Asymmetric Peer Influence in Smartphone Adoption in a Large Mobile Network

Understanding adoption patterns of smartphones is of vital importance to telecommunication managers in today’s highly dynamic mobile markets. In this paper, we leverage the network structure and specific position of each individual in the social network to account for and measure the potential heterogeneous role of peer influence in the adoption of the iPhone 3G. We introduce the idea of coreperiphery as a meso-level organizational principle to study the social network, which complements the use of centrality measures derived from either global network properties (macro-level) or from each individual\u27s local social neighbourhood (micro-level). Using millions of call detailed records from a mobile network operator in one country for a period of eleven months, we identify overlapping social communities as well as core and periphery individuals in the network. Our empirical analysis shows that core users exert more influence on periphery users than vice versa. Our findings provide important insights to help identify influential members in the social network, which is potentially useful to design optimal targeting strategies to improve current network-based marketing practices

Mobile Authentication with NFC enabled Smartphones

Smartphones are becoming increasingly more deployed and as such new possibilities for utilizing the smartphones many capabilities for public and private use are arising. This project will investigate the possibility of using smartphones as a platform for authentication and access control, using near field communication (NFC). To achieve the necessary security for authentication and access control purposes, cryptographic concepts such as public keys, challenge-response and digital signatures are used. To focus the investigation a case study is performed based on the authentication and access control needs of an educational institutions student ID. To gain a more practical understanding of the challenges mobile authentication encounters, a prototype has successfully been developed on the basis of the investigation. The case study performed in this project argues that NFC as a standalone technology is not yet mature to support the advanced communication required by this case. However, combining NFC with other communication technologies such as Bluetooth has proven to be effective. As a result, a general evaluation has been performed on several aspects of the prototype, such as cost-effectiveness, usability, performance and security to evaluate the viability of mobile authentication

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

Platform Competition: A Systematic and Interdisciplinary Review of the Literature

Over the past three decades, platform competition—the competition between firms that facilitate transactions and govern interactions between two or more distinct user groups who are connected via an indirect network—has attracted significant interest from the fields of management and organizations, information systems, economics, and marketing. Despite common interests in research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts by scholars from across these fields, the literature has developed mostly in isolated fashion. This article offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on platform competition by analyzing a sample of 333 articles published between 1985 and 2019. The review contributes by (a) documenting how the literature on platform competition has evolved; (b) outlining four themes of shared scholarly interest, including how network effects generate “winner-takes-all” dynamics that influence strategies, such as pricing and quality; how network externalities and platform strategy interact with corporate-level decisions, such as vertical integration or diversification into complementary goods; how heterogeneity in the platform and its users influences platform dynamics; and how the platform “hub” orchestrates value creation and capture in the overall ecosystem; and (c) highlighting several areas for future research. The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of the platform competition research that helps to advance our knowledge of how platforms compete to create and capture value

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

App-based feedback on safety to novice drivers: learning and monetary incentives

An over-proportionally large number of car crashes is caused by novice drivers. In a field experiment, we investigated whether and how car drivers who had recently obtained their driving license reacted to app-based feedback on their safety-relevant driving behavior (speeding, phone usage, cornering, acceleration and braking). Participants went through a pre-measurement phase during which they did not receive app-based feedback but driving behavior was recorded, a treatment phase during which they received app-based feedback, and a post-measurement phase during which they did not receive app-based feedback but driving behavior was recorded. Before the start of the treatment phase, we randomly assigned participants to two possible treatment groups. In addition to receiving app-based feedback, the participants of one group received monetary incentives to improve their safety-relevant driving behavior, while the participants of the other group did not. At the beginning and at the end of experiment, each participant had to fill out a questionnaire to elicit socio-economic and attitudinal information. We conducted regression analyses to identify socio-economic, attitudinal, and driving-behavior-related variables that explain safety-relevant driving behavior during the pre-measurement phase and the self-chosen intensity of app usage during the treatment phase. For the main objective of our study, we applied regression analyses to identify those variables that explain the potential effect of providing app-based feedback during the treatment phase on safety-relevant driving behavior. Last, we applied statistical tests of differences to identify self-selection and attrition biases in our field experiment. For a sample of 130 novice Austrian drivers, we found moderate improvements in safety-relevant driving skills due to app-based feedback. The improvements were more pronounced under the treatment with monetary incentives, and for participants choosing higher feedback intensities. Moreover, drivers who drove relatively safer before receiving app-based feedback used the app more intensely and, ceteris paribus, higher app use intensity led to improvements in safety-related driving skills. Last, we provide empirical evidence for both self-selection and attrition biases

