The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects

Facilitating Mobile Music Sharing and Social Interaction with Push!Music

Push!Music is a novel mobile music listening and sharing system, where users automatically receive songs that have autonomously recommended themselves from nearby players depending on similar listening behaviour and music history. Push!Music also enables users to wirelessly send songs between each other as personal recommendations. We conducted a two-week preliminary user study of Push!Music, where a group of five friends used the application in their everyday life. We learned for example that the shared music in Push!Music became a start for social interaction and that received songs in general were highly appreciated and could be looked upon as ‘treats’

Security by Spatial Reference:Using Relative Positioning to Authenticate Devices for Spontaneous Interaction

Spontaneous interaction is a desirable characteristic associated with mobile and ubiquitous computing. The aim is to enable users to connect their personal devices with devices encountered in their environment in order to take advantage of interaction opportunities in accordance with their situation. However, it is difficult to secure spontaneous interaction as this requires authentication of the encountered device, in the absence of any prior knowledge of the device. In this paper we present a method for establishing and securing spontaneous interactions on the basis of emphspatial references that capture the spatial relationship of the involved devices. Spatial references are obtained by accurate sensing of relative device positions, presented to the user for initiation of interactions, and used in a peer authentication protocol that exploits a novel mechanism for message transfer over ultrasound to ensures spatial authenticity of the sender

Mobslinger: The Fastest Mobile in the West.

Whilst there is a number of location sensing games emerging for mobile phones, from both commercial and academic sectors, there are few examples of social proximity based games that are effectively position independent. Bluetooth would seem an obvious choice for proximity based games, although the majority of games produced to-date simply uses it to provide a quasi peer to peer connection between users of multiplayer games. This is no-doubt due to the fact that proximity can often be implied from other location sensing technologies and that Bluetooth is often perceived as difficult to employ. In this paper we will show that Bluetooth can provide exciting game scenarios that can enable spontaneous stimulated social interaction using only proximity information. We illustrate this through the design rationale and subsequent implementation of ‘mobslinger’ which is a wild west, quick draw, ‘shoot-em-up’ game using mobile phones

Mobile language learning now and in the future

The widespread ownership of mobile devices such as cellphones, personal media players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and wireless laptops means that ‘mobile learning’ is no longer in the preserve of technical experts and researchers with specialist knowledge. Teachers and learners have begun to integrate mobile technologies into everyday practices and there is evidence of efforts to invent exciting new scenarios of use. Language learning is one of the disciplines that looks set to benefit from these developments. Learners can make good use of the facilities to record and to listen to audio at any time, supported by the rising availability of podcasts and the ‘always on’ characteristics of portable devices which encourage spontaneous interactions. Mobile learning promises to deliver closer integration of language learning with everyday communication needs and cultural experiences

Some Inquiries to Spontaneous Opinions: A case with Twitter in Indonesia \ud

The paper discusses opportunities to utilize the series of micro-blogs as provided by the Twitter in observation of opinion dynamics. The spontaneity of tweets is more, as the service is attached more to the mobile communications. The extraction of information in the series of tweets is demonstrated as in conceptual map and mention map. From the latter, the social network stylized properties, i.e.: power law distribution is shown. The exemplification of the methodology is on the 82nd commemoration of Indonesian Youth Pledge and the participatory movement of Indonesian capitol city, Jakarta