Conceptual model of persuasive multimedia content (PMC) for social media advertising of island homestays

This study encompasses the development and application of a conceptual model for social media advertising of island homestays. Findings through observation and two preliminary studies found that the use of advertising without suitable models, approaches, or strategies could lead the homestay industry into failure in terms of attracting potential customers. It is because relying on traditional advertising alone is no longer adequate. The majority of homestay operators were lack of advertising and promotion strategies. Thus, they wished to endeavor alternative strategy of advertising that can help them to improve their income performance. They believed that advertising through social media is a useful way to transform business by engaging with customers. Hence, this study proposes a conceptual model that embedded persuasive multimedia content (PMC) into advertisement. The main aim of this study is development of a conceptual model of PMC for social media advertising of island homestays. This is supported by four sub-objectives: (i) identification of the suitable components and elements for the conceptual model, (ii) development of the conceptual model of PMC, (iii) validation of the proposed conceptual model through expert review and prototyping, and (iv) measurement of the effectiveness of the prototype. The identified components and elements of the PMC were inserted into a diagram to form a conceptual model. Then, the conceptual model went through two validation processes by seven expert reviewers. For advertisement content creation, the conceptual model was applied into the advertisement content of island homestays to produce persuasive advertisement. The prototype of island homestay advertisement was uploaded on the island homestay‟s Facebook page. Paper-based and online questionnaires were distributed to measure the effectiveness of the advertisement. The technique used was copy-testing where 169 Facebook users viewed the island homestay advertisements and gave their response through the questionnaires. The results of the analysis showed that the application of the PMC were significant in influencing social media users‟ attitude. Dimension of advertisement content effect and persuasive multimedia that was correlated with other four dimensions are (i) attitude toward advertised brand, (ii) awareness of persuasive intent, (iii) attitude toward advertisement, and (iv) purchase intention, significantly effective in influencing their attitude toward island homestays. This is because homestay advertisements have attracted respondents‟ attention and persuaded them. They had positive tendency to experience the lifestyle in island homestays

Contributions to enterprise content management and qualitative and quantitative decision support

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A framework for QoS driven user-side cloud service management

This thesis presents a comprehensive framework that assists the cloud service user in making cloud service management decisions, such as service selection and migration. The proposed framework utilizes the QoS history of the available services for QoS forecasting and multi-criteria decision making. It then integrates all the inherent necessary processes, such as QoS monitoring, forecasting, service comparison and ranking to recommend the best and optimal decision to the user

Analysis and Design of Privacy-Enhancing Information Sharing Systems

Recent technological advancements have enabled the collection of large amounts of personal data of individuals at an ever-increasing rate. Service providers, organisations and governments can collect or otherwise acquire rich information about individuals’ everyday lives and habits from big data-silos, enabling profiling and micro-targeting such as in political elections. Therefore, it is important to analyse systems that allow the collection and information sharing between users and to design secure and privacy enhancing solutions. This thesis contains two parts. The aim of the first part is to investigate in detail the effects of the collateral information collection of third-party applications on Facebook. The aim of the second part is to analyse in detail the security and privacy issues of car sharing systems and to design a secure and privacy-preserving solution. In the first part, we present a detailed multi-faceted study on the collateral information collection privacy issues of Facebook applications; providers of third-party applications on Facebook exploit the interdependency between users and their friends. The goal is to (i) study the existence of the problem, (ii) investigate whether Facebook users are concerned about the issue, quantify its (iii) likelihood and (iv) impact of collateral information collection affecting users, (v) identify whether collateral information collection is an issue for the protection of the personal data of Facebook users under the legal framework, and (vi) we propose solutions that aim to solve the problem of collateral information collection. In order to investigate the views of the users, we designed a questionnaire and collected the responses of participants. Employing real data from the Facebook third-party applications ecosystem, we compute the likelihood of collateral information collection affecting users and quantify its significance evaluating the amount of attributes collected by such applications. To investigate whether collateral information collection is an issue in terms of users’ privacy we analysed the legal framework in light of the General Data Protection Regulation. To provide countermeasures, we propose a privacy dashboard extension that implements privacy scoring computations to enhance transparency towards collateral information collection

