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Pervasive computing systems can be modeled effectively as populations of interacting autonomous components. The key challenge to realizing such models is in getting separately-specified and -developed sub-systems to discover and interoperate with each other in an open and extensible way, supported by appropriate middleware services. In this paper, we argue that nature-inspired coordination models offer a promising way of addressing this challenge. We first frame the various dimensions along which nature-inspired coordination models can be defined, and survey the most relevant proposals in the area. We describe the nature-inspired coordination model developed within the SAPERE project as a synthesis of existing approaches, and show how it can effectively support the multifold requirements of modern and emerging pervasive services. We conclude by identifying what we think are the open research challenges in this area, and identify some research directions that we believe are promising.

Social networks are perhaps the purest example of "Web 2.0" services, and offer a sophisticated tool for accessing the preferences and properties of individuals and groups. Thus, they potentially allow up-to-date, richly annotated contextual data to be acquired as a side effect of users' everyday use of the services. In this paper, we explore how such "social sensing" could be integrated into pervasive systems. We frame and survey the possible approaches to such an integration, and eventually discuss the open issues and challenges facing researchers.

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Here we present the overall objectives and approach of the SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) project, focussed on the development of a highly-innovative nature-inspired framework, suited for the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-aware and adaptive pervasive services in future network scenarios

-Web communities are making available an increasing volume of free, fresh, detailed and powerful information about living people. Among them, the Flickr photo-sharing service offers to researchers a database of several millions of geotagged pictures from users all around the world. Working on that opens the door to the study of meaningful mobility data, where title and description of a geotagged picture represent a mine from which extract labels to detect places and events, and useful information about user trends, behaviors and tastes. Our approach goes in the direction of developing an intelligence and unattended system able to extract and take advantage of up-to-date and spontaneous information embedded with pictures, making cities intelligent and able to reach user expectations. Such system, learning from past touristic user experiences, could make customized recommendations on "where to go", and "what to see", to people going to visit touristic places for the first time.

Wireless sensor networks have the potentials to be a very useful technology for fine-grained monitoring in remote and hostile environments. This paper reports on the implementation and deployment of a system for landslide monitoring in the Northern Italy Apennines, and analyzes the positive results we have achieved with it. Yet, the paper also critically analyzes the problems and the inherent limitations/difficulties we had to face in developing and deploying such a system, challenging many of the "big claims" that are often heard around wireless sensor networks.

Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws-based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.