Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practice

Supervisor virtual machine for VoLTE service on a cloud environment

With the continuing growth of Voice of Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) networks, coupled with the need of Mobile Operators to reduce maintenance costs, Cloud Service deployment is becoming a common application. This study was designed to create a method capable of improving the Operations and Monitoring activities of a VoLTE service that is deployed on a Cloud platform. In this study, we present contents referring to the constituent elements of a VoLTE network, and we review in detail the features of the Telephony Application Server. For this study, TAS used was the Open TAS. Also included in this study is a generic explanation of Cloud Openstack’s behavior. The presented method implies the creation of a virtual machine Supervisor and its deployment in Cloud. This virtual machine is capable of establishing SSH connections with open TAS to extract the Clear Codes report, which identifies the state with which calls were terminated for analysis. The virtual machine contains defined limits, which check if they have been exceeded. If this a limit is excited, the virtual machine notifies the system operator of an incident. This study presents the possibilities of implementation in a Cloud environment, to improve and automate Operations and Maintenance functions in the Telecommunications network.Com o crescimento contínuo das redes de Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE), juntamente com a necessidade de redução de custo de manutenção pelos Operadores Móveis, a implementação do Serviço em Cloud começa a ser uma aplicação comum. Este estudo foi elaborado com o intuito de criar um método capaz de melhorar as atividades de Operações e Monitorização de um serviço de VoLTE, que esteja implementado numa plataforma Cloud. Neste estudo, encontram-se presentes conteúdos referentes aos elementos constituintes de uma rede de VoLTE, e é revisto em detalhe as funcionalidades do Telephony Application Server. Para este estudo, o TAS utilizado foi o open TAS. Neste estudo, igualmente é incluído uma explicação genérica do comportamento da Cloud Openstack. O método apresentado implica criação de uma máquina virtual Supervisor e da sua implementação na Cloud. Esta máquina virtual é capaz de estabelecer ligações SSH com o open TAS, de modo a extrair o relatório de Clear Codes, que identifica o estado com que as chamadas foram finalizadas, para proceder a análises. A máquina virtual contém limites definidos, os quais verifica se foram excedidos. Caso este evento seja verificado, notificam o operador do sistema para um incidente. Esta é uma proposta que apresenta as possibilidades de implementação num ambiente de Cloud, em melhorar e automatizar as funções de Operações e Manutenção na rede de Telecomunicações

Stay Tuned: Whether Cloud-Based Service Providers Can Have Their Copyrighted Cake and Eat It Too

Copyright owners have the exclusive right to perform their works publicly and the ability to license their work to others who want to share that right. Subsections 106(4) and (5) of the Copyright Act govern this exclusive public performance right, but neither subsection elaborates on what constitutes a performance made “to the public” versus one that remains private. This lack of clarity has made it difficult for courts to apply the Copyright Act consistently, especially in the face of changing technology. Companies like Aereo, Inc. and AereoKiller, Inc. developed novel ways to transmit content over the internet to be viewed instantly by their subscribers and declined to procure the licenses that would have been required if these transmissions were being made “to the public.” However, while these companies claimed that their activities were outside of the purview of § 106(4) and (5), their rivals, copyright owners, and the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Likening Aereo to a cable company for purposes of § 106(4) and (5), the Supreme Court determined that the company would need to pay for the material it streamed. Perhaps more problematic for Aereo (and other similar companies) is the fact that the Court declined to categorize Aereo as an actual cable company, such that it would qualify to pay compulsory licensing fees—the more affordable option given to cable companies under § 111—to copyright holders. This Comment shows that, while the Court correctly ruled that companies like Aereo and AereoKiller should pay for the content transmitted, its failure to address whether Aereo is a cable company could frustrate innovation to the detriment of the public. It suggests, therefore, that these companies should be required to pay for the content that they transmit in the same way that cable companies do until Congress develops another system

The latest frontiers for financial inclusion: Using mobile phones to reach the unbanked

The goal of community development should be to improve the lives of as many disadvantaged people as possible with a minimum amount of resources. The field can achieve this goal by identifying those community development projects that are both efficient and have significant social impacts, and then scaling up. However, without effective evaluations, it is impossible to gauge progress. Effective evaluations include randomized experiments and well-designed observational studies, both of which can measure the impact to society. This article analyzes the best evaluation methods in international development, including examples of evaluation toolkits, with the aim of helping community development practitioners apply the methods to projects in the United States. The article also includes steps and recommendations to increase the quantity and quality of evaluations for community development projects.Unbanked

Indoor Mobile Positioning Using Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic Control

Indoor mobile navigation systems are becoming more prevalent in many areas (transport, public institutions, logistics, etc.). The interior navigation based on the access points, arranged according to the radio fingerprints, is becoming increasingly popular. The model of artificial neural networks (ANN) is often used as a mechanism for storing and processing radio fingerprints. The task of selection of the access point in WLAN network in the case of high user density is quite topical. Such selection must take into account not only the level of the signal received by the mobile device, but also a width in the dedicated channel bandwidth. The main issues related to the creation of program complex for the mobile indoors navigation using neural networks is discussed in the chapter as well as the method of access point selection based on analysis not only the signal level but also the other parameters. To solve this task, fuzzy logic is used

An empirical study on Marketing strategy of telecom sector in Gujarat State

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