Wearable and mobile devices

Information and Communication Technologies, known as ICT, have undergone dramatic changes in the last 25 years. The 1980s was the decade of the Personal Computer (PC), which brought computing into the home and, in an educational setting, into the classroom. The 1990s gave us the World Wide Web (the Web), building on the infrastructure of the Internet, which has revolutionized the availability and delivery of information. In the midst of this information revolution, we are now confronted with a third wave of novel technologies (i.e., mobile and wearable computing), where computing devices already are becoming small enough so that we can carry them around at all times, and, in addition, they have the ability to interact with devices embedded in the environment. The development of wearable technology is perhaps a logical product of the convergence between the miniaturization of microchips (nanotechnology) and an increasing interest in pervasive computing, where mobility is the main objective. The miniaturization of computers is largely due to the decreasing size of semiconductors and switches; molecular manufacturing will allow for “not only molecular-scale switches but also nanoscale motors, pumps, pipes, machinery that could mimic skin” (Page, 2003, p. 2). This shift in the size of computers has obvious implications for the human-computer interaction introducing the next generation of interfaces. Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Media Lab’s Physics and Media Group, argues, “The world is becoming the interface. Computers as distinguishable devices will disappear as the objects themselves become the means we use to interact with both the physical and the virtual worlds” (Page, 2003, p. 3). Ultimately, this will lead to a move away from desktop user interfaces and toward mobile interfaces and pervasive computing

Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

This report presents technical evaluation and case studies of the use of wearable and mobile computing mobile devices in further and higher education. The first section provides technical evaluation of the current state of the art in wearable and mobile technologies and reviews several innovative wearable products that have been developed in recent years. The second section examines three scenarios for further and higher education where wearable and mobile devices are currently being used. The three scenarios include: (i) the delivery of lectures over mobile devices, (ii) the augmentation of the physical campus with a virtual and mobile component, and (iii) the use of PDAs and mobile devices in field studies. The first scenario explores the use of web lectures including an evaluation of IBM's Web Lecture Services and 3Com's learning assistant. The second scenario explores models for a campus without walls evaluating the Handsprings to Learning projects at East Carolina University and ActiveCampus at the University of California San Diego . The third scenario explores the use of wearable and mobile devices for field trips examining San Francisco Exploratorium's tool for capturing museum visits and the Cybertracker field computer. The third section of the report explores the uses and purposes for wearable and mobile devices in tertiary education, identifying key trends and issues to be considered when piloting the use of these devices in educational contexts

Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach

Learning Behaviour for Service Personalisation and Adaptation

Context-aware applications within pervasive environments are increasingly being developed as services and deployed in the cloud. As such these services are increasingly required to be adaptive to individual users to meet their specific needs or to reflect the changes of their behavior. To address this emerging challenge this paper introduces a service-oriented personalisation framework for service personalisation with special emphasis being placed on behavior learning for user model and service function adaptation. The paper describes the system architecture and the underlying methods and technologies including modelling and reasoning, behavior analysis and a personalisation mechanism. The approach has been implemented in a service-oriented prototype system, and evaluated in a typical scenario of providing personalised travel assistance for the elderly using the help-on-demand services deployed on smartphone

User interface personalization in news apps

News is increasingly being accessed on smartphones and tablets, establishing mobile news reading as one of the most popular activities on mobile devices. News reading is also a very individual activity with marked differences in the way people read and access the news, however, news apps have limited personalization. In this paper, we approach news personalization as a two-dimensional problem. We discuss news personalization in terms of 'what' content is delivered to the user and 'how' that content is consumed. We present our approach towards user interface personalization in news apps and we conclude that news content recommendation and user interface personalization should co-exist in news apps

User Interface Personalization in News Apps

ABSTRACT News is increasingly being accessed on smartphones and tablets, establishing mobile news reading as one of the most popular activities on mobile devices. News reading is also a very individual activity with marked differences in the way people read and access the news, however, news apps have limited personalization. In this paper, we approach news personalization as a two-dimensional problem. We discuss news personalization in terms of 'what' content is delivered to the user and 'how' that content is consumed. We present our approach towards user interface personalization in news apps and we conclude that news content recommendation and user interface personalization should co-exist in news apps

AMCIS 2006 Tutorial Paper: A Review of Methods to Assess National Knowledge in the Knowledge Economy

The evolving role of knowledge in modern societies has spurred an interest in better evaluating knowledge creation capabilities of a variety of business, non-profit, national or multinational actors. Our field has extensively focused on reviewing knowledge management evaluation and implementation programs at the organizational level. In this paper, which stems from a tutorial presented at AMICS 2006 in Acapulco, we focus on the efforts undertaken by International Development Institutions (IDIs) to assess the role of knowledge as a driver of national wealth and economic development. This paper describes methodological frameworks - such as the knowledge assessments - used to evaluate a country\u27s potential to generate new knowledge. Knowledge assessments comprise of qualitative and quantitative exercises to collect benchmarking data on relative national standing in knowledge endowment (the knowledge indexes). The review suggests some open issues and solicits enhancing the predictive capabilities of current models

A personalized system for scalable distribution of multimedia content in multicast wireless networks

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2139-3This paper presents a novel architecture for scalable multimedia content delivery over wireless networks. The architecture takes into account both the user preferences and context in order to provide personalized contents to each user. In this way, third-party applications filter the most appropriate contents for each client in each situation. One of the key characteristics of the proposal is the scalability, which is provided, apart from the use of filtering techniques, through the transmission in multicast networks. In this sense, content delivery is carried out by means of the FLUTE (File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) protocol, which provides reliability in unidirectional environments through different mechanisms such as AL-FEC (Application Layer Forward Error Correction) codes, used in this paper. Another key characteristic is the context-awareness and personalization of content delivery, which is provided by means of context information, user profiles, and adaptation. The system proposed is validated through several empirical studies. Specifically, the paper presents evaluations of two types that collect objective and subjective measures. The first evaluate the efficiency of the transmission protocol, analyzing how the use of appropriate transmission parameters reduces the download time (and thus increasing the Quality of Experience), which can be minimized by using caching techniques. On the other hand, the subjective measures present a study about the user experience after testing the application and analyze the accuracy of the filtering process/strategy. Results show that using AL-FEC mechanisms produces download times until four times lower than when no protection is used. Also, results prove that there is a code rate that minimizes the download time depending on the losses and that, in general, code rates 0.7 and 0.9 provide good download times for a wide range of losses. On the other hand, subjective measures indicate a high user satisfaction (more than 80 %) and a relevant degree of accuracy of the content adaption.This work is supported in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Government of Spain under project COMINN (IPT-2012-0883-430000) and by the project PAID/2012/313 from the PAID-05-12 program of the Vicerrectorado de Investigacion of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.De Fez Lava, I.; Gil Pascual, M.; Fons Cors, JJ.; Guerri Cebollada, JC.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2014). A personalized system for scalable distribution of multimedia content in multicast wireless networks. 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