Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

Potential mass surveillance and privacy violations in proximity-based social applications

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and used to build a sense of serendipitous discovery of people, places and interests. Unfortunately, while this class of applications opens different interactions possibilities for people in urban settings, obtaining access to certain identity information could lead a possible privacy attacker to identify and follow a user in their movements in a specific period of time. The same information shared through the platform could also help an attacker to link the victim's online profiles to physical identities. We analyse a set of popular dating application that shares users relative distances within a certain radius and show how, by using the information shared on these platforms, it is possible to formalise a multilateration attack, able to identify the user actual position. The same attack can also be used to follow a user in all their movements within a certain period of time, therefore identifying their habits and Points of Interest across the city. Furthermore we introduce a social attack which uses common Facebook likes to profile a person and finally identify their real identity

Social dynamics in conferences: analyses of data from the Live Social Semantics application

Popularity and spread of online social networking in recent years has given a great momentum to the study of dynamics and patterns of social interactions. However, these studies have often been confined to the online world, neglecting its interdependencies with the offline world. This is mainly due to the lack of real data that spans across this divide. The Live Social Semantics application is a novel platform that dissolves this divide, by collecting and integrating data about people from (a) their online social networks and tagging activities from popular social networking sites, (b) their publications and co-authorship networks from semantic repositories, and (c) their real-world face-to-face contacts with other attendees collected via a network of wearable active sensors. This paper investigates the data collected by this application during its deployment at three major conferences, where it was used by more than 400 people. Our analyses show the robustness of the patterns of contacts at various conferences, and the influence of various personal properties (e.g. seniority, conference attendance) on social networking patterns

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing

Towards a Cloud-Based Service for Maintaining and Analyzing Data About Scientific Events

We propose the new cloud-based service OpenResearch for managing and analyzing data about scientific events such as conferences and workshops in a persistent and reliable way. This includes data about scientific articles, participants, acceptance rates, submission numbers, impact values as well as organizational details such as program committees, chairs, fees and sponsors. OpenResearch is a centralized repository for scientific events and supports researchers in collecting, organizing, sharing and disseminating information about scientific events in a structured way. An additional feature currently under development is the possibility to archive web pages along with the extracted semantic data in order to lift the burden of maintaining new and old conference web sites from public research institutions. However, the main advantage is that this cloud-based repository enables a comprehensive analysis of conference data. Based on extracted semantic data, it is possible to determine quality estimations, scientific communities, research trends as well the development of acceptance rates, fees, and number of participants in a continuous way complemented by projections into the future. Furthermore, data about research articles can be systematically explored using a content-based analysis as well as citation linkage. All data maintained in this crowd-sourcing platform is made freely available through an open SPARQL endpoint, which allows for analytical queries in a flexible and user-defined way.Comment: A completed version of this paper had been accepted in SAVE-SD workshop 2017 at WWW conferenc