Tourism mobile and recommendation systems - a state of the art

Recommendation systems have been growing in number for the last fifteen years. To evolve and adapt to the demands of the actual society, many paradigms emerged giving birth to even more paradigms and hybrid approaches. Mobile devices have also been under an incredible growth rate in every business area, and there are already lots of mobile based systems to assist tourists. This explosive growth gave birth to different mobile applications, each having their own advantages and disadvantages. Since recommendation and mobile systems might as well be integrated, this work intends to present the current state of the art in tourism mobile and recommendation systems, as well as to state their advantages and disadvantages

Developing Future Smart Parking Solutions for Hangzhou\u27s IoT Town

With help from the Smart Cities Research Center of Zhejiang Province, this project aimed to assess and improve current smart parking solutions in Hangzhou, China. The team consulted industry experts and research students to gauge the direction of smart technology applicable to future parking solutions. The team analyzed results from interviews, customer surveys, and observations to infer needs for improved user experience. Research performed on future technologies allowed the team to offer a system framework recommendation with modern smart parking features for a characteristic town in Hangzhou. The project team discovered that a future smart parking system could integrate 5G, High-Frequency RFID, and non-contact payment methods to address the shortcomings of current smart parking systems

Contextual mobile adaptation

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) involves systems that attempt to fit in with users’ context and interaction. Researchers agree that system adaptation is a key issue in ubicomp because it can be hard to predict changes in contexts, needs and uses. Even with the best planning, it is impossible to foresee all uses of software at the design stage. In order for software to continue to be helpful and appropriate it should, ideally, be as dynamic as the environment in which it operates. Changes in user requirements, contexts of use and system resources mean software should also adapt to better support these changes. An area in which adaptation is clearly lacking is in ubicomp systems, especially those designed for mobile devices. By improving techniques and infrastructure to support adaptation it is possible for ubicomp systems to not only sense and adapt to the environments they are running in, but also retrieve and install new functionality so as to better support the dynamic context and needs of users in such environments. Dynamic adaptation of software refers to the act of changing the structure of some part of a software system as it executes, without stopping or restarting it. One of the core goals of this thesis is to discover if such adaptation is feasible, useful and appropriate in the mobile environment, and how designers can create more adaptive and flexible ubicomp systems and associated user experiences. Through a detailed study of existing literature and experience of several early systems, this thesis presents design issues and requirements for adaptive ubicomp systems. This thesis presents the Domino framework, and demonstrates that a mobile collaborative software adaptation framework is achievable. This system can recommend future adaptations based on a history of use. The framework demonstrates that wireless network connections between mobile devices can be used to transport usage logs and software components, with such connections made either in chance encounters or in designed multi–user interactions. