Embedding a Crowd inside a Relay Baton:A Case Study in a Non-Competitive Sporting Activity

This paper presents a digital relay baton that connects long-distance runners with distributed online spectators. Such baton broadcasts athletes’ live locative data to a social network and communicates back remote-crowd support through haptic and audible cheers. Our work takes an exploratory design approach to bring new insights into the design of real-time techno-mediated social support. The prototype was deployed during a 170-mile charity relay race across the UK with 13 participants, 261 on-line supporters, and collected a total of 3153 ‘cheers’. We report on the insights collected during the design and deployment process and identify three fundamental design considerations: the degree of expressiveness afforded by the system design, the context applicability, and the data flow within the social networ

Embedding a Crowd inside a Relay Baton:A Case Study in a Non-Competitive Sporting Activity

This paper presents a digital relay baton that connects long-distance runners with distributed online spectators. Such baton broadcasts athletes’ live locative data to a social network and communicates back remote-crowd support through haptic and audible cheers. Our work takes an exploratory design approach to bring new insights into the design of real-time techno-mediated social support. The prototype was deployed during a 170-mile charity relay race across the UK with 13 participants, 261 on-line supporters, and collected a total of 3153 ‘cheers’. We report on the insights collected during the design and deployment process and identify three fundamental design considerations: the degree of expressiveness afforded by the system design, the context applicability, and the data flow within the social networ

Given Enough Eyeballs, all Bugs are Shallow - A Literature Review for the Use of Crowdsourcing in Software Testing

Over the last years, the use of crowdsourcing has gained a lot of attention in the domain of software engineering. One key aspect of software development is the testing of software. Literature suggests that crowdsourced software testing (CST) is a reliable and feasible tool for manifold kinds of testing. Research in CST made great strides; however, it is mostly unstructured and not linked to traditional software testing practice and terminology. By conducting a literature review of traditional and crowdsourced software testing literature, this paper delivers two major contributions. First, it synthesizes the fields of crowdsourcing research and traditional software testing. Second, the paper gives a comprehensive overview over findings in CST-research and provides a classification into different software testing types

The social dynamics of heterogeneous innovation ecosystems : Effects of openness on community–firm relations

In this article, we develop a programmatic notion of innovation ecosystems, which emphasizes the analysis of different forms of distributed innovation without reducing the perspective to the role of a focal organization. It highlights relationships between communities and corporate firms as nexus for distributed innovation and elaborates how different facets of openness shape the dynamic of the ecosystem. Thus, our model allows for the analysis and comparison of a broad scope of constellations, their particular coordinating mechanisms as well as related advantages and disadvantages. We apply this framework to two specific cases of distributed innovation, the RepRap 3D printer and the ARA modular smartphone, in order to delineate how differences in the forms of openness affect the prevalent relationships between communities and firms as well as the constituting functions of their particular innovation ecosystem

The use of Bluetooth Beacons in Maritime Emergencies Mobile safety and security - DigLogs pilot project by University of Trieste

The aim of this paper is to research and describe how the use of mobile technologies can help in reducing the time required for the ship evacuation and abandonment procedures, as it was identified within the scope of 2014 - 2020 Interreg V-A Italy - Croatia CBC Programme \u201cDigitalising Logistics processes - DIGLOGS\u201d project. Furthermore, main findings and opportunities for proving technical feasibility will be identified and presented along with a carefully selected and envisaged test scenario chosen to compare the standard evacuation time with the one related to the adoption of the mobile technologies, the final goal being the streamlined evacuation procedures, and the increase of the ship's security and target group stakeholders' satisfaction

Leveraging the Power of Crowds: Automated Test Report Processing for The Maintenance of Mobile Applications

