sensing techniques have been increasingly deployed in many Internet of Things based applications because of their cost efficiency, wide coverage and flexibility. However, these techniques are unreliable in many situations due to noise of different kinds, loss of communication, or insufficient energy. As such, datasets created from mobile sensing scenarios are likely to contain large amount of missing data, which makes further data analysis difficult, inaccurate, or even impossible. We find that the existing estimation models and techniques developed for static sensing do not work well in the mobile sensing scenarios. To address the problem, we propose a spatio-temporal method, which is specifically designed for answering queries in such applications. Experiments on a real-world, incomplete mobile sensing dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art noticeably in terms of estimation errors. More importantly, the proposed model is tolerant to datasets with extremely high missing data rates. Training with the proposed model is also efficient, which makes it suitable for deployment on computationally constrained devices and platforms that need to process massive amounts of data in real time.
    Zhou Yuchao, De Suparna, Ewa Gideon, Perera Charith, Moessner Klaus (2018) Data-driven Air Quality Characterisation for Urban Environments: a Case Study,IEEE Accesspp. 1-1 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2884647
    The economic and social impact of poor air quality in towns and cities is increasingly being recognised, together with the need for effective ways of creating awareness of real-time air quality levels and their impact on human health. With local authority maintained monitoring stations being geographically sparse and the resultant datasets also featuring missing labels, computational data-driven mechanisms are needed to address the data sparsity challenge. In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based method to accurately predict the Air Quality Index (AQI), using environmental monitoring data together with meteorological measurements. To do so, we develop an air quality estimation framework that implements a neural network that is enhanced with a novel Non-linear Autoregressive neural network with exogenous input (NARX) model, especially designed for time series prediction. The framework is applied to a case study featuring different monitoring sites in London, with comparisons against other standard machine-learning based predictive algorithms showing the feasibility and robust performance of the proposed method for different kinds of areas within an urban region.
    De Suparna, Moessner Klaus, Gligoric Nenad, Krco Srdjan, Hakola Liisa, Vehmas Kaisa, Jansson Kristoffer, Polenz Ingmar, van Kranenburg Rob (2019) SmartTags: IoT Product Passport for Circular Economy Based on Printed Sensors and Unique Item-Level Identifiers,Sensors19(3) MDPI AG
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s19030586
    In this paper, we present a method that facilitates Internet of Things (IoT) for building a product passport and data exchange enabling the next stage of the circular economy. SmartTags based on printed sensors (i.e., using functional ink) and a modified GS1 barcode standard enable unique identification of objects on a per item-level (including Fast-Moving Consumer Goods?FMCG), collecting, sensing, and reading of parameters from environment as well as tracking a products? lifecycle. The developed ontology is the first effort to define a semantic model for dynamic sensors, including datamatrix and QR codes. The evaluation of decoding and readability of identifiers (QR codes) showed good performance for detection of sensor state printed over and outside the QR code data matrix, i.e., the recognition ability with image vision algorithm was possible. The evaluation of the decoding performance of the QR code data matrix printed with sensors was also efficient, i.e., the QR code ability to be decoded with the reader after reversible and irreversible process of ink (dis)appearing was preserved, with slight drop in performance if ink density is low.
