Familiars: manipulating social networks with mobile gaming

This paper presents the mobile multiplayer gaming application Familiars. Familiars leverages social networking and locative technologies to create a reactive social experience for the game’s participants over extended periods of time. The game is based around the concept of each player owning a Familiar –a virtual sprite or creature somewhat similar in concept to Pullman’s dæmons - which has a visual appearance and a location in the real world. A player’s interactions with their own, and other players’, Familiars is used to directly inform the state of the game and status of the player – inviting them to become more aware of the impact of their social activity, and to discover novel strategies for becoming more socially effective in computer-mediated environments. We begin by explaining the design for the game and the unique challenges of the mobile medium as a platform for social gaming. We discuss the theoretical and technical background of the social and contextual analysis system used in the mobile mediated environment and go on to describe how this informed the implementation of the mobile and server applications that power the game. Finally we discuss the findings of the application test groups, lessons learnt during development and important design considerations for mediated mobile social gaming

Design of Prototype for Online Disaster Multimedia Data Transmission Based on Android

The development of information and communication technology application is growing rapidly. It has motivated the use of mobile devices for various social networking mobile services such as android based multimedia disaster information transmission. Disaster multimedia information is important for quick response and recovery phases of the disaster management. In previous work, an online disaster information system based on location (we called it ASIKonLBS) has been proposed. However, it was only providing the coordinate information of the disaster location by using short message service (SMS) gateway and global positioning system (GPS). In this paper, we propose the design of prototype for online disaster multimedia data transmission based on android. Such that, the ASIKonLBSv2 can provide not only the information of the location, but also the situation of the disaster area including news, picture, and video. The research method refers to a spiral model that begins with conceptual design, prototype development and evaluation. The result shows that the designed prototype can be implemented for online disaster multimedia data transmission (news, photo and video) using Android Developer Tools. Furthermore, the prototype can be installed in the android-based smartphone and map the disaster multimedia data onto the web of ASIKonLBS. Therefore, the proposed prototype is useful for the disaster agencies and practitioners in order to give the first aid for the victim in the disaster are

Design of prototype for online disaster multimedia data transmission based on Android

The development of information and communication technology application is growing rapidly. It has motivated the use of mobile devices for various social networking mobile services such as android based multimedia disaster information transmission. Disaster multimedia information is important for quick response and recovery phases of the disaster management. In previous work, an online disaster information system based on location (we called it ASIKonLBS) has been proposed. However, it was only providing the coordinate information of the disaster location by using short message service (SMS) gateway and global positioning system (GPS). In this paper, we propose the design of prototype for online disaster multimedia data transmission based on android. Such that, the ASIKonLBSv2 can provide not only the information of the location, but also the situation of the disaster area including news, picture, and video. The research method refers to a spiral model that begins with conceptual design, prototype development and evaluation. The result shows that the designed prototype can be implemented for online disaster multimedia data transmission (news, photo and video) using Android Developer Tools. Furthermore, the prototype can be installed in the android-based smartphone and map the disaster multimedia data onto the web of ASIKonLBS. Therefore, the proposed prototype is useful for the disaster agencies and practitioners in order to give the first aid for the victim in the disaster are

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Wireless Communications in the Era of Big Data

The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adaptable for managing the bigdata traffic in wireless networks. On the other hand, instead of viewing mobile bigdata as a unwanted burden, we introduce methods to capitalize from the vast data traffic, for building a bigdata-aware wireless network with better wireless service quality and new mobile applications. We highlight several promising future research directions for wireless communications in the mobile bigdata era.Comment: This article is accepted and to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin