333 research outputs found

    e-Business challenges and directions: important themes from the first ICE-B workshop

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    A three-day asynchronous, interactive workshop was held at ICE-B’10 in Piraeus, Greece in July of 2010. This event captured conference themes for e-Business challenges and directions across four subject areas: a) e-Business applications and models, b) enterprise engineering, c) mobility, d) business collaboration and e-Services, and e) technology platforms. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods were used to gather, organize and evaluate themes and their ratings. This paper summarizes the most important themes rated by participants: a) Since technology is becoming more economic and social in nature, more agile and context-based application develop methods are needed. b) Enterprise engineering approaches are needed to support the design of systems that can evolve with changing stakeholder needs. c) The digital native groundswell requires changes to business models, operations, and systems to support Prosumers. d) Intelligence and interoperability are needed to address Prosumer activity and their highly customized product purchases. e) Technology platforms must rapidly and correctly adapt, provide widespread offerings and scale appropriately, in the context of changing situational contexts

    User privacy risks and protection in WLAN-based indoor positioning

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    Using location-based services (LBS) is the new trend for mobile users. LBS mostly exploit GPS and WLAN infrastructures for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively, in order to determine a user's location. After a location is known to a LBS, the network can provide location related contextual information such as nearby events, places, or navigation for the mobile users. Currently, LBS have been specically growing rapidly in the domain of indoor positioning as more public places, e.g. schools, shopping centers, and airports are being equipped with WLAN networks. The aforementioned situation leads to the fact that huge amount of tracking data gets possessed by a wide variety of different LBS and it poses the risk of location privacy violation of citizens. The problem is not only that this information reveals the places that a person has visited, but that it can also expose their behaviors and habits to the LBS and associated third parties. The conditions exacerbate as there are no appropriate regulations on how the tracking data is used by the LBS. In addition, the LBS data servers are under constant attacks by third parties who seek to access this kind of valuable data. Furthermore, the private sector has initiated the tracking of their customers in such places as shopping malls by means of simply collecting their MAC addresses. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the literature part of this thesis, different indoor positioning techniques, location privacy leaks, and the solutions to tackle the problem will be explained. In the second part, we show practical implementation examples about how and at what extent a user may be positioned by the network, based simply on the mobile MAC address or using jointly MAC and signal strength information

    Privacy-preserving and fraud-resistant targeted advertising for mobile devices

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    Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) enables Ad-Networks to capitalize on the popularity of digital Publishers in order to target users with contextaware promotional materials from Advertisers. OBA has been shown to be very effective at engaging consumers but at the same time presents severe privacy and security threats for both users and Advertisers. Users view OBA as intrusive and are therefore reluctant to share their private data with Ad-Networks. In many cases this results in the adoption of anti-tracking tools and ad-blockers which reduces the system's performance. Advertisers on their part are susceptible to financial fraud due to Ad-Reports that do not correspond to real consumer activity. Consequently, user privacy is further violated as Ad-Networks are provoked into collecting even more data in order to detect fictitious Ad-Reports. Researchers have mostly approached user privacy and fraud prevention as separate issues while ignoring how potential solutions to address one problem will effect the other. As a result, previously proposed privacy-preserving advertising systems are susceptible to fraud or fail to offer fine-grain targeting which makes them undesirable by Advertisers while systems that focus on fraud prevention, require the collection of private data which renders them as a threat for users. The aim of our research is to offer a comprehensive solution which addresses both problems without resulting in a conflict of interest between Advertisers and users. Our work specifically focuses on the preservation of privacy for mobile device users who represent the majority of consumers that are targeted by OBA. To accomplish the set goal, we contribute ADS+R (Advert Distribution System with Reporting) which is an innovative advertising system that supports the delivery of personalized adverts as well as the submission of verifiable Ad-Reports on mobile devices while still maintaining user privacy. Our approach adopts a decentralized architecture which connects mobile users and Advertisers over a hybrid opportunistic network without the need for an Ad-Network to operate as administrative authority. User privacy is preserved through the use of peer-to-peer connections (serving as proxy connections), Anonymous- download technologies and cryptography, while Advertiser fraud is prevented by means of a novel mechanism which we termed Behavioural Verification. Behavioural Verification combines client-side processing with a blockchaininspired construction which enables Advertisers to certify the integrity of Ad-Reports without exposing the identity of the submitting mobile users. In comparison to previously proposed systems, ADS+R provides both (1) user privacy and (2) advert fraud prevention while allowing for (3) a tunable trade-off between resource consumption and security, and (4) the statistical analysis and data mining of consumer behaviours

    Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

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    Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

    Creation of value with open source software in the telecommunications field

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    Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

