2018 Volume 26 Pages 486-496
Aware agents (A-agents) are programs that can be aware of various situations and support human decisions. The aim of this study is to implement A-agents on portable/wearable computing devices (P/WCDs) like smartphones. Since P/WCDs usually have limited resources, it is difficult to implement many A-agents together in one P/WCD. Cloud-based system is a solution, but this kind of system has privacy problem. To use a cloud server while preserving privacy, we propose a new protocol that has four features, namely, 1) divide each A-agent into two parts, and implement the computationally expensive part using the cloud server; 2) encrypt the data before sending them to the server; 3) share the same black-box computing model on the server side by various A-agents; and 4) make the final decisions on the P/WCD side with selected results obtained from the server. Experimental results show that the performance of the A-agents does not change significantly even if they share the same black-box model. In addition, the P/WCD can be more energy efficient. Therefore, the proposed protocol can be very useful for improving the usability of P/WCDs.
