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Intelligible TinyOS Sensor Systems: Explanations for Embedded Software

  • Conference paper
Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6967))

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Abstract

As embedded sensing systems are central to developing pervasive, context-aware services, the applications running on these systems should be intelligible to system programmers and to users. Given that sensor systems are programmed in low-level languages, manually writing high-level explanations about their decision model requires knowledge about the system architecture, and is error-prone. We explore the possibility of extracting explanations which are small and expressive, but still preserve bit-level accuracy when needed. We contribute a tool which automatically and soundly generates compact, graphical explanations from sensor software implementation at compile-time. We base our algorithm on the techniques of (i) finite-state machine model extraction from software as used in model checking, and (ii) abstraction of program execution traces. We experiment with extracting explanations from heavyweight, low-level TinyOS applications for a mainstream sensor platform.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Innovation Centre for Advanced Sensors and Sensor Systems (INCAS3), The Netherlands

    Doina Bucur

Authors
  1. Doina Bucur
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. TecO/Pervasive Computing Systems, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Am Fasanengarten 5, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Michael Beigl  & Hedda R. Schmidtke  & 

  2. Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University, P.O. box 260, 4000, Roskilde, Denmark

    Henning Christiansen

  3. Institut für Informatik, AG Erklärungsfähige Softwaresystems, Universität Hildesheim, Marienburger Platz 22, 31141, Hildesheim, Germany

    Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer

  4. Department of Computer and Information Science, Intelligent Systems Group, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Sem Saelandsvei 7-9,, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Anders Kofod-Petersen

  5. Cognition and Communication Research Centre, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK

    Kenny R. Coventry

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bucur, D. (2011). Intelligible TinyOS Sensor Systems: Explanations for Embedded Software. In: Beigl, M., Christiansen, H., Roth-Berghofer, T.R., Kofod-Petersen, A., Coventry, K.R., Schmidtke, H.R. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6967. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24279-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24279-3_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24278-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24279-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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