    Alturki Badraddin, Reiff-Marganiec Stephan, Perera Charith, De Suparna (2019) Exploring the Effectiveness of Service Decomposition in Fog Computing Architecture for the Internet of Things,IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    DOI: 10.1109/TSUSC.2019.2907405
    The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect everyday physical objects to the internet. These objects will produce a significant amount of data. The traditional cloud computing architecture aims to process data in the cloud. As a result, a significant amount of data needs to be communicated to the cloud. This creates a number of challenges, such as high communication latency between the devices and the cloud, increased energy consumption of devices during frequent data upload to the cloud, high bandwidth consumption, while making the network busy by sending the data continuously, and less privacy because of less control on the transmitted data to the server. Fog computing has been proposed to counter these weaknesses. Fog computing aims to process data at the edge and substantially eliminate the necessity of sending data to the cloud. However, combining the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with the fog computing architecture is still an open challenge. In this paper, we propose to decompose services to create linked-microservices (LMS). Linked-microservices are services that run on multiple nodes but closely linked to their linked-partners. Linked-microservices allow distributing the computation across different computing nodes in the IoT architecture. Using four different types of architectures namely cloud, fog, hybrid and fog+cloud, we explore and demonstrate the effectiveness of service decomposition by applying four experiments to three different type of datasets. Evaluation of the four architectures shows that decomposing services into nodes reduce the data consumption over the network by 10% - 70%. Overall, these results indicate that the importance of decomposing services in the context of fog computing for enhancing the quality of service.
    Chen Qi, Wang Wei, Wu Fangyu, De Suparna, Wang Ruili, Zhang Bailing, Huang Xin (2019) A Survey on an Emerging Area: Deep Learning for Smart City Data,IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/TETCI.2019.2907718
    Rapid urbanisation has brought about great challenges to our daily lives, such as traffic congestion, environmental pollution, energy consumption, public safety and so on. Research on smart cities aims to address these issues with various technologies developed for the Internet of Things. Very recently, the research focus has shifted towards processing of massive amount of data continuously generated within a city environment, e.g., physical and participatory sensing data on traffic flow, air quality, and healthcare. Techniques from computational intelligence have been applied to process and analyse such data, and to extract useful knowledge that helps citizens better understand their surroundings and informs city authorities to provide better and more efficient public services. Deep learning, as a relatively new paradigm in computational intelligence, has attracted substantial attention of the research community and demonstrated greater potential over traditional techniques. This paper provides a survey of the latest research on the convergence of deep learning and smart city from two perspectives: while the technique-oriented review pays attention to the popular and extended deep learning models, the application-oriented review emphasises the representative application domains in smart cities. Our study showed that there are still many challenges ahead for this emerging area owing to the complex nature of deep learning and wide coverage of smart city applications. We pointed out a number of future directions related to deep learning efficiency, emergent deep learning paradigms, knowledge fusion and privacy preservation, and hope these would move the relevant research one step further in creating truly distributed intelligence for smart cities.
    Perera Charith, Barhamgi Mahmoud, De Suparna, Baarslag Tim, Vecchio Massimo, Choo Kim-Kwang Raymond (2018) Designing the Sensing as a Service Ecosystem for the Internet of Things,IEEE Internet of Things1(2)pp. 18-23 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    DOI: 10.1109/IOTM.2019.1800023

    The Internet of Things is infiltrating many businesses. It provides simple means to collect and analyze technical system data to identify and optimize the performance of many things in our private and work lives. This technical revolution is also revealing new challenges and issues with our current IoT technologies. New solutions like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and 5G promise to overcome these challenges. Within this article we discuss with leading experts the pros and cons of these technologies and what it means for future IoT business.

    The Internet of Things envisions the creation of an environment where everyday objects (e.g., microwaves, fridges, cars, coffee machines) are connected to the Internet and make users? lives more productive, efficient, and convenient. During this process, everyday objects capture a vast amount of data that can be used to understand individuals and their behaviors. In the current IoT ecosystems, such data is collected and used only by the respective IoT solutions. There is no formal way to share data with external entities. We believe this is very inefficient and unfair for users. We believe that users, as data owners, should be able to control, manage, and share data about them in any way that they choose and make or gain value out of them. To achieve this, we proposed the sensing as a service (S2aaS) model. In this article, we discuss the (S2aaS) ecosystem in terms of its architecture, components, and related user interaction designs. This article aims to highlight the weaknesses of the current IoT ecosystem and to explain how S2aaS would eliminate those weaknesses. We also discuss how an everyday user may engage with the S2aaS ecosystem as well as design challenges.