RESTful PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE DEVICES

The growing popularity of mobile platforms is changing the Internet user’s computing experience. Current studies suggest that the traditional ubiquitous computing landscape is shifting towards more enhanced and broader mobile computing platform consists of large number of heterogeneous devices. Smartphones and tablets begin to replace the desktop as the primary means of interacting with IT resources. While mobile devices facilitate in consuming web resources in the form of web services, the growing demand for consuming services on mobile device is introducing a complex ecosystem in the mobile environment. This research addresses the communication challenges involved in mobile distributed networks and proposes an event-driven communication approach for information dissemination. This research investigates different communication techniques such as synchronous and asynchronous polling and long-polling, server-side push as mechanisms between client-server interactions and the latest web technologies namely HTML5 standard WebSocket as communication protocol within a publish/subscribe paradigm. Finally, this research introduces and evaluates a framework that is hybrid of REST and event-based publish/subscribe for operating in the mobile environment

The Landscape of Salesforce for Nonprofits: A Report on the Current Marketplace for Apps

Do you use Salesforce as a Constituent Relationship Management database at your organization, or are you considering it? Since it launched in 1999, more than 20,000 nonprofits have employed the cloud-based system, which is made available to them for free through the philanthropic Salesforce Foundation. What's the catch? Making such a powerful system work for the particular needs of a nonprofit isn't always straightforward. This report can tell you everything you need to know.What's in it? To learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of Salesforce, we interviewed nine prominent consultants specializing in implementing Salesforce for nonprofits along with several members of the Salesforce.com Foundation about what the platform does well, and what you'll want to add to it to suit your needs. We evaluated some of the constituent management packages built on top of Salesforce, including the Salesforce Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Pack, which is aimed at turning the sales automation platform into a tool for nonprofits. We also took a look at the universe of add-ons to the base Salesforce platform -- called "apps" because of Salesforce's online marketplace, the App Exchange -- to find out which might be useful to support a nonprofit's processes.The goal for this report was to break down misconceptions about the tool and to collect disparate information in one place to help you make informed decisions. Whether you're already using Salesforce, are thinking about adopting it, or have yet to even consider it, there's information here for you.What's more, we've included a directory of consultants or firms with experience working with nonprofits to implement Salesforce and the additional App Exchange modules that we cover in this report to make it easier for you to find the help you'll need

The Development of a Modular Framework for Serious Games and the Internet of Things

The combination of Serious Games and the Internet of Things is a recent academic domain of research. By combining the software and gaming advantages of Serious Games with the interconnected hardware and middleware driven ecosystem of the Internet of Things, it is possible to develop data-driven games that source data from the local or extended physical environment to progress in the virtual environment of gaming. The following thesis presents research into Serious Games and the Internet of Things, focusing on the development of a modular framework that represents the combination of the two technologies. Current research in the domain of Smart Serious Games omits a modular framework that is application independent and outlines the software and hardware interaction between Serious Games and the Internet of Things, therefore this thesis is the first to introduce one. By developing such a framework, this thesis contributes to the academic domain and encourages new and innovative real-world applications of Smart Serious Games that include healthcare, education, simulation and others. Further to the framework, this thesis presents a survey into the network topologies for Serious Games and the Internet of Things and a computer algorithm that provides a measure of student engagement, integrated into a Smart Serious Game developed as part of the undertaken research named Student Engagement Application (SEA). This thesis utilises a semester-long experiment and the techniques of control groups and randomised controlled trials to investigate and compare the measures of engagement obtained through SEA and self-reflection questionnaires, and the measure of student engagement against academic performance, respectively. After statistical analysis, the data presented strong confidence in the measure of engagement through SEA, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework for Smart Serious Games

Model-Driven Methodology for Rapid Deployment of Smart Spaces based on Resource-Oriented Architectures

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym

Data semantic enrichment for complex event processing over IoT Data Streams

This thesis generalizes techniques for processing IoT data streams, semantically enrich data with contextual information, as well as complex event processing in IoT applications. A case study for ECG anomaly detection and signal classification was conducted to validate the knowledge foundation

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MODULAR FRAMEWORK FOR SERIOUS GAMES AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS

The combination of Serious Games and the Internet of Things is a recent academic domain of research. By combining the software and gaming advantages of Serious Games with the interconnected hardware and middleware driven ecosystem of the Internet of Things, it is possible to develop data-driven games that source data from the local or extended physical environment to progress in the virtual environment of gaming. The following thesis presents research into Serious Games and the Internet of Things, focusing on the development of a modular framework that represents the combination of the two technologies. Current research in the domain of Smart Serious Games omits a modular framework that is application independent and outlines the software and hardware interaction between Serious Games and the Internet of Things, therefore this thesis is the first to introduce one. By developing such a framework, this thesis contributes to the academic domain and encourages new and innovative real-world applications of Smart Serious Games that include healthcare, education, simulation and others. Further to the framework, this thesis presents a survey into the network topologies for Serious Games and the Internet of Things and a computer algorithm that provides a measure of student engagement, integrated into a Smart Serious Game developed as part of the undertaken research named Student Engagement Application (SEA). This thesis utilises a semester-long experiment and the techniques of control groups and randomised control trials to investigate the compare the measures of engagement obtained through SEA and self-reflection questionnaires, and the measure of student engagement against academic performance, respectively. After statistical analysis, the data presented strong confidence in the measure of engagement through SEA, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework for Smart Serious Games