Crowdsourcing is an emerging distributed problem-solving model combining human and machine computation. It collects intelligence and knowledge from a large and diverse workforce to complete complex tasks. In the software engineering domain, crowdsourced techniques have been adopted to facilitate various tasks, such as design, testing, debugging, development, and so on. Specifically, in crowdsourced testing, crowdsourced workers are given testing tasks to perform and submit their feedback in the form of test reports. One of the key advantages of crowdsourced testing is that it is capable of providing engineers software engineers with domain knowledge and feedback from a large number of real users. Based on diverse software and hardware settings of these users, engineers can bugs that are not caught by traditional quality assurance techniques. Such benefits are particularly ideal for mobile application testing, which needs rapid development-and-deployment iterations and support diverse execution environments. However, crowdsourced testing naturally generates an overwhelming number of crowdsourced test reports, and inspecting such a large number of reports becomes a time-consuming yet inevitable task. This dissertation presents a series of techniques, tools and experiments to assist in crowdsourced report processing. These techniques are designed for improving this task in multiple aspects: 1. prioritizing crowdsourced report to assist engineers in finding as many unique bugs as possible, and as quickly as possible; 2. grouping crowdsourced report to assist engineers in identifying the representative ones in a short time; 3. summarizing the duplicate reports to provide engineers with a concise and accurate understanding of a group of reports; In the first step, I present a text-analysis-based technique to prioritize test reports for manual inspection. This technique leverages two key strategies: (1) a diversity strategy to help developers inspect a wide variety of test reports and to avoid duplicates and wasted effort on falsely classified faulty behavior, and (2) a risk-assessment strategy to help developers identify test reports that may be more likely to be fault-revealing based on past observations.Together, these two strategies form our technique to prioritize test reports in crowdsourced testing. Moreover, in the mobile testing domain, test reports often consist of more screenshots and shorter descriptive text, and thus text-analysis-based techniques may be ineffective or inapplicable. The shortage and ambiguity of natural-language text information and the well-defined screenshots of activity views within mobile applications motivate me to propose a novel technique based on using image understanding for multi-objective test-report prioritization. This technique employs the Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) technique to measure the similarity of the screenshots, and apply the natural-language processing technique to measure the distance between the text of test reports. Next, I design and implement CTRAS: a novel approach to leveraging duplicates to enrich the content of bug descriptions and improve the efficiency of inspecting these reports. CTRAS is capable of automatically aggregating duplicates based on both textual information and screenshots, and further summarizes the duplicate test reports into a comprehensive and comprehensible report.I validate all of these techniques on industrial data by collaborating with several companies. The results show my techniques can improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of crowdsourced test report processing. Also, I suggest settings for different usage scenarios and discuss future research directions

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Hajj crowd management via a mobile augmented reality application: a case of The Hajj event, Saudi Arabia

Hajj event is considered as one of the Islamic pillars that each Muslim, who could afford its’ expenses and are well bodied, should perform its’ rituals at least once in a lifetime. Therefore, they could travel to Mecca city, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj rituals. This holy city hosts this event annually in the last month of the Arabic calendar, which is Dhul Hijjah, and it lasts for 6 days. In addition, those Muslim visitors or pilgrims are obligated to be accommodated at Hajj ritual places, which are Arafat, Mina and Muzdalifah. However, in the last ten years, it was noticed that the Hajj events are crowded every year. Therefore, Hajj crowd management is being a complex task, due to the huge number of the pilgrims as they are crowded at the Hajj ritual places. This huge number is causing many problems, and Hajj authorities are facing difficulties in managing those crowded pilgrims. As a result, this research focuses on three main problems that occur at Hajj events. First, difficulties in organizing the crowds’ movements of the pilgrims, as Hajj events host enormous number of pilgrims in limited geographical spaces at the ritual places. This problem leads to overcrowdings, congestions and stampedes. Second, the pilgrims could get lost at Hajj ritual places, especially when they are moving between these places. Third, lack of directional information and guidance for those lost pilgrims. This problem leads to difficulties in finding their groups at the ritual sites, because the huge number of the pilgrims. Thus, this research proposes to deploy a technology, such as a Mobile Augmented Reality application. This application would assist the Hajj authorities (staff and operators) in managing the pilgrims’ movements between the ritual places, and to provide directions to the lost pilgrims. In addition, it would help those lost pilgrims by alerting, and sending their location information to their group guide. On the other hand, the research literature review covers previous studies about the Hajj crowd management, as it is divided into two perspectives. The theoretical perspective, which explains the crowd management steps that should be followed and applied, as these steps would help the Hajj authorities to succeed in crowd management at Hajj events. The practical perspective presents some studies that are related to the Hajj events. Those studies offered some solutions to manage crowded pilgrims, to avoid overcrowdings and stampedes, and to identify, locate and guide lost pilgrims. The solutions were Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) deceives and monitoring cameras. In addition, this research conducted and distributed questionnaires on 104 respondents. They were selected as they are related to Hajj events. The results of this research method confirmed that the Hajj events face problems. For example, overcrowdings, congestions and stampedes that occur at the ritual places, due to lack of pilgrims organization in limited spaces at these places. In addition, foreign pilgrims face difficulties in guidance, due to lack of directional information, and they could get lost from their groups at the Hajj events. In addition, the respondents suggested using technology to assist Hajj authorities in Hajj crowd management. Therefore, deploying MAR application is suggested, as a solution to solve or at least reduce the Hajj problems. The proposed application could help the Hajj authorities to manage the crowded pilgrims at the Hajj ritual places as this research illustrates two scenarios in Hajj crowd management. In conclusion, this application is beneficial and significant in crowd management at Hajj events, as it could provide instant information using high-speed process in sending and receiving information. In addition, the information about the pilgrims’ movements could be gathered, presented on smart devices and shared between applications’ users. Those users will be the Hajj staff on the ground and the Hajj operators in the control room of Hajj operations