Mass Customization of Cloud Services - Engineering, Negotiation and Optimization

Several challenges hinder the entry of mass customization principles into Cloud computing: Firstly, the service engineering on provider side needs to be automated. Secondly, there has to be a suitable negotiation mechanism helping provider and consumer on finding an agreement on Quality-of-Service and price. Thirdly, finding the optimal configuration requires adequate and efficient optimization techniques. The work at hand addresses these challenges through technical and economic contributions

The platform as ecosystem: Configurations and dynamics of governance and power

Digital ‘platforms’ owned and operated by powerful Big Tech companies have shaped and impacted social, economic, and political life in significant ways. Yet, platforms remain an ambiguous phenomenon. What exactly are these platforms? How can we identify and understand the features of their power? The platform as ecosystem explains how not merely the platforms themselves but especially their larger ‘ecosystems’ are important for understanding the unique features of platform governance and power. Platform ecosystems have become the dominant technological, organisational, and governance model for digital platforms over the past fifteen years. These ecosystems comprise many different types of users including end-consumers, software developers, marketers and advertisers, and business partners who build software tools, products, and services of their own ‘on top’ of the interfaces provided and controlled by leading platforms. These users each help build and expand platform ecosystems while negotiating governance and control by central platforms. This dissertation examines different aspects of platform ecosystems to determine how platforms’ material foundations or infrastructures relate to governance and power. It develops several novel empirical and historical approaches for studying the distinct material and relational features of digital platform ecosystems. This reveals how platforms derive considerable power from their ecosystems and provides unique empirical and historical insights into the technological, organisational, and evolutionary features of platform (and mobile app) ecosystems. These approaches and insights are relevant to digital media and platform researchers and help policymakers, regulators, and authorities worldwide dealing with the challenges of governing digital economies and societies

WSN based sensing model for smart crowd movement with identification: a conceptual model

With the advancement of IT and increase in world population rate, Crowd Management (CM) has become a subject undergoing intense study among researchers. Technology provides fast and easily available means of transport and, up-to-date information access to the people that causes crowd at public places. This imposes a big challenge for crowd safety and security at public places such as airports, railway stations and check points. For example, the crowd of pilgrims during Hajj and Ummrah while crossing the borders of Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To minimize the risk of such crowd safety and security identification and verification of people is necessary which causes unwanted increment in processing time. It is observed that managing crowd during specific time period (Hajj and Ummrah) with identification and verification is a challenge. At present, many advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) are being used to solve the crowed management problem with minimal processing time. In this paper, we have presented a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based conceptual model for smart crowd movement with minimal processing time for people identification. This handles the crowd by forming groups and provides proactive support to handle them in organized manner. As a result, crowd can be managed to move safely from one place to another with group identification. The group identification minimizes the processing time and move the crowd in smart way

Descriptive business process models at run-time

Today's competitive markets require organisations to react proactively to changes in their environment if financial and legal consequences are to be avoided. Since business processes are elementary parts of modern organisations they are also required to efficiently adapt to these changes in quick and flexible ways. This requirement demands a more dynamic handling of business processes, i.e. treating business processes as run-time artefacts rather than design-time artefacts. One general approach to address this problem is provided by the community of [email protected], which promotes methodologies concerned with self-adaptive systems where models reflect the system's current state at any point in time and allow immediate reasoning and adaptation mechanisms. However, in contrast to common self-adaptive systems the domain of business processes features two additional challenges: (i) a bigger than usual abstraction gap between the business process models and the actual run-time information of the enterprise system and (ii) the possibility of run-time deviations from the planned models. Developing an understanding of such processes is a crucial necessity in order to optimise business processes and dynamically adapt to changing demands. This thesis explores the potential of adopting and enhancing principles and mechanisms from the [email protected] domain to the business process domain for the purpose of run-time reasoning, i.e. investigating the potential role of Descriptive Business Process Models at Run-time (DBPMRTs) in the business process management domain. The DBPMRT is a model describing the enterprise system at run-time and thus enabling higher-level reasoning on the as-is state. Along with the specification of the DBPMRT, algorithms and an overall framework are proposed to establish and maintain a causal link from the enterprise system to the DBPMRT at run-time. Furthermore, it is shown that proactive higher-level reasoning on a DBPMRT in the form of performance prediction allows for more accurate results. By taking these steps the thesis addresses general challenges of business process management, e.g. dealing with frequently changing processes and shortening the business process life cycle. At the same time this thesis contributes to research in [email protected] by providing a complex real-world use case as well as a reference approach for dealing with volatile [email protected] of a higher abstraction level