Using Technology Enabled Qualitative Research to Develop Products for the Social Good, An Overview

This paper discusses the potential benefits of the convergence of three recent trends for the design of socially beneficial products and services: the increasing application of qualitative research techniques in a wide range of disciplines, the rapid mainstreaming of social media and mobile technologies, and the emergence of software as a service. Presented is a scenario facilitating the complex data collection, analysis, storage, and reporting required for the qualitative research recommended for the task of designing relevant solutions to address needs of the underserved. A pilot study is used as a basis for describing the infrastructure and services required to realize this scenario. Implications for innovation of enhanced forms of qualitative research are presented

Using Ubicomp systems for exchanging health information : considering trust and privacy issues

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will trust such systems and at the same time achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios. This research project investigates the concepts of trust and privacy issues specifically related to the exchange of health, financial, shopping and e-voting information when using AmI system. The method used in the study and findings related to the health scenario will be discussed in this paper and discussed in terms of motivation and social implications

Embodiment, Cognition and the World Wide Web

Cognitive embodiment refers to the hypothesis that cognitive processes of all kinds are rooted in perception and action. Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience revealed that the motor cortex, long confined to the mere role of action programming and execution, in fact, plays a crucial role in complex cognitive abilities

Exploration of location-based services adoption

As mobile technologies become more ubiquitous in the general population, it is reasonable to assume that individuals will consume services and software to enhance their aspirations and entertainment desires. This paper discusses a controlled experiment to explore aspects of user perceptions of their use of location-based services. This study examines a location-based service prototype experiment and analysis based on the UTAUT model. The results show significant indicators that suggest behavior patterns of early adopters of location-based services are being observed. We discuss these influences and attempt to explain their significance. Moreover, more curiously we discuss why some of our model was unsupported and postulate why

POEM: Pricing Longer for Edge Computing in the Device Cloud

Multiple access mobile edge computing has been proposed as a promising technology to bring computation services close to end users, by making good use of edge cloud servers. In mobile device clouds (MDC), idle end devices may act as edge servers to offer computation services for busy end devices. Most existing auction based incentive mechanisms in MDC focus on only one round auction without considering the time correlation. Moreover, although existing single round auctions can also be used for multiple times, users should trade with higher bids to get more resources in the cascading rounds of auctions, then their budgets will run out too early to participate in the next auction, leading to auction failures and the whole benefit may suffer. In this paper, we formulate the computation offloading problem as a social welfare optimization problem with given budgets of mobile devices, and consider pricing longer of mobile devices. This problem is a multiple-choice multi-dimensional 0-1 knapsack problem, which is a NP-hard problem. We propose an auction framework named MAFL for long-term benefits that runs a single round resource auction in each round. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed auction mechanism outperforms the single round by about 55.6% on the revenue on average and MAFL outperforms existing double auction by about 68.6% in terms of the revenue.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Accepted by the 18th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP