1,330 research outputs found
An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile
This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications
Demonstrating the feasibility of standardized application program interfaces that will allow mobile/portable terminals to receive services combining UMTS and DVB-T
Crucial to the commercial exploitation of any service combining UMTS and DVB-T is the availability of standardized APIâs adapted to the hybrid UMTS and DVB-T network and to the technical limitations of mobile/portable terminals. This paper describes work carried out in the European Commission Framework Program 5 (FP5) project CONFLUENT to demonstrate the feasibility of such Application Program Interfaces (APIâs) by enabling the reception of a Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) based application transmitted over DVB-T on five different terminals with parts of the service running on a mobile phone
A mobile tour guide app for sustainable tourism
Portugal has had a flourishing tourism sector for the past few years. In fact, Portugalâs tourism
boom has made the industry one of the biggest contributors to the national economy and the
largest employer. In the year 2019, Portugal had a total of 27 million tourists, surpassing once
again the record established in the previous year. However, tourism also brings a series of
unintended negative side effects, such as overcrowding. The Santa Maria Maior historic district
in Lisbon is being particularly affected by this problem.
The work undertaken in this dissertation is part of the Sustainable Tourism Crowding project,
that aims to mitigate the overcrowding phenomenon in this district, by fostering a balanced
distribution of visitors while promoting the visitation of sustainable points of interest. This
dissertation focuses on developing a mobile app prototype targeted at tourists, through which
these sustainable walking tour recommendations can be delivered.
To validate the functional requirements of the prototype, more specifically the trip creation
process, a series of unit tests, integration tests, and manual tests were developed. To evaluate
the usability of the prototype, a user-centered approach was adopted during the design stage,
in which two usability techniques were conducted with members of ISCTEâs research center
ISTAR and partners from the Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, that guided and validated
the decisions made.
The achieved prototype contains mechanisms for measuring touristsâ adherence to the
recommended tours using the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm, which raises new research
opportunities on touristsâ behaviour.O desenvolvimento prĂłspero do setor turĂstico em Portugal nos Ășltimos anos fez da indĂșstria
um dos maiores contribuintes para a economia nacional e o maior empregador do paĂs. No ano
de 2019, Portugal recebeu um total de 27 milhÔes de turistas, ultrapassando uma vez mais uma
vez o recorde estabelecido no ano anterior. No entanto, o turismo traz também uma série de
efeitos secundĂĄrios negativos nĂŁo intencionais, tais como overcrowding. A freguesia histĂłrica de
Santa Maria Maior em Lisboa estĂĄ a ser particularmente afetada por este problema.
O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação faz parte do projeto de pesquisa Sustainable
Tourism Crowding, que visa mitigar o fenĂłmeno de overcrowding nesta freguesia, promovendo
uma distribuição equilibrada dos visitantes e incentivando a visita de pontos de interesse
sustentåveis. Esta dissertação foca-se no desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel protótipo
destinada a turistas, através do qual recebem recomendaçÔes de visitas sustentåveis.
Para validar os requisitos funcionais do protĂłtipo, mais especificamente o processo de
criação de visitas, foram desenvolvidos testes unitårios, testes de integração, e testes manuais.
Para avaliar a usabilidade do protĂłtipo, foi adotada uma abordagem centrada no utilizador
durante a fase de conceção, em que foram utilizadas duas técnicas de usabilidade em parceria
com o ISTAR (centro de investigação do ISCTE) e com a Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria
Maior, cujos resultados guiaram e validaram as decisÔes tomadas.
O protĂłtipo desenvolvido contĂ©m mecanismos para medir a aderĂȘncia dos turistas Ă s recomendaçÔes
sugeridas através do algoritmo Dynamic Time Warping, proporcionando novas
oportunidades de pesquisa nesta ĂĄrea
Continuous Authentication for Voice Assistants
Voice has become an increasingly popular User Interaction (UI) channel,
mainly contributing to the ongoing trend of wearables, smart vehicles, and home
automation systems. Voice assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana, have
become our everyday fixtures, especially in scenarios where touch interfaces
are inconvenient or even dangerous to use, such as driving or exercising.
Nevertheless, the open nature of the voice channel makes voice assistants
difficult to secure and exposed to various attacks as demonstrated by security
researchers. In this paper, we present VAuth, the first system that provides
continuous and usable authentication for voice assistants. We design VAuth to
fit in various widely-adopted wearable devices, such as eyeglasses,
earphones/buds and necklaces, where it collects the body-surface vibrations of
the user and matches it with the speech signal received by the voice
assistant's microphone. VAuth guarantees that the voice assistant executes only
the commands that originate from the voice of the owner. We have evaluated
VAuth with 18 users and 30 voice commands and find it to achieve an almost
perfect matching accuracy with less than 0.1% false positive rate, regardless
of VAuth's position on the body and the user's language, accent or mobility.
VAuth successfully thwarts different practical attacks, such as replayed
attacks, mangled voice attacks, or impersonation attacks. It also has low
energy and latency overheads and is compatible with most existing voice
assistants
Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications
As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements
Location based services with personal area network for community and tourism applications
The Infopoint Explorer is an outdoor wireless personal area network for location-based services that allows users to access locality information interactively using mobile computing devices such as PDAs and smartphones. The Infopoint explorer was used to study the limitations imposed by inexpensive and popular wireless technologies such as Bluetooth for outdoor location-based services. The Infopoint Explorer functioned as a multimedia guidebook that allowed access to location-specific information using wireless Infopoints. The Infopoints detect and attempt to transfer multimedia content to nearby mobile computing devices using Bluetooth connectivity. An adaptive Bluetooth Inquiry Access Code algorithm was developed to reduce the time taken for the Infopoint to detect nearby devices. The Infopoint was deployed for a four-month trial
A Context-based framework for mobile applications
Mobile applications have become commonplace in the past few years. In domains such as healthcare, app user experience becomes even more critical. If healthcare apps are not user friendly, patients simply stop using them, or worse still, they may use these apps with disastrous consequences. One approach to improving app user experience is to keep track of mobile context, which is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity, where an entity can be a person, place, or object. In this thesis, a system was designed using the following features. Relevant, context-based alerts are provided to the users via the mobile application. The mobile context of the user is tracked completely automatically. Alerts prompt the user to interact with an underlying information system and also improve the user\u27s domain knowledge of the system. A proof of concept was constructed for the healthcare domain. Existing literature shows that user experience of apps is improved by ensuring the existence of the following features: Implicitly sensed contexts, providing the right information at the right time and reduction of user-input requirement. To establish the improvement in the user experience of the system, the features were measured against the research recommendations from existing literature. Based on these measurements and analysis, the hypothesis that the quality of user experience can be enhanced using context is found to be valid
- âŠ