Scheduling Advertisement Delivery in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular users are emerging as a prime market for targeted advertisement, where advertisements (ads) are sent from network points of access to vehicles, and displayed to passengers only if they are relevant to them. In this study, we take the viewpoint of a broker managing the advertisement system, and getting paid every time a relevant ad is displayed to an interested user. The broker selects the ads to broadcast at each point of access so as to maximize its revenue. In this context, we observe that choosing the ads that best fit the users’ interest could actually hurt the broker’s revenue. In light of this conflict, we present Volfied, an algorithm allowing for conflict-free, near-optimal ad selection with very low computational complexity. Our performance evaluation, carried out through real-world vehicular traces, shows that Volfied increases the broker revenue by up to 70% with provably low computational complexity, compared to state-of-the-art alternatives.This work is supported by the European Commission through the H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER project (Project ID 761536).En prens

Content Analysis of Common Billboard Advertisements in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Gaps, Weaknesses and Strengths of Billboard Advertisements

This study analyzed the contents of some common commercial billboard advertisements in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The contents analyzed include; photographs, messages, color and appeal strategy .As the demand to advertise products and services through billboards tend to grow the question over effective communication becomes a serious issue. This study thus, conducted to answer such questions raised in billboard advertisements. The gaps, weaknesses and strengths of billboard advertisements were deeply examined and findings were presented.Qualitative content analysis  and deep interview have  been used to analyze the contents .According to the analysis made , billboard ads  those planted alongside major roads in Addis Ababa  ,mostly used human photographs, particularly women's photograph and this was done without any connection women's had  to the product/service  being advertised. Apart from this, most billboard ads had been overlooked by the target consumers. This was observed as a key weakness and gap among the businesses those used billboard ads and ad agencies engaged in designing billboard ads. The study showed that, there were   billboard ads those achieved best communication through their messages, pictures and designs. Furthermore, the study indicated as there was ad agencies deficiency in designing, writing proper product and service messages. Significant weaknesses and gaps were found from the data collected, this includes, poor message structure, erroneous color choice and stumpy creativity.Concerning the documentary photographs, the findings indicated, there were mismatches found in those billboard ads selected for analysis. Beyond this, appeal strategies used   on the   billboard ads selected for analysis  were  weak ,thus , couldn’t  able to catch viewer's attention .The messages accompanied with the product /services were  also detailed, straightforward and embraced each information about the product. In association to the appeal strategy used most billboards used, an ornate design which means over decoration. This caused inconveniences over the billboards ads those selected for analysis. The result revealed that, Billboards those deployed in the city of Addis Ababa were unable to communicate the right information about the product /service being advertised. Keywords: Billboards, Products, services, Advertisements, Customers, Photographs, Messages, Communication and Commercials. DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/102-02 Publication date:October 31st 202

Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising is emerging as a promising advertising strategy, which leverages prescriptive analytics, location-based distribution, and feedback-driven marketing to engage consumers with timely and targeted advertisements. In the current mobile advertising system, a third-party ad broker collects and manages advertisements for merchants who would like to promote their business to mobile users. Based on its large-scale database of user profiles, the ad broker can help the merchants to better reach out to customers with related interests and charges the merchants for ad dissemination services. Recently, mobile advertising technology has dominated the digital advertising industry and has become the main source of income for IT giants. However, there are many security and privacy challenges that may hinder the continuous success of the mobile advertising industry. First, there is a lack of advertising transparency in the current mobile advertising system. For example, mobile users are concerned about the reliability and trustworthiness of the ad dissemination process and advertising review system. Without proper countermeasures, mobile users can install ad-blocking software to filter out irrelevant or even misleading advertisements, which may lower the advertising investments from merchants. Second, as more strict privacy regulations (e.g. European General Data Privacy Regulations) take effect, it is critical to protect mobile users’ personal profiles from illegal sharing and exposure in the mobile advertising system. In this thesis, three security and privacy challenges for the mobile advertising system are identified and addressed with the designs, implementations, and evaluations of a blockchain-based architecture. First, we study the anonymous review system for the mobile advertising industry. When receiving advertisements from a specific merchant (e.g. a nearby restaurant), mobile users are more likely to browse the previous reviews about the merchant for quality-of-service assessments. However, current review systems are known for the lack of system transparency and are subject to many attacks, such as double reviews and deletions of negative reviews. We exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology, to design a blockchain-based review system for mobile advertising, where review accumulations are transparent and verifiable to the public. To preserve user review privacy, we further design an anonymous review token generation scheme, where users are encouraged to leave reviews anonymously while still ensuring the review authenticity. We also explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based system on an Ethereum testing network and the experimental results demonstrate the application feasibility of the proposed anonymous review system. Second, we investigate the transparency issues for the targeted ad dissemination process. Specifically, we focus on a specific mobile advertising application: vehicular local advertising, where vehicular users send spatial-keyword queries to ad brokers to receive location-aware advertisements. To build a transparent advertising system, the ad brokers are required to provide mobile users with explanations on the ad dissemination process, e.g., why a specific ad is disseminated to a mobile user. However, such transparency explanations are often found incomplete and sometimes even misleading, which may lower the user trust on the advertising system if without proper countermeasures. Therefore, we design an advertising smart contract to efficiently realize a publicly verifiable spatial-keyword query scheme. Instead of directly implementing the spatial-keyword query scheme on the smart contract with prohibitive storage and computation cost, we exploit the on/off-chain computation models to trade the expensive on-chain cost for cheap off-chain cost. With two design strategies: digest-and-verify and divide-then-assemble, the on-chain cost for a single spatial keyword query is reduced to constant regardless of the scale of the spatial-keyword database. Extensive experiments are conducted to provide both on-chain and off-chain benchmarks with a verifiable computation framework. Third, we explore another critical requirement of the mobile advertising system: public accountability enforcement against advertising misconducts, if (1) mobile users receive irrelevant ads, or (2) advertising policies of merchants are not correctly computed in the ad dissemination process. This requires the design of a composite Succinct Non-interactive ARGument (SNARG) system, that can be tailored for different advertising transparency requirements and is efficient for the blockchain implementations. Moreover, pursuing public accountability should also achieve a strict privacy guarantee for the user profile. We also propose an accountability contract which can receive explanation requirements from both mobile users and merchants. To promote prompt on-chain responses, we design an incentive mechanism based on the pre-deposits of involved parties, i.e., ad brokers, mobile users, and merchants. If any advertising misconduct is identified, public accountability can be enforced by confiscating the pre-deposits of the misbehaving party. Comprehensive experiments and analyses are conducted to demonstrate the versatile functionalities and feasibility of the accountability contract. In summary, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated a blockchain-based architecture for security and privacy preservations in the mobile advertising. The designed architecture can not only enhance the transparency and accountability for the mobile advertising system, but has also achieved notably on-chain efficiency and privacy for real-world implementations. The results from the thesis may shed light on the future research and practice of a blockchain-based architecture for the privacy regulation compliance in the mobile advertising

Planning for Secure Surface Bus Stops in Toronto

This paper evaluates the ways spatial planning understands and engages with personal security through a study of inner-suburban surface transit stops in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Although often considered by planning, personal security does not appear to be subjected to the same level of attention as other design and planning priorities. The foundation for this study was a review of security focussed criminological, spatial planning, and a small quantity of legal texts in order to analyze overlaps and deviations. This was followed by analysis of relationship between personal security and the city’s public transit operator, the Toronto Transit Commission, through a review of historical texts and current policy documents guiding surface transit stop placement and design. The final component of this paper is a discussion of an audit of the design and placement of a selection of conventional bus stops in inner-suburban areas. Overall, there are indications that some progress is being made in addressing personal security but there is still significant room for improvement

A Recent Connected Vehicle - IoT Automotive Application Based on Communication Technology

Realizing the full potential of vehicle communications depends in large part on the infrastructure of vehicular networks. As more cars are connected to the Internet and one another, new technological advancements are being driven by a multidisciplinary approach. As transportation networks become more complicated, academic, and automotive researchers collaborate to offer their thoughts and answers. They also imagine various applications to enhance mobility and the driving experience. Due to the requirement for low latency, faster throughput, and increased reliability, wireless access technologies and an appropriate (potentially dedicated) infrastructure present substantial hurdles to communication systems. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the wireless access technologies, deployment, and connected car infrastructures that enable vehicular connectivity. The challenges, issues, services, and maintenance of connected vehicles that rely on infrastructure-based vehicular communications are also identified in this paper