Context awareness is important for many cooperation and coordination scenarios in ad hoc mobile environments. Developing context-aware applications in a dynamic and volatile ad hoc mobile setting is a complex task. The goal of this work is to investigate implications of ad hoc mobility on application design and development, to explore design principles and general design frameworks, and to deliver a middleware to facilitate application development for ad hoc mobile systems. The middleware aims to provide a set of toolkits and spatiotemporal services for efficient and reliable information discovery and dissemination in ad hoc mobile environments.  We believe this research effort will result in new insights, algorithms and design principles much needed in this area.

One recent “by-product” of this research is the just-in-time spatiotemporal multicast mechanism we propose for space and time aware applications on large scale sensor and mobile ad hoc networks.

Each year in the United States alone, motor vehicle crashes account for about 40,000 deaths, more than three million injuries, and over $130 billion in financial losses. The statistics is similar in European Union (42,500 death, 3.5 million injuries and 160 billion euro loss).

This research, in collaboration with the Ford Motor Company, aims to develop a new generation of intelligent transportation system including a vehicle collision warning system and an intelligent traffic control system, as the means to improve traffic safety.  The peer-to-peer vehicle collision warning system we propose uses motion profile sensors and wireless communication to enable vehicles to share safety critical information with others in proximity which, in turn, makes it possible for collective safety assessment among the vehicles. This system has the advantage of not requiring line-of-sight for threat assessment, which is a limitation of many other collision warning systems that are based on radar, sonar, or laser for threat assessment.  We have also recently designed and developed a reliable wireless traffic signaling system for driver assistance in low visibility driving conditions caused by glare, fog, smoke or others and for color blind people by turning the signals into in-vehicle sounds.