Eavesdropping Whilst You're Shopping: Balancing Personalisation and Privacy in Connected Retail Spaces

Physical retailers, who once led the way in tracking with loyalty cards and `reverse appends', now lag behind online competitors. Yet we might be seeing these tables turn, as many increasingly deploy technologies ranging from simple sensors to advanced emotion detection systems, even enabling them to tailor prices and shopping experiences on a per-customer basis. Here, we examine these in-store tracking technologies in the retail context, and evaluate them from both technical and regulatory standpoints. We first introduce the relevant technologies in context, before considering privacy impacts, the current remedies individuals might seek through technology and the law, and those remedies' limitations. To illustrate challenging tensions in this space we consider the feasibility of technical and legal approaches to both a) the recent `Go' store concept from Amazon which requires fine-grained, multi-modal tracking to function as a shop, and b) current challenges in opting in or out of increasingly pervasive passive Wi-Fi tracking. The `Go' store presents significant challenges with its legality in Europe significantly unclear and unilateral, technical measures to avoid biometric tracking likely ineffective. In the case of MAC addresses, we see a difficult-to-reconcile clash between privacy-as-confidentiality and privacy-as-control, and suggest a technical framework which might help balance the two. Significant challenges exist when seeking to balance personalisation with privacy, and researchers must work together, including across the boundaries of preferred privacy definitions, to come up with solutions that draw on both technology and the legal frameworks to provide effective and proportionate protection. Retailers, simultaneously, must ensure that their tracking is not just legal, but worthy of the trust of concerned data subjects.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the PETRAS/IoTUK/IET Living in the Internet of Things Conference, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 March 201

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

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

Eye Tracking Support for Visual Analytics Systems

Visual analytics (VA) research provides helpful solutions for interactive visual data analysis when exploring large and complex datasets. Due to recent advances in eye tracking technology, promising opportunities arise to extend these traditional VA approaches. Therefore, we discuss foundations for eye tracking support in VA systems. We first review and discuss the structure and range of typical VA systems. Based on a widely used VA model, we present five comprehensive examples that cover a wide range of usage scenarios. Then, we demonstrate that the VA model can be used to systematically explore how concrete VA systems could be extended with eye tracking, to create supportive and adaptive analytics systems. This allows us to identify general research and application opportunities, and classify them into research themes. In a call for action, we map the road for future research to broaden the use of eye tracking and advance visual analytics

An Ecological Approach to Smart Homes for Health Care Services: Conceptual Framework of a Smart Servicescape Wheel

Background: Smart homes are considered effective solutions for home health care for the elderly, as smart home technologies can reduce care costs and improve elderly residents' independence. To develop a greater understanding of smart homes for health care services (SHHSs), this study accentuated the necessity of ecological approaches with an emphasis on environmental constraints. This study was based on 2 rationales: (1) users are inclined to perceive the service quality and service experience from environments (ie, servicescape) owing to the intangibility of health care and the pervasiveness of smart home technologies, and (2) both service domains are complex adaptive systems in which diversified and undefined service experiences-not only a few intended service flows-can be generated by complex combinations of servicescape elements. Objective: This study proposed the conceptual framework of a Smart Servicescape Wheel (SSW) as an ecological approach delineating the extensive spectrum of environmental constraints in SHHSs. Methods: The SSW framework was established based on a literature review. Results: Generally divided by perceptible and imperceptible servicescapes, the SSW consists of the perceptible Physical scape (ie, hardware components, environmental cues, and human states) and Social scape (ie, service relationships and social relationships) as well as the imperceptible Datascape (ie, computing intelligence, databases, and communication networks). Following the ecological approach, each category of the SSW is subdivided and defined at the level of components or functions. Conclusions: The SSW's strengths lie in the various application opportunities for SHHSs. In terms of service planning and development, the SSW can be utilized to (1) establish the requirements for SHHS development, (2) associate with work domain analysis by defining component layers, and (3) understand the real contexts of SHHSs for the enhanced prediction of diverse service experiences. Regarding service management, it can be applied to develop measurement items for the operation and evaluation of SHHSs.This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea under grant NRF-2017S1A5A8019275. This fund has no specific role or influence in the research process

Information and communication technology solutions for outdoor navigation in dementia

INTRODUCTION: Information and communication technology (ICT) is potentially mature enough to empower outdoor and social activities in dementia. However, actual ICT-based devices have limited functionality and impact, mainly limited to safety. What is an ideal operational framework to enhance this field to support outdoor and social activities? METHODS: Review of literature and cross-disciplinary expert discussion. RESULTS: A situation-aware ICT requires a flexible fine-tuning by stakeholders of system usability and complexity of function, and of user safety and autonomy. It should operate by artificial intelligence/machine learning and should reflect harmonized stakeholder values, social context, and user residual cognitive functions. ICT services should be proposed at the prodromal stage of dementia and should be carefully validated within the life space of users in terms of quality of life, social activities, and costs. DISCUSSION: The operational framework has the potential to produce ICT and services with high clinical impact but requires substantial investment

ILR Research in Progress 2006-07

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.Research_in_Progress_2006_07.pdf: 18 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020