Lifelogging Data Validation Model for Internet of Things enabled Personalized Healthcare

The rapid advance of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology offers opportunities to monitor lifelogging data by a variety of IoT assets, like wearable sensors, mobile apps, etc. But due to heterogeneity of connected devices and diverse life patterns in an IoT environment, lifelogging personal data contains much uncertainty and are hardly used for healthcare studies. Effective validation of lifelogging personal data for longitudinal health assessment is demanded. In this paper, it takes lifelogging physical activity as a target to explore the possibility of improving validity of lifelogging data in an IoT based healthcare environment. A rule based adaptive lifelogging physical activity validation model, LPAV-IoT, is proposed for eliminating irregular uncertainties and estimating data reliability in IoT healthcare environments. In LPAV-IoT, a methodology specifying four layers and three modules is presented for analyzing key factors impacting validity of lifelogging physical activity. A series of validation rules are designed with uncertainty threshold parameters and reliability indicators and evaluated through experimental investigations. Following LPAV-IoT, a case study on an IoT enabled personalized healthcare platform MHA [38] connecting three state-of-the-art wearable devices and mobile apps are carried out. The results reflect that the rules provided by LPAV-IoT enable efficiently filtering at least 75% of irregular uncertainty and adaptively indicating the reliability of lifelogging physical activity data on certain condition of an IoT personalized environment

A scrutable adaptive hypertext

Fuelled by the popularity and uptake of the World Wide Web since the 1990s, many researchers and commercial vendors have focussed on Adaptive Hypermedia Systems as an effective mechanism for disseminating personalised information and services. Such systems store information about the user, such as their goals, interests and background, and use this to provide a personalised response to the user. This technology has been applied to a number of contexts such as education systems, e-commerce applications, information search and retrieval systems. As an increasing number of systems collect and store personal information about their users to provide a personalised service, legislation around the world increasingly requires that users have access to view and modify their personal data. The spirit of such legislation is that the user should be able to understand how personal information about them is used. There literature has reported benefits of allowing users to access and understand data collected about them, particularly in the context of supporting learning through reflection. Although researchers have experimented with open user models, typically the personalisation is inscrutable: the user has little or no visibility in to the adaptation process. When the adaptation produces unexpected results, the user may be left confused with no mechanism for understanding why the system did what it did or how to correct it. This thesis is the next step, giving users the ability to see what has been personalised and why. In the context of personalised hypermedia, this thesis describes the first research to go beyond open, or even scrutable user models; it makes the adaptivity and associated processes open to the user and controllable. The novelty of this work is that a user of an adaptive hypertext system might ask How was this page personalised to me? and is able to see just how their user model affected what they saw in the hypertext document. With an understanding of the personalisation process and the ability to control it, the user is able to steer the personalisation to suit their changing needs, and help improve the accuracy of the user model. Developing an interface to support the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext is difficult. Users may not scrutinise often as it is a distraction from their main task. But when users need to scrutinise, perhaps to correct a system misconception, they need to easily find and access the scrutinisation tools. Ideally, the tools should not require any training and users should be able to use them effectively without prior experience or if have not used them for a long time, since this is how users are likely to scrutinise in practice. The contributions of thesis are: (1) SASY/ATML, a domain independent, reusable framework for creation and delivery of scrutable adaptive hypertext; (2)a toolkit of graphical tools that allow the user to scrutinise, or inspect and understand what personalisation occurred and control it; (3) evaluation of the scrutinisation tools and (4) a set of guidelines for providing support for the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext through the exploration of several forms of scrutinisation tools

Organisational flexibility in an emergent economy

The management literature has claimed that the complexity of business contexts has made firms confront hypercompetitive( D'Aveni, 1994) or high-velocity environments (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997). Behind such claims lies a new interest in the dynamics of adaptation and in particular in a firm's flexibility as a way of adjusting under conditions of uncertainty (Volberda, 1999). This study takes up the challenge of exploring the dynamics of organisational adaptation under the conditions of environmental volatility that characterised Argentina over the period 1989-1999. The empirical focus of the thesis is the study of the determinants of organisational flexibility in four family-owned companies: two flexible and two less flexible from the edible oil industry (i. e., a deregulated industry) and pharmaceutical industry (i. e., an industry in the process of deregulation). By means of an innovative analysis (which includes longitudinal analysis, coding analysis, statistical analysis and the use of original display charts) we were able to show what determines whether an organisation is flexible. The findings of our case study were interrogated and interpreted by developing theoretical ideas from three areas of literature between which historically there has been no interface. These are the literatures on organisational flexibility, organisational innovativeness and institutional embeddedness. In our empirical results we identified five determinants of organisational flexibility as a set of organisational and managerial capabilities that enabled some firms to adapt quickly in a highly competitive environment (i. e., heterogeneity of the dominant coalition, centralisation and formalisation of decision-making, low macroculture embeddedness, environmental scanning, and a strong organisational identity). The study also sheds light on the process of transformation and adaptation of family firms - an area that has not yet been the subject of extensive empirical inquiry (Aronoff and Ward, 1997)

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

Harnessing non-modernity: a case study in artificial life

Artificial Life is a research field which has developed around the use of synthetic artificial systems, mostly robotic and virtual, to investigate the supposed characteristic features of life. The thesis presents a case study of Artificial Life, with the overall objective of understanding some of the cultural, disciplinary and epistemological developments that may be distinctive of research communities who ground their work on a collaborative involvement with non-human simulation models. The study examines the cultural identity of the Artificial Life research community and its knowledgemaking practices, as well as its sustainability strategies into existing institutional contexts. The study aims at being neither an over-localized laboratory micro-study nor an over general macro-study, but tries to situate itself in the mid-range by combining both approaches. It has been conducted through a combination of ethnographical fieldwork and of bibliographical analysis, and places a special focus on the Artificial Life research group at University of Sussex, which has been selected for its centrality in the global Artificial Life landscape