UTJECAJ INFORMATIČKIH MEGATRENDOVA NA GLOBALNE MEGATRENDOVE

In this paper, the author analyses the significant influence of IT on global megatrends. Of the five leading global megatrends, two are in the field of ICT, digital media and new technologies. The main reasons for the impact of IT megatrends are twofold: (1) the digital convergence of the media, ICT and telecommunications industries, (2)the exponential increase in information, computing power and internet transfer data. Digital convergence will significantly contribute to changing business models. In an applicative sense, the author considers the concepts of Industry 4.0 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), to be the most significant as it marks the paradigmatic change of information, the conceptual and processual transformation of data and services ecosystems in the domains of robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Services, Automated Intelligence, Collaborative Robots (Cobots), Industrial Robots, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. In business and strategic terms, digital media business models will transition, under the influence of digital convergence, to a multi-platform, complementary, interoperable and networked media and ICT ecosystem with a specific focus on the production and distribution of media products, services and applications within the user interface, hypermedia, immersion, mass customization, personalized, augmented and ambient media business space and environment.Autor u ovom radu analizira značajan utjecaj informatičkih na globalne megatrendove. Od pet vodećih globalnih megatrendova, dva se nalaze u području ICT, digitalnih medija i novih tehnologija. Glavni razlozi utjecaja informatičkih megatrendova su dvojaki: (1) Digitalna konvergencija medija, ICT-a i telekomunikacijske industrije, (2) Eksponencijalni porast informacija, kompjutacijske moći i brzine prijenosa podataka. Digitalna konvergencija će značajno doprinijeti promjeni poslovnih modela. U aplikativnom smislu, autor smatra posebno značajnim koncepte Industry 4.0 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) koja čini paradigmatsku promjenu informacijske, konceptualne i procesualne transformacije ekosistema podataka i usluga u domenu: robotike, the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Services, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, Smart Cloud, quantum computing, nanotechnology, Big Data (Analytics), cloud computing, edge and fog computing, artificial intelligence, collaborative robots (cobots), industrial robots, augmented reality i virtual reality. U poslovnom i strateškom smislu, poslovni modeli digitalnih medija će se, pod utjecajem digitalne konvergencije, kretati prema multi-platformskom, komplementarnom, interoperabilnom i umreženom medijskom i ICT ekosistemu, sa posebnim fokusom na proizvodnju i distribuciju medijskih proizvoda, usluga i aplikacija u okviru korisničkog interfejsa, hipermedijalnosti, imerzivnosti, masovne kastomizacije/personalizacije, augmentacije i ambijentalizacije medijskog poslovnog prostora i okruženja

Energy-Saving Strategies for Mobile Web Apps and their Measurement: Results from a Decade of Research (Preprint)

In 2022, over half of the web traffic was accessed through mobile devices. By reducing the energy consumption of mobile web apps, we can not only extend the battery life of our devices, but also make a significant contribution to energy conservation efforts. For example, if we could save only 5% of the energy used by web apps, we estimate that it would be enough to shut down one of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of energy-saving experiments and related approaches for mobile web apps, relevant for researchers and practitioners. To achieve this objective, we conducted a systematic literature review and identified 44 primary studies for inclusion. Through the mapping and analysis of scientific papers, this work contributes: (1) an overview of the energy-draining aspects of mobile web apps, (2) a comprehensive description of the methodology used for the energy-saving experiments, and (3) a categorization and synthesis of various energy-saving approaches.Comment: Preprint for 2023 IEEE/ACM 10th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft): Energy-Saving Strategies for Mobile Web Apps and their Measurement: Results from a Decade of Researc