Faculty Profile

Professor: Digital Media, Graduate School

Jianhua MA

• Doctor of Information Engineering

Research area:

• Ubiquitous Network and Computing
• Smart Object, Space and Service
• Autonomic and Trusted System

Related site:

• http://cis.k.hosei.ac.jp/~jianhua/

Personal Statement

Prior to joining Hosei University in 2000, I had 15 years' teaching and/or research experiences at NUDT, Xidian University, and The University of Aizu. My research from 1983 to 2003 covered coding techniques for wireless communications, data transmission security, speech recognition and synthesis, multimedia QoS, 1-to-m HC hyper-interface, graphics rendering, e-learning, virtual university, CSCW, multi-agents, Internet audio and video, mobile web service, P2P network, etc. Since 2003 my main research has been ubiquitous network and computing with emphases on smart u-things (real everyday objects and environments with attached/embedded/blended computers) towards Smart Worlds (SW) and Ubiquitous Intelligence (UI) or Pervasive Intelligence (PI). I have published over 130 articles, gotten 6 excellent paper awards, and received 3 appreciation certificates from IEEE Computer Society. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence (JUCI), Journal of Mobile Multimedia (JMM), and Journal of Autonomic and Trusted Computing (JoATC), respectively, and the Assistant Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications (JPCC).

Message

Corresponding to the mainframe and PC waves occurred in the last century, the ubiquitous computing is generally regarded as the 3rd wave undergoing since 21st century, and another profound revolution in the computer history. Furthermore, ubiquitous computers and networks are paving a road towards a smart world (SW) in which various computers and computational intelligence are embedded into everyday objects, our workplaces, our homes and even ourselves, to provide novel services to people anywhere anytime. This ubiquitous intelligence (UI) will change the computing landscape because it will enable new breeds of applications.

To design and develop such new kind of intelligent ubiquitous systems and applications, students must greatly extend their views about computing systems from popular PCs to many different forms and sizes of computers and devices that are distributed in ambient physical environment, and work collaboratively with adapting to users’ needs and surrounding situations. Students are welcome joining our MUSE Lab (Multimedia Ubiquitous Smart Environment Laboratory) to use various computers and devices including PDA, robot, sensor, RFID and so on, study advanced networking technologies for communications between ubiquitous devices, acquire wide knowledge on multimedia context-aware systems, and develop smart/intelligent ubiquitous objects, spaces and services.

Teaching Courses

Research Area

Research Motivation

"Towards Smart Worlds and Ubiquitous Intelligence"

Computers are becoming available anytime and anywhere in many different forms. They are distributed ubiquitously, pervasively and unobtrusively throughout the everyday environments in forms of small or large, visible or invisible, attached or embedded or blended, simple or complex, and so on. Wired or wireless networks connect these computers locally or globally, coordinated or ad hoc, continuously or intermittently, etc. Ubiquitous computing and networking has created tremendous opportunities to provide numerous novel services and applications that are built in both the real world and cyber worlds. Increasingly, all of us will live in a real-cyber integrated world in which countless physical objects including human bodies will be armed with computers and networks.

Ubiquitous computing is primarily for physical things in the real world and their function/service enhancement or extension by adding computing abilities of information sense, communication and processing to them. The real physical things are called u-things, as opposed to pure virtual e-things, if they are attached, embedded or blended with computers, networks, sensors, actors, IC-tags and so on. Smart u-things are ones that can, more or less, sense, communicate, compute, and/or take some human-like actions automatically according to their goals, situated contexts, users’ needs, etc.

Ubiquitous intelligence (UI, u-intelligence) is focused on various kinds/levels of computation intelligence of the smart u-things as well as their related technologies and applications in the real world. By embedding digital intelligence in everyday objects, our workplaces, our homes and even ourselves, many tasks and processes could be simplified, made more efficient, safer and more enjoyable. The research of mine and our MUSE Lab is to study and develop ubiquitous smart/intelligent environments including smart u-objects and smart u-spaces to make innovative context-aware u-services towards the smart worlds and ubiquitous intelligence.

Ubiquitous Networking and Communication

Enable talking between real objects

One of fundamental features in the ubiquitous world is that a great number and variety of computers will be used, and many of small ubiquitous devices such as RFID and sensors can be resided in the various real objects and distributed to our surrounding environments. They often work interactively and cooperatively to complete specified tasks. To support the interaction and cooperation between the objects/devices, they must be first able to communicate to each other. However, the main difficulty to realize ubiquitous object-to-object communications is the great heterogeneity among different kinds of hardware, software and networks used by different devices, or embedded into various ubiquitous objects. Therefore, this research is to build a common scalable communication platform to cover the heterogeneity so as to enable all these devices and objects, no matter what kinds of computers and networks are used, can find, communicate and thus talk to each other in flexible interconnection modes of P2P, server-client, hierarchy, etc.

Smart Object, Space and Service

Embed intelligence to real objects and spaces

This research is mainly focused on various intelligent environments including smart objects and smart spaces to offer innovative ubiquitous services to users in their daily lives. We have equipped different computers (servers, gateways, PCs, PDAs and cell phones) and many devices (robots, cameras, microphones, speakers, IC-tags, RFID, GPS, various sensors, etc.) in our laboratory, and interconnected them via wired/wireless communication networks as a general testbed to develop specific smart ubiquitous applications. The multimedia row data acquired from these devices is further processed to get users’ and surrounding contextual information, i.e., 5Ws - who, where, when, what and why, existing in some environments such as a home, an office, a classroom, a kindergarten, a hospital, a vehicle, a road, etc. The context information processing is based on the research of associative semantics models and intelligent algorithms for information perception, cognition, analysis, reasoning and anticipation. With knowing context situations about users and environments, smart objects/spaces can take proper responses/actions to optimally serve users in right time, right place and right means.

Autonomic and Trusted System

Make self-manageable and safe ubiquitous systems

A ubiquitous system is often composed of many computers and devices, and thus is too complex to be managed by human users especially for non-expert people. When a ubiquitous system is deployed to an everyday environment such as a home and used by ordinary family members, it is almost impossible to manage the system by such people. Therefore, ubiquitous systems must be autonomic, i.e., self-manageable, and exhibit self-awareness, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protection and other self-x operations to the maximum extent possible without human intervention. Any autonomic system must be also trustworthy to avoid the risk of losing control and retain confidence that the system will not fail. Since a ubiquitous system involves many components with complex interactions and serves different users from very young children to elder people, a small event or mistake occurring somewhere may generate a sequence of cascaded events or consequences to others, and possibly make users unsafe or the whole system in trouble. This research is to make ubiquitous systems that are manageable by themselves, and at the same time are always safe to all users under all situations.