With the support of the regional public transport operator, this paper explores the potential for mobile games to make journeys on public transport more enjoyable. To this end we have developed a game called Bus Runner which is a context-aware endless runner, based on open and shared data. By blending features of the physical world, such as recognisable landmarks, with the game’s virtual world, we situate and enhance passengers’ experience of travelling on public transport. We identify a set of challenges and opportunities based on the development and evaluation of Bus Runner. These are of relevance not only for game development purposes, but also impact context-driven content generation of infotainment services as a whole.

Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) with verification and validation (VV) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. For example, weak communication of requirements changes to testers may result in lack of verification of new requirements and incorrect verification of old invalid requirements, leading to software quality problems, wasted effort and delays. However, despite the serious implications of weak alignment research and practice both tend to focus on one or the other of RE or VV rather than on the alignment of the two. We have performed a multi-unit case study to gain insight into issues around aligning RE and VV by interviewing 30 practitioners from 6 software developing companies, involving 10 researchers in a flexible research process for case studies. The results describe current industry challenges and practices in aligning RE with VV, ranging from quality of the individual RE and VV activities, through tracing and tools, to change control and sharing a common understanding at strategy, goal and design level. The study identified that human aspects are central, i.e. cooperation and communication, and that requirements engineering practices are a critical basis for alignment. Further, the size of an organisation and its motivation for applying alignment practices, e.g. external enforcement of traceability, are variation factors that play a key role in achieving alignment. Our results provide a strategic roadmap for practitioners improvement work to address alignment challenges. Furthermore, the study provides a foundation for continued research to improve the alignment of RE with VV.

The Internet of Things (IoT) unleashes great opportunities to improve our way of living and working through a seamless and highly dynamic cooperation among heterogeneous things including both computer-based systems and physical objects. However, properly dealing with the design, development, deployment and runtime management of IoT applications means to provide solutions for a multitude of challenges related to intelligent distributed systems within the IoT. In this paper we propose Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) as a key enabler for applications running on intelligent distributed loT systems. MDE helps in tackling challenges and supporting the lifecycle of such systems. Specifically, we introduce MDE4IoT, an MDE approach enabling the modelling of things and supporting intelligence as self-adaptation of Emergent Configurations in the IoT. Moreover, we show how MDE, and in particular MDE4IoT, can help in tackling several challenges by providing the Smart Street Lights concrete case.

Understanding and managing complex systems has become one of the biggest challenges for research, policy and industry. Modeling and simulation of complex systems promises to enable us to understand how a human nervous system and brain not just maintain the activities of a metabolism, but enable the production of intelligent behavior, how huge ecosystems adapt to changes, or what actually influences climatic changes. Also man-made systems are getting more complex and difficult, or even impossible, to grasp. Therefore we need methods and tools that can help us in, for example, estimating how different infrastructure investments will affect the transport system and understanding the behavior of large Internet-based systems in different situations. This type of system is becoming the focus of research and sustainable management as there are now techniques, tools and the computational resources available. This chapter discusses modeling and simulation of such complex systems. We will start by discussing what characterizes complex systems.

Social phenomena simulation in the area of agent-based modeling and simulation concerns the emulation of the individual behavior of a group of social entities, typically including their cognition, actions, and interaction.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Practical Applications of Scalable Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2017, held in Porto, Portugal, in June 2017.The 11 revised full papers, 11 short papers, and 17 Demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers report on the application and validation of agent-based models, methods, and technologies in a number of key application areas, including day life and real world, energy and networks, human and trust, markets and bids, models and tools, negotiation and conversation, scalability and resources.  

Agile software development principles enable companies to successfully and quickly deliver software by meeting their customers' expectations while focusing on high quality. Many companies working with pure software systems have adopted these principles, but implementing them in companies dealing with non-pure software products is challenging. We identified a set of goals and practices to support large-scale agile development in companies that develop software-intense mechatronic systems. We used an inductive approach based on empirical data collected during a longitudinal study with six companies in the Nordic region. The data collection took place over two years through focus group workshops, individual on-site interviews, and complementary surveys. The primary benefit of large-scale agile development is improved quality, enabled by practices that support regular or continuous integration between teams delivering software, hardware, and mechanics. In this regard, the most beneficial integration cycle for deliveries is every four weeks; while continuous integration on a daily basis would favor software teams, other disciplines does not seem to benefit from faster integration cycles. We identified 108 goals and development practices supporting agile principles among the companies, most of them concerned with integration; therefrom, 26 agile practices are unique to the mechatronics domain to support adopting agile beyond pure software development teams. 16 of these practices are considered as key enablers, confirmed by our control cases.

