Factors influencing adoption and diffusion of mobile payment systems - a holistic framework

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Mobile devices have a potential to become ideal payment devices because they are small, light, personal, convenient, and many people carry them anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices have a number of connectivity options, and their own display and input capabilities. They are already widely used around the world. Mobile payments, despite their potential, have not reached the expected adoption levels. While there may be many reasons for this, previous research focused on few topics only, mainly technology and consumers. The main aim of this study was to find out what is necessary to improve adoption and diffusion of mobile payments. Specific objectives that were proposed to help achieve this aim included: a) identifying all the factors that may influence adoption and diffusion of mobile payments, b) integrating such factors and relations between them in a holistic framework, and c) providing specific recommendations and guidelines in all the various perspectives. Grounded theory was the methodology employed to fulfil these objectives. Qualitative approach was found to be most suitable to this study, and open- ended Web surveys, as well as various kinds of interviews, including email, face-to-face, phone, and focus groups managed to obtain detailed, in-depth information from industry and user participants. The main contribution of this study is the holistic theoretical framework that explains the specific factors that influence adoption and diffusion of mobile payments, provides interesting findings on each of the identified factors, and at the same time integrates such investigations together as one coherent whole that forms a roadmap of success factors for mobile payments. Some of the discovered factors have not been proposed before at all. Some others have been proposed in fragmented explanations that focused on several influences only. Other factors have been proposed before but this study offered more accurate or understandable interpretations or names for them. In addition, this project integrated all the factors together in a holistic framework, pointing out all the important contexts and conditions that providers need to understand and fulfil. Another contribution is a multitude of specific guidelines and recommendations that have been discovered in the participants' data. This study, unlike some other mobile payment projects, additionally devoted much attention to studying mobile payments in relation to other payment methods. The proposed theory with its well explained success factors can be used by providers to improve their current systems or better design new mobile payment initiatives

Properties and algorithms of the (n, k)-star graphs

The (n, k)-star interconnection network was proposed in 1995 as an attractive alternative to the n-star topology in parallel computation. The (n, k )-star has significant advantages over the n-star which itself was proposed as an attractive alternative to the popular hypercube. The major advantage of the (n, k )-star network is its scalability, which makes it more flexible than the n-star as an interconnection network. In this thesis, we will focus on finding graph theoretical properties of the (n, k )-star as well as developing parallel algorithms that run on this network. The basic topological properties of the (n, k )-star are first studied. These are useful since they can be used to develop efficient algorithms on this network. We then study the (n, k )-star network from algorithmic point of view. Specifically, we will investigate both fundamental and application algorithms for basic communication, prefix computation, and sorting, etc. A literature review of the state-of-the-art in relation to the (n, k )-star network as well as some open problems in this area are also provided

A Sustainable Autonomic Architecture for Organically Reconfigurable Computing Systems

A Sustainable Autonomic Architecture for Organically Reconfigurable Computing System based on SRAM Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is proposed, modeled analytically, simulated, prototyped, and measured. Low-level organic elements are analyzed and designed to achieve novel self-monitoring, self-diagnosis, and self-repair organic properties. The prototype of a 2-D spatial gradient Sobel video edge-detection organic system use-case developed on a XC4VSX35 Xilinx Virtex-4 Video Starter Kit is presented. Experimental results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed architecture and provide the infrastructure to quantify the performance and overcome fault-handling limitations. Dynamic online autonomous functionality restoration after a malfunction or functionality shift due to changing requirements is achieved at a fine granularity by exploiting dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (PR) techniques. A Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based hardware/software platform for intrinsic evolvable hardware is designed and evaluated for digital circuit repair using a variety of well-accepted benchmarks. Dynamic bitstream compilation for enhanced mutation and crossover operators is achieved by directly manipulating the bitstream using a layered toolset. Experimental results on the edge-detector organic system prototype have shown complete organic online refurbishment after a hard fault. In contrast to previous toolsets requiring many milliseconds or seconds, an average of 0.47 microseconds is required to perform the genetic mutation, 4.2 microseconds to perform the single point conventional crossover, 3.1 microseconds to perform Partial Match Crossover (PMX) as well as Order Crossover (OX), 2.8 microseconds to perform Cycle Crossover (CX), and 1.1 milliseconds for one input pattern intrinsic evaluation. These represent a performance advantage of three orders of magnitude over the JBITS software framework and more than seven orders of magnitude over the Xilinx design flow. Combinatorial Group Testing (CGT) technique was combined with the conventional GA in what is called CGT-pruned GA to reduce repair time and increase system availability. Results have shown up to 37.6% convergence advantage using the pruned technique. Lastly, a quantitative stochastic sustainability model for reparable systems is formulated to evaluate the Sustainability of FPGA-based reparable systems. This model computes at design-time the resources required for refurbishment to meet mission availability and lifetime requirements in a given fault-susceptible missions. By applying this model to MCNC benchmark circuits and the Sobel Edge-Detector in a realistic space mission use-case on Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA, we demonstrate a comprehensive model encompassing the inter-relationships between system sustainability and fault rates, utilized, and redundant hardware resources, repair policy parameters and decaying reparability