Maschinelles Lernen Bayes'scher Netze in benutzeradaptiven Systemen

Das Thema der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Anwendung existierender sowie die Entwicklung neuer, spezifisch auf den Fall benutzeradaptiver Systeme zugeschnittener, maschineller Lernverfahren für Bayes'sche Netze. Bislang werden die in benutzeradaptiven Systemen eingesetzten Bayes'schen Netze meist manuell—anhand von theoretischen Überlegungen (von Experten)—konstruiert. Es bietet sich an, die im System anfallenden Interaktionsdaten im Rahmen des Konstruktions- bzw. Wartungsprozesses durch die Anwendung entsprechender maschineller Lernverfahren zur Verbesserung der Systemperformanz auszunutzen. Dieser Arbeit liegt eine integrative Konzeption des maschinellen Lernens Bayes';scher Netze für benutzeradaptive Systeme zugrunde, die gemäß den Anforderungen der zu modellierenden Domäne mit alternativen Verfahren instanziiert werden kann. In diesem Rahmen werden in dieser Arbeit neu entwickelte maschinelle Lern- bzw. Adaptionsverfahren für Bayes';sche Netze vorgestellt, die das gemeinsame Ziel verfolgen, die besonderen Eigenschaften und Anforderungen des Benutzermodellierungskontexts während des Lern- bzw. Adaptionsvorgangs zu berücksichtigen. Diese neuen Verfahren werden in vergleichenden Studien mit alternativ einsetzbaren existierenden Methoden des maschinellen Lernens Bayes'scher Netze evaluiertThis thesis focuses on the application of existing and the development of new Bayesian network learning methods that are able to deal with or that can exploit the characteristics of domains of user-adaptive systems. So far, Bayesian networks used by user-adaptive systems have typically been specified manually—on the basis of theoretical considerations (of experts). It seems to be a promising approach to exploit the interaction data that can be collected during the systems'; use through the application of machine learning methods in the design and maintenance phases. We present an integrative generic framework that can be instantiated with alternative methods according to the demands of the domain to be modeled. To this end, new Bayesian network learning and adaptation methods are presented that jointly aim to address adequately the characteristics and demands of the user modeling context during the learning and adaptation processes. These methods are evaluated in comparative empirical studies relative to alternative existing standard Bayesian network learning procedures

A framework to guide the design of environments coupling mobile and situated technologies

An increasing number of devices are being situated in public spaces yet interactions with such devices are problematic: they tend to be impersonal and subject to social apprehension while devices suitable for specific tasks may be difficult to locate. This thesis considers how one might design for these environments to overcome these issues and deliver engaging user experiences. It proposes the coupling of the interactive features of mobile and situated devices to facilitate personalised interactions with those situated devices. The thesis explores coupling techniques that extend the computational capabilities of the situated device through the addition of the input, output and storage capabilities of the mobile device. Finally it considers how multiple points of coupling can be used to link sequences of interactions with different situated devices providing rich, cohesive experiences across an environment. The thesis presents a novel framework that builds upon previous work. Existing work is reviewed that links mobiles with single situated displays, and that uses mobiles for mediating exploration of physical spaces to address the lack of work addressing multiple situated de-vices in public. This review grounds a proposal and elaboration of a core model of interaction within a coupling environment, providing the basis for a design framework. This was sup-ported by the implementation of a test-bed that consisted of six couples in various configura-tions, underpinned by a software infrastructure. Formative user studies refined the framework and revealed novel aspects of the user experi-ence for study. It was found that through support for narrative and personal orchestration, coupling environments afford personalised trajectories. By designing for personal trajectories the visitor has a more enjoyable personal experience and seeks to improve the experiences of others. In addition, coupling environments support social experiences; the step-by-step nature of a visitor’s trajectory through the coupling environment lends itself to gradually introducing visitors to social coupled interaction and reducing social awkwardness

A framework to guide the design of environments coupling mobile and situated technologies

An increasing number of devices are being situated in public spaces yet interactions with such devices are problematic: they tend to be impersonal and subject to social apprehension while devices suitable for specific tasks may be difficult to locate. This thesis considers how one might design for these environments to overcome these issues and deliver engaging user experiences. It proposes the coupling of the interactive features of mobile and situated devices to facilitate personalised interactions with those situated devices. The thesis explores coupling techniques that extend the computational capabilities of the situated device through the addition of the input, output and storage capabilities of the mobile device. Finally it considers how multiple points of coupling can be used to link sequences of interactions with different situated devices providing rich, cohesive experiences across an environment. The thesis presents a novel framework that builds upon previous work. Existing work is reviewed that links mobiles with single situated displays, and that uses mobiles for mediating exploration of physical spaces to address the lack of work addressing multiple situated de-vices in public. This review grounds a proposal and elaboration of a core model of interaction within a coupling environment, providing the basis for a design framework. This was sup-ported by the implementation of a test-bed that consisted of six couples in various configura-tions, underpinned by a software infrastructure. Formative user studies refined the framework and revealed novel aspects of the user experi-ence for study. It was found that through support for narrative and personal orchestration, coupling environments afford personalised trajectories. By designing for personal trajectories the visitor has a more enjoyable personal experience and seeks to improve the experiences of others. In addition, coupling environments support social experiences; the step-by-step nature of a visitor’s trajectory through the coupling environment lends itself to gradually introducing visitors to social coupled interaction and reducing social awkwardness