    Privacidade em comunicaçÔes de dados para ambientes contextualizados

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    Doutoramento em InformĂĄticaInternet users consume online targeted advertising based on information collected about them and voluntarily share personal information in social networks. Sensor information and data from smart-phones is collected and used by applications, sometimes in unclear ways. As it happens today with smartphones, in the near future sensors will be shipped in all types of connected devices, enabling ubiquitous information gathering from the physical environment, enabling the vision of Ambient Intelligence. The value of gathered data, if not obvious, can be harnessed through data mining techniques and put to use by enabling personalized and tailored services as well as business intelligence practices, fueling the digital economy. However, the ever-expanding information gathering and use undermines the privacy conceptions of the past. Natural social practices of managing privacy in daily relations are overridden by socially-awkward communication tools, service providers struggle with security issues resulting in harmful data leaks, governments use mass surveillance techniques, the incentives of the digital economy threaten consumer privacy, and the advancement of consumergrade data-gathering technology enables new inter-personal abuses. A wide range of fields attempts to address technology-related privacy problems, however they vary immensely in terms of assumptions, scope and approach. Privacy of future use cases is typically handled vertically, instead of building upon previous work that can be re-contextualized, while current privacy problems are typically addressed per type in a more focused way. Because significant effort was required to make sense of the relations and structure of privacy-related work, this thesis attempts to transmit a structured view of it. It is multi-disciplinary - from cryptography to economics, including distributed systems and information theory - and addresses privacy issues of different natures. As existing work is framed and discussed, the contributions to the state-of-theart done in the scope of this thesis are presented. The contributions add to five distinct areas: 1) identity in distributed systems; 2) future context-aware services; 3) event-based context management; 4) low-latency information flow control; 5) high-dimensional dataset anonymity. Finally, having laid out such landscape of the privacy-preserving work, the current and future privacy challenges are discussed, considering not only technical but also socio-economic perspectives.Quem usa a Internet vĂȘ publicidade direccionada com base nos seus hĂĄbitos de navegação, e provavelmente partilha voluntariamente informação pessoal em redes sociais. A informação disponĂ­vel nos novos telemĂłveis Ă© amplamente acedida e utilizada por aplicaçÔes mĂłveis, por vezes sem razĂ”es claras para isso. Tal como acontece hoje com os telemĂłveis, no futuro muitos tipos de dispositivos elecĂłnicos incluirĂŁo sensores que permitirĂŁo captar dados do ambiente, possibilitando o surgimento de ambientes inteligentes. O valor dos dados captados, se nĂŁo for Ăłbvio, pode ser derivado atravĂ©s de tĂ©cnicas de anĂĄlise de dados e usado para fornecer serviços personalizados e definir estratĂ©gias de negĂłcio, fomentando a economia digital. No entanto estas prĂĄticas de recolha de informação criam novas questĂ”es de privacidade. As prĂĄticas naturais de relaçÔes inter-pessoais sĂŁo dificultadas por novos meios de comunicação que nĂŁo as contemplam, os problemas de segurança de informação sucedem-se, os estados vigiam os seus cidadĂŁos, a economia digital leva ĂĄ monitorização dos consumidores, e as capacidades de captação e gravação dos novos dispositivos eletrĂłnicos podem ser usadas abusivamente pelos prĂłprios utilizadores contra outras pessoas. Um grande nĂșmero de ĂĄreas cientĂ­ficas focam problemas de privacidade relacionados com tecnologia, no entanto fazem-no de maneiras diferentes e assumindo pontos de partida distintos. A privacidade de novos cenĂĄrios Ă© tipicamente tratada verticalmente, em vez de re-contextualizar trabalho existente, enquanto os problemas actuais sĂŁo tratados de uma forma mais focada. Devido a este fraccionamento no trabalho existente, um exercĂ­cio muito relevante foi a sua estruturação no Ăąmbito desta tese. O trabalho identificado Ă© multi-disciplinar - da criptografia Ă  economia, incluindo sistemas distribuĂ­dos e teoria da informação - e trata de problemas de privacidade de naturezas diferentes. À medida que o trabalho existente Ă© apresentado, as contribuiçÔes feitas por esta tese sĂŁo discutidas. Estas enquadram-se em cinco ĂĄreas distintas: 1) identidade em sistemas distribuĂ­dos; 2) serviços contextualizados; 3) gestĂŁo orientada a eventos de informação de contexto; 4) controlo de fluxo de informação com latĂȘncia baixa; 5) bases de dados de recomendação anĂłnimas. Tendo descrito o trabalho existente em privacidade, os desafios actuais e futuros da privacidade sĂŁo discutidos considerando tambĂ©m perspectivas socio-econĂłmicas

    Strategies of newsroom convergence: comparing UK and Chinese newspaper groups

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    This research examines media integration in China, choosing two Chinese newspaper groups as cases for comparative study. The study analyses the convergence strategies of these Chinese groups by reference to an Role Model of convergence developed from a literature review of studies of cases of media convergence in the UK – in particular the Guardian (GNM), Telegraph Media Group (TMG), the Daily Mail and the Times. UK cases serve to establish the characteristics, causes and consequences of different forms of convergence and formulate a model of convergence. The model will specify the levels of newsroom convergence and the sub-units of analysis which will be used to collect empirical data from Chinese News Organisations and compare their strategies, practices and results with the UK experience. The literature review shows that there is a need for more comparative studies of media convergence strategy in general, and particularly in relation to Chinese media. Therefore, the study will address a gap in the understanding of media convergence in China. For this reason, my innovations have three folds: Firstly, to develop a new and comprehensive model of media convergence and a detailed understanding of the reasons why media companies pursue differing strategies in managing convergence across a wide range of units of analysis. Secondly, this study tries to compare the multimedia strategies of media groups under radically different political systems. Since, there is no standard research method or systematic theoretical framework for the study of Newsroom Convergence, this study develops an integrated perspective. The research will use the triangulation analysis of textual, field observation and interviews to explain systematically what was the newsroom structure like in the past and how did the copy flow change and why. Finally, this case study of media groups can provide an industrial model or framework for the other media groups
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