A Calculus of Mobility and Communication for Ubiquitous Computing

We propose a Calculus of Mobility and Communication (CMC) for the modelling of mobility, communication and context-awareness in the setting of ubiquitous computing. CMC is an ambient calculus with the in and out capabilities of Cardelli and Gordon's Mobile Ambients. The calculus has a new form of global communication similar to that in Milner's CCS. In CMC an ambient is tagged with a set of ports that agents executing inside the ambient are allowed to communicate on. It also has a new context-awareness feature that allows ambients to query their location. We present reduction semantics and labelled transition system semantics of CMC and prove that the semantics coincide. A new notion of behavioural equivalence is given by defining capability barbed bisimulation and congruence which is proved to coincide with barbed bisimulation congruence. The expressiveness of the calculus is illustrated by two case studies.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Exploring the Experiences of Call Center Employees Regarding Business Scripting

Scripting, defined as the mechanization of business processes through automated tools or orchestrated responses, has played a significant role in shaping call center activities and the resultant customer relationship. However, findings of industry research have shown that the use of scripting to maximize operational efficiency has had a disempowering effect on call center employees by lowering their job-skill and knowledge requirements. Grounded in the concepts of knowledge management and knowledge transfer, this study explored the experiences of frontline call center employees on the effects of scripting on customer problem solving. A single-case study design with semistructured interviews was used with a population of 20 frontline employees in a North American call center to gather insights. Thematic analysis was applied to the interview data using nodes to identify emerging themes and insights. Three major themes emerged: First, although scripting had contributed to improved service quality and operational efficiency, scripted practices undermined the use of team knowledge and limited the amount of shared information. Second, the employees requested that call center scripted solutions be more intuitive and better aligned to knowledge requirements. Third, the employees suggested that an object-oriented approach to solution management be used, one that could better leverage communities of practices and collective team knowledge sharing within the organization. This object-oriented approach to solution management may promote virtual knowledge flow and the building of subject matter expertise that could elicit higher agent engagement and problem ownership. The proposed object-oriented approach to knowledge sharing is important to management, as it could help facilitate knowledge reuse and improved organizational performance

AGENT-BASED, CONTEXT-AWARE INFORMATION SHARING FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE

International audienceIn a future vision of Ambient Intelligence - or AmI - our surrounding environment will integrate a pervasive, interconnected network of sensors, intelligent appliances and computer-like devices. This implies, on the one hand, hardware and interface related issues, and, on the other hand, a layer of context-aware services that manages the large quantities of information generated throughout a system formed mostly of devices with limited capabilities. This paper presents the first steps toward the realization of the AmIciTy framework: a multi-agent system that relies on local interaction and the self-organization of agents, having as purpose the context-aware sharing of pieces of information. The paper presents the structure of the system, the design of the agents, the manner of building scenarios, experiments and the evaluation of a prototype