Efficient Opportunistic Sensing using Mobile Collaborative Platform MOSDEN

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the primary computing device in people's lives. Application delivery platforms like Google Play, Apple App Store have transformed mobile phones into intelligent computing devices by the means of applications that can be downloaded and installed instantly. Many of these applications take advantage of the plethora of sensors installed on the mobile device to deliver enhanced user experience. The sensors on the smartphone provide the opportunity to develop innovative mobile opportunistic sensing applications in many sectors including healthcare, environmental monitoring and transportation. In this paper, we present a collaborative mobile sensing framework namely Mobile Sensor Data EngiNe (MOSDEN) that can operate on smartphones capturing and sharing sensed data between multiple distributed applications and users. MOSDEN follows a component-based design philosophy promoting reuse for easy and quick opportunistic sensing application deployments. MOSDEN separates the application-specific processing from the sensing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN is scalable and requires minimal development effort from the application developer. We have implemented our framework on Android-based mobile platforms and evaluate its performance to validate the feasibility and efficiency of MOSDEN to operate collaboratively in mobile opportunistic sensing applications. Experimental outcomes and lessons learnt conclude the paper

Emerging Opportunities: Monitoring and Evaluation in a Tech-Enabled World

Various trends are impacting on the field of monitoring and evaluation in the area of international development. Resources have become ever more scarce while expectations for what development assistance should achieve are growing. The search for more efficient systems to measure impact is on. Country governments are also working to improve their own capacities for evaluation, and demand is rising from national and community-based organizations for meaningful participation in the evaluation process as well as for greater voice and more accountability from both aid and development agencies and government.These factors, in addition to greater competition for limited resources in the area of international development, are pushing donors, program participants and evaluators themselves to seek more rigorous – and at the same time flexible – systems to monitor and evaluate development and humanitarian interventions.However, many current approaches to M&E are unable to address the changing structure of development assistance and the increasingly complex environment in which it operates. Operational challenges (for example, limited time, insufficient resources and poor data quality) as well as methodological challenges that impact on the quality and timeliness of evaluation exercises have yet to be fully overcome

A Framework for Integrating Transportation Into Smart Cities

In recent years, economic, environmental, and political forces have quickly given rise to “Smart Cities” -- an array of strategies that can transform transportation in cities. Using a multi-method approach to research and develop a framework for smart cities, this study provides a framework that can be employed to: Understand what a smart city is and how to replicate smart city successes; The role of pilot projects, metrics, and evaluations to test, implement, and replicate strategies; and Understand the role of shared micromobility, big data, and other key issues impacting communities. This research provides recommendations for policy and professional practice as it relates to integrating transportation into smart cities

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Data as a Service (DaaS) for sharing and processing of large data collections in the cloud

Data as a Service (DaaS) is among the latest kind of services being investigated in the Cloud computing community. The main aim of DaaS is to overcome limitations of state-of-the-art approaches in data technologies, according to which data is stored and accessed from repositories whose location is known and is relevant for sharing and processing. Besides limitations for the data sharing, current approaches also do not achieve to fully separate/decouple software services from data and thus impose limitations in inter-operability. In this paper we propose a DaaS approach for intelligent sharing and processing of large data collections with the aim of abstracting the data location (by making it relevant to the needs of sharing and accessing) and to fully decouple the data and its processing. The aim of our approach is to build a Cloud computing platform, offering DaaS to support large communities of users that need to share, access, and process the data for collectively building knowledge from data. We exemplify the approach from large data collections from health and biology domains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft