Tutorial Summaries and Slides

Ambient, pervasive, and ubiquitous computing have been seen as the key to a future where people in an almost effortless way can do incredible things by means of technology they do not perceive. Key issues in ambient computing include:

• Invisibility (computing is embedded in everyday objects)
• Construction (new capabilities can be obtained by putting existing components or resources together)
• Heterogeneity (components should function in many fundamentally different contexts and configurations)
• Change (needs and technologies are changing continuously)
• Scalability (solutions working with few users and in a limited context, should also work in almost unlimited contexts)

From a data and resource management perspective this vision of ambient computing leaves the database community with new challenges. The aim of this summer school is to offer an opportunity to database researchers to become familiar with the latest advances on data and resources management addressing some of these challenges.

Semantic oriented data spaces (Marie-Christine Rousset)

A data space system is a multi-model data management system that manages data sourced from a variety of local or external sources. The management of data spaces raises new challenges for representing, indexing, sharing and querying possibly distributed collections of heterogeneous and ill-structured data.
Semantic approaches are promising for providing the glue between heterogeneous data. The goal of this course is to give an overview of the challenges and existing solutions for representing and exploiting the data semantics in data spaces. We will distinguish centralized approaches based on the mediator model from decentralized approaches of P2P data sharing for online communities connected through overlay networks.

Event and  data stream processing (Nesime Tatbul)

The evolution of computer units (e.g. PC, PDA, smart phones, and sensors) combined with networks capabilities (wired and wireless) allows developing applications where data is naturally distributed in our surrounding space. Databases are replaced by data spaces. Have to be taken into account (1) the mobility of data and users in spatio-temporal environments; (2) the existence of many data or event streams, continuously produced by different kinds of sensors and to be processed in real time. These sensors cover a wide spectrum, from satellites to smart labels (RFID). Processing data & event streams appears in many applications: e-commerce, B2B, supply-chain, network monitoring, traffic control, analysis of banking transactions, health monitoring, seismic, etc.

Privacy aware data management and Information security (Pierangela Samarati)

Ambient Intelligence relies on the idea of a pervasive and unobtrusive type of intelligence, seamlessly supporting the different activities and interactions of users acting within a controlled environment.  Due to the huge amount of personal information about users that is therefore collected and disseminated, personal information privacy is becoming an issue that most people are concerned about, particularly because the possibilities of information distribution, combination, and reuse have been increased. Regardless of her awareness of the ambient, the user should then be able to specify how much information should be available to whom, and new privacy-aware data management techniques should be developed for guaranteeing the desired level of privacy of information exchanged between different parties.

Middleware for ambient computing (Ichiro Satoh)

Ambient computing is sensitive and responsive to changes in the real world and in the presence of people.  Middleware is a key technology in ambient computing, because it manages numerous computing devices and sensors, monitors contextual information about the physical world acquired via sensors, and provide a variety of services according to the information.  This lecture presents several background of middleware for ambient computing, e.g., sensor network management, context modeling, service discovery, and service provision, and surveys current research trends in middleware for ambient computing.

ERC-funded project (Alessandro Cami, Davide Frey, Marie-Christine Rousset)

The SeCo, WebDam, and GOSSPLE advanced grants given by ERC in Computer science will be presented during a special session of the EBDT Summer Summer school.