Online controlled experiments (for example A/B tests) are increasingly being performed to guide product development and accelerate innovation in online software product companies. The benefits of controlled experiments have been shown in many cases with incremental product improvement as the objective. In this paper, we demonstrate that the value of controlled experimentation at scale extends beyond this recognized scenario. Based on an exhaustive and collaborative case study in a large software-intensive company with highly developed experimentation culture, we inductively derive the benefits of controlled experimentation. The contribution of our paper is twofold. First, we present a comprehensive list of benefits and illustrate our findings with five case examples of controlled experiments conducted at Microsoft. Second, we provide guidance on how to achieve each of the benefits. With our work, we aim to provide practitioners in the online domain with knowledge on how to use controlled experimentation to maximize the benefits on the portfolio, product and team level.

Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research and Support (PELARS) is a project about learning and making. The PELARS project finds ways of generating "analytics" (data about the learning process and analysis of this data), which helps learners and teachers by providing feedback from hands-on, project-based and experiential learning situations. In this paper, we present our proposal for improving analytics education with hands-on, project-based and experimental scenarios for engineering students. This is done through teacher and learner engagement, user studies and evaluated trials, performed at UCV (University of Craiova, Romania) and DTU Diplom (Technical University of Denmark, Campus Ballerup, Denmark). The PELARS project provides technological tools and ICT-based methods for collecting activity data ( moving image-based and embedded sensing) for learning analytics (data-mining and reasoning) of practice-based and experiential STEM.

In this paper, we present our body-and-mind-centric approach for the design of wearable personal assistants (WPAs) motivated by the fact that such devices are likely to play an increasing role in everyday life. We also report on the utility of such a device for orthopedic surgeons in hospitals. A prototype of the WPA was developed on Google Glass for supporting surgeons in three di↵erent scenarios: (1) touch-less interaction with medical images, (2) tele-presence during surgeries, and (3) mobile access to Electronic Patient Records (EPR) during ward rounds. We evaluated the system in a clinical simulation facility and found that while the WPA can be a viable solution for touch-less interaction and remote collaborations during surgeries, using the WPA in the ward rounds might interfere with social interaction between clinicians and patients. Finally, we present our ongoing exploration of gaze and gesture as alternative input modalities for WPAs inspired by the hospital study.

Previous work on eye tracking and eye-based human-computer interfaces mainly concentrated on making use of the eyes in traditional desktop settings. With the recent growth of interest in wearable computers, such as smartwatches, smart eyewears and low-cost mobile eye trackers, eye-based interaction techniques for mobile computing are becoming increasingly important. PETMEI 2016 focuses on the pervasive eye tracking paradigm as a trailblazer for mobile eye-based interaction to take eye tracking out into the wild, to mobile and pervasive settings. We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of these communities with respect to the implications, key research challenges, and new applications for pervasive eye tracking in ubiquitous computing. The long-term goal is to create a strong interdisciplinary research community linking these fields together and to establish the workshop as the premier forum for research on pervasive eye tracking.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global net- work of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. How- ever, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT sys- tems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous ’things’ in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can ex- hibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users’ requirements. To this end, contextu- alisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user’s interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users’ intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.

Current interaction options with smartphones are limited. In this paper, we present four experiments that we conducted and our initial findings. Our experimenting process was analyzed together with Dourish’s work on tangible and embodied interaction and we gained insights to better understand the meaning behind smartphone interactions. This sets a foundation for discovering new ways to interact with smartphones in the future such as touch-less, eyes free or haptic interaction.

The rapidly growing use of mobile technologies has increased pressure on the demand for mobile-based data collection solutions to bridge the information gaps in the public health sector. In this paper, a prototype for mobile health data collection (MHDK) is proposed. MHDK is built based on open source data collection frameworks. The proposed prototype offers ways of collecting health data through mobile phones and visualizes the collected data in a web application. The evaluation of the prototype seems to show the feasibility of mobile technologies, particularly open source technologies, in improving the health data collection and reporting systems for the developing world. The use of cellular phones for public health service monitoring and evaluation is therefore one of the most promising developments in the quest to achieve improved public health services.