Can cyber technology be resilient and green?

There are some key events that have characterised the recent period one of these is the so-called digital transformation considered the natural evolution of the current society in the light of a pervasive technology like digital technology. Digital technology is intertwined with almost all the life sectors. Since the dawn of digital technology, the number of application and solutions based on such technology had a surprising rate of growth. Nowadays there is no field of human knowledge that doesn’t take advantage or is based on digital: communication, education, government, health, energy, mobility, etc.. We are increasing leaving the analog, face to face, paper-based world to enter the intangible digital mediated one. At the same time, society already faced several relevant cyber infrastructure malfunctions and attacks due to hackers, some targeting Governmental or Law Enforcement agencies and Institutions, some targeting critical infrastructures, others targeting big companies. Nowadays we are surrounded by “critical infrastructures” managed by cyber components that, in case of attacks, may create minor or mayor impacts on our daily life. The actual trend is to transfer to the digital domain as much as possible any “traditional” process and document, so in a glimpse government procedures and citizens documents and data will flow in the format of bit streams, sometimes, under the pressure of critical events this process wasn’t designed to ensure security. Consequently, the more we become digitalised, the more we are vulnerable to hackers and hybrid threats. Of course, the overall scenario includes many other aspects and “shades”. In the “analogue” world we had different pipelines and “channels” to perform, thanks to different tools and means, our activities, in the cyber world the whole activity depends on a single “pillar”: cyber technology. The pervasiveness of cyber technology, the internet and the quick deployment of emerging number crunching applications is emphasizing energy consumption, at the same time the rapid pace of innovation in the field of consumers’ devices produces significant amount of waste to be recycled or disposed. As a consequence, can cyber technology be considered green and resilient

Pervasive Personal Information Spaces

Each user’s electronic information-interaction uniquely matches their information behaviour, activities and work context. In the ubiquitous computing environment, this information-interaction and the underlying personal information is distributed across multiple personal devices. This thesis investigates the idea of Pervasive Personal Information Spaces for improving ubiquitous personal information-interaction. Pervasive Personal Information Spaces integrate information distributed across multiple personal devices to support anytime-anywhere access to an individual’s information. This information is then visualised through context-based, flexible views that are personalised through user activities, diverse annotations and spontaneous information associations. The Spaces model embodies the characteristics of Pervasive Personal Information Spaces, which emphasise integration of the user’s information space, automation and communication, and flexible views. The model forms the basis for InfoMesh, an example implementation developed for desktops, laptops and PDAs. The design of the system was supported by a tool developed during the research called activity snaps that captures realistic user activity information for aiding the design and evaluation of interactive systems. User evaluation of InfoMesh elicited a positive response from participants for the ideas underlying Pervasive Personal Information Spaces, especially for carrying out work naturally and visualising, interpreting and retrieving information according to personalised contexts, associations and annotations. The user studies supported the research hypothesis, revealing that context-based flexible views may indeed provide better contextual, ubiquitous access and visualisation of information than current-day systems

Quantifying subjective quality evaluations for mobile video watching in a semi-living lab context

This paper discusses results from an exploratory study in which Quality of Experience aspects related to mobile video watching were investigated in a semi-living lab setting. More specifically, we zoom in on usage patterns in a natural research context and on the subjective evaluation of high and low-resolution movie trailers that are transferred to a mobile device using two transmission protocols for video (i.e., real-time transport protocol and progressive download using HTTP). User feedback was collected by means of short questionnaires on the mobile device, combined with traditional pen and paper diaries. The subjective evaluations regarding the general technical quality, perceived distortion, fluentness of the video, and loading speed are studied and the influence of the transmission protocol and video resolution on these evaluations is analyzed. Multinomial logistic regression results in a model to estimate the subjective evaluations regarding the perceived distortion and loading speed based on objectively-measured parameters of the video session

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Innovations with Smart Service Systems: Analytics, Big Data, Cognitive Assistance, and the Internet of Everything

Service innovations, enabled by the confluence of big data, mobile solutions, cloud, social, and cognitive computing, and the Internet of Things, have gained a lot of attention among many enterprises in the past few years because they represent promising ways for companies to effectively and rapidly deliver new services. But one of today\u27s most pervasive and bedeviling challenges is how to start this journey and stay on course. In this paper, we review some of the important developments in this area and reports the views voiced by five industry leaders from IBM, Cisco, HP, and ISSIP at a panel session at the 24th Annual Compete through Service Symposium in 2013. Panelists provided an extensive list of recommendations to academicians and professionals. The biggest conclusion is that all of the information and communications technology (ICT)-enabled service innovations need to be human-centered and focused on co-creating value

Exploration of Pervasive Games in Relation to Mobile Technologies

The project is an exploration of Pervasive Games in relation to mobile technologies, with the intention of developing a pervasive game engine. Pervasive Games are interactive games where the participants drive the game play by playing the game in both the real world and a virtual environment. This is an area of gaming that has rapidly evolved over the last few years. The initial research involved establishing several key elements common to existing pervasive applications, defining real world / virtual world considerations for game play (both positive and negative) and identifying the technical requirements needed to implement play elements on a mobile device. After comparing several platforms the Windows 7 platform was selected for development purposes. The requirements for establishing a working development platform (with delivery mechanism) was investigated and a working environment set-up. A pervasive games engine was then developed in the format of 67 code stubs (coding solutions) that allow the implementation of solutions to gaming elements required in the development of pervasive applications. Two new helper classes were in addition developed containing solutions to topics related to run-time data storage (StorageUtils.cs) and generic gaming tasks (GameCode.cs). A pervasive game was implemented to test a cross section of functionality in the engine. The basic principle behind the game was to overlay various layers video, backgrounds, sprite and text, to build up an immersive pervasive environment with a player in the centre of the game imagery, game domain and real world. The intention of the game was to see how the pervasive game experience could be reflected in the game mechanics and pervasive interaction, while utilising the engine functionality

Can gamification improve the benefits of student response systems in learning? an experimental study

Student response systems (SRSs) are becoming popular among instructors in nearly all levels of learning. The benefits of using SRSs in terms of attendance, attention, participation, or motivation have been shown in many studies. Moreover, several studies demonstrate that the use of some kind of gaming techniques in education are useful to stimulate students to learn in wider, longer, and deeper ways. This paper analyzes whether the integration of both SRSs and gaming techniques leads to better results in motivation, attention, engagement, and learning performance than SRSs alone. For this purpose, a new tool has been developed for conducting an experimental study with students from different subjects and from different academic levels. A randomized post-test-only control group analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of the gamified SRS

On supporting university communities in indoor wayfinding: An inclusive design approach

Mobility can be defined as the ability of people to move, live and interact with the space. In this context, indoor mobility, in terms of indoor localization and wayfinding, is a relevant topic due to the challenges it presents, in comparison with outdoor mobility, where GPS is hardly exploited. Knowing how to move in an indoor environment can be crucial for people with disabilities, and in particular for blind users, but it can provide several advantages also to any person who is moving in an unfamiliar place. Following this line of thought, we employed an inclusive by design approach to implement and deploy a system that comprises an Internet of Things infrastructure and an accessible mobile application to provide wayfinding functions, targeting the University community. As a real word case study, we considered the University of Bologna, designing a system able to be deployed in buildings with different configurations and settings, considering also historical buildings. The final system has been evaluated in three different scenarios, considering three different target audiences (18 users in total): i. students with disabilities (i.e., visual and mobility impairments); ii. campus students; and iii. visitors and tourists. Results reveal that all the participants enjoyed the provided functions and the indoor localization strategy was fine enough to provide a good wayfinding experience

Services in pervasive computing environments : from design to delivery

The work presented in this thesis is based on the assumption that modern computer technologies are already potentially pervasive: CPUs are embedded in any sort of device; RAM and storage memory of a modern PDA is comparable to those of a ten years ago Unix workstation; Wi-Fi, GPRS, UMTS are leveraging the development of the wireless Internet. Nevertheless, computing is not pervasive because we do not have a clear conceptual model of the pervasive computer and we have not tools, methodologies, and middleware to write and to seamlessly deliver at once services over a multitude of heterogeneous devices and different delivery contexts. Our thesis addresses these issues starting from the analysis of forces in a pervasive computing environment: user mobility, user profile, user position, and device profile. The conceptual model, or metaphor, we use to drive our work is to consider the environment as surrounded by a multitude of services and objects and devices as the communicating gates between the real world and the virtual dimension of pervasive computing around us. Our thesis is thus built upon three main “pillars”. The first pillar is a domain-object-driven methodology which allows developer to abstract from low level details of the final delivery platform, and provides the user with the ability to access services in a multi-channel way. The rationale is that domain objects are self-contained pieces of software able to represent data and to compute functions and procedures. Our approach fills the gap between users and domain objects building an appropriate user interface which is both adapted to the domain object and to the end user device. As example, we present how to design, implement and deliver an electronic mail application over various platforms. The second pillar of this thesis analyzes in more details the forces that make direct object manipulation inadequate in a pervasive context. These forces are the user profile, the device profile, the context of use, and the combinatorial explosion of domain objects. From the analysis of the electronic mail application presented as example, we notice that according to the end user device, or according to particular circumstances during the access to the service (for instance if the user access the service by the interactive TV while he is having his breakfast) some functionalities are not compulsory and do not fit an adequate task sequence. So we decided to make task models explicit in the design of a service and to integrate the capability to automatically generate user interfaces for domain objects with the formal definition of task models adapted to the final delivery context. Finally, the third pillar of our thesis is about the lifecycle of services in a pervasive computing environment. Our solutions are based upon an existing framework, the Jini connection technology, and enrich this framework with new services and architectures for the deployment and discovery of services, for the user session management, and for the management of offline agents