AktiMotBot: A social media chatbot with activity tracker integration for motivating increased physical activity

The World Health Organization has reported that more than 80% of the world’s adolescent population is insufficiently physically active [1]. Up to five million deaths per year could be averted if the global population were more active[1]. The low adherence to physical activity shows the need to implement services that promote physical activity. In addition, it is crucial to educate people on the benefits of being physically active and the negative consequences sedentary behavior imposes. This thesis proposes a social media chatbot with the integration of an activity tracker that aims to motivate people to increase their daily step count. The chatbot, AktiMotBot, encourages people by implementing behavior change techniques in its messages and functionality. We use popular technology, such as social media applications, to ease access. Further, the use of chatbots has grown. A chatbot gives a service that is always available to the user and is cost-effective. In addition, chatbots have familiar interfaces that ease their use. Finally, activity data is integrated into the chatbot as a motivation and personalization tool, enabling monitoring behavior change. A thorough investigation of social media applications was conducted to ensure users’ privacy and security. A usability study investigated how potential users perceived the system, and the usability of the chatbot was scored as average. The results showed that the chatbot was able to increase the motivation of half of the participants. Finally, the findings from this research are that chatbots could motivate people to increase their physical activity levels and make people more aware of their step count

Discovering location based services: A unified approach for heterogeneous indoor localization systems

The technological solutions and communication capabilities offered by the Internet of Things paradigm, in terms of raising availability of wearable devices, the ubiquitous internet connection, and the presence on the market of service-oriented solutions, have allowed a wide proposal of Location Based Services (LBS). In a close future, we foresee that companies and service providers will have developed reliable solutions to address indoor positioning, as basis for useful location based services. These solutions will be different from each other and they will adopt different hardware and processing techniques. This paper describes the proposal of a unified approach for Indoor Localization Systems that enables the cooperation between heterogeneous solutions and their functional modules. To this end, we designed an integrated architecture that, abstracting its main components, allows a seamless interaction among them. Finally, we present a working prototype of such architecture, which is based on the popular Telegram application for Android, as an integration demonstrator. The integration of the three main phases –namely the discovery phase, the User Agent self-configuration, and the indoor map retrieval/rendering– demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed integrated architectur

Sharpening the sword and rounding the shield: online jokes and the vernacular response to political reform in Iran

This thesis is an ethnographic study of Iranian political jokes: a hybridized genre of folklore which intersects in both online and oral spheres where it is created and shared. It specifically explores the emergence and growth of politicized humorous cellphonelore, which I term “electionlore”, during and after the 2016 February elections in Iran. Analysing different joke sub-cycles in this electionlore, I argue that these jokes serve as a powerful tool for my informants to construct their own “newslore” (Frank 2011) and make manifest what I term and define “vernacular politics” through which they were mobilized and unified in their political activism. I diverge from the theory of “resistance jokes” (Powell and Paton 1988; Bryant 2006; Davies 2011) and propose a new framework for studying political jokes in countries in suspense between democracy and dictatorship: jokes as an effective and strategic form of reform and unquiet protest

Holland City News, Volume 76, Number 46: November 13, 1947

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1947/1045/thumbnail.jp

Holland City News, Volume 69, Number 50: December 12, 1940

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1940/1049/thumbnail.jp

Holland City News, Volume 74, Number 5: February 1, 1945

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1945/1004/thumbnail.jp

Holland City News, Volume 71, Number 49: December 3, 1942

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1942/1048/thumbnail.jp

The Easterner, Vol. 13, No. 2, October 10, 1962

This issue includes articles on the dedication for the new science building, a talk on India by Dr. Darrell Morse, Homecoming activities and the candidates for Homecoming Queen, and the restructuring for the KEWC radio station.https://dc.ewu.edu/student_newspapers/2230/thumbnail.jp

Holland City News, Volume 73, Number 7: February 17, 1944

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1944/1006/thumbnail.jp

Cryptographic Analysis of Secure Messaging Protocols

Instant messaging applications promise their users a secure and private way to communicate. The validity of these promises rests on the design of the underlying protocol, the cryptographic primitives used and the quality of the implementation. Though secure messaging designs exist in the literature, for various reasons developers of messaging applications often opt to design their own protocols, creating a gap between cryptography as understood by academic research and cryptography as implemented in practice. This thesis contributes to bridging this gap by approaching it from both sides: by looking for flaws in the protocols underlying real-world messaging applications, as well as by performing a rigorous analysis of their security guarantees in a provable security model.Secure messaging can provide a host of different, sometimes conflicting, security and privacy guarantees. It is thus important to judge applications based on the concrete security expectations of their users. This is particularly significant for higher-risk users such as activists or civil rights protesters. To position our work, we first studied the security practices of protesters in the context of the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests in Hong Kong using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with participants of these protests. We report how they organised on different chat platforms based on their perceived security, and how they developed tactics and strategies to enable pseudonymity and detect compromise.Then, we analysed two messaging applications relevant in the protest context: Bridgefy and Telegram. Bridgefy is a mobile mesh messaging application, allowing users in relative proximity to communicate without the Internet. It was being promoted as a secure communication tool for use in areas experiencing large-scale protests. We showed that Bridgefy permitted its users to be tracked, offered no authenticity, no effective confidentiality protections and lacked resilience against adversarially crafted messages. We verified these vulnerabilities by demonstrating a series of practical attacks.Telegram is a messaging platform with over 500 million users, yet prior to this work its bespoke protocol, MTProto, had received little attention from the cryptographic community. We provided the first comprehensive study of the MTProto symmetric channel as implemented in cloud chats. We gave both positive and negative results. First, we found two attacks on the existing protocol, and two attacks on its implementation in official clients which exploit timing side channels and uncover a vulnerability in the key exchange protocol. Second, we proved that a fixed version of the symmetric MTProto protocol achieves security in a suitable bidirectional secure channel model, albeit under unstudied assumptions. Our model itself advances the state-of-the-art for secure channels