This paper motivates and describes the notion of mobile ad-hoc information systems. Such a system consists of a decentralized and self-organizing network of autonomous, mobile devices that interact as peers. Connectivity is determined by distance between devices; as hosts change their physical location they establish pair-wise communication links based on mutual proximity. We describe application scenarios for mobile ad-hoc information systems and identify technical challenges of a generic software infrastructure. Moreover, we present the goals and architecture of Proem, a peer-to-peer system and development platform for mobile ad-hoc applications. Proem has successfully been used as instructional tool in an advanced software engineering course on peer-to-peer computing.

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This paper describes a framework for managing and distributing trust information in a community of mobile and wearable computer users. Trust information in the form of reputations are used to aid users during their social interactions with the rest of the community.

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This paper introduces the notion of a Wearable Community as a group of wearable users who cooperate for their mutual benefit. In such a community, wearable computers act as personal agents on behalf of and in the interest of their 'owners'. These agents are goal-directed and will perform a broad array of tasks for the user, ranging from personal scheduling to task planning. We describe how personal wearable agents can be used to enable goal directed cooperation during physical encounters of people with selfish and conflicting goals, such that cooperation leads to mutually beneficial results. We discuss negotiation protocols, and describe the design and implementation of a wearable agent system, as well as a simulator for large-scale wearable communities.@en

There is a growing interest in a class of systems having dynamic and adaptable properties. In this paper we discuss our work on one subclass of such systems, that of wearable computers. In particular, our interest is in the software organization necessary to build wearable computing systems. We will examine some of the key properties of such a software organization such as the ability to rapidly and dynamically reconfigure software to meet both physical changes and information changes of the wearable system. This has lead us to study a middleware layer for a wearable system that supports dynamic reconfiguration. The middleware approach is studied in the context of the NETMAN - a network maintenance assistant. Current results from the system evaluations and the final system requirements and open issues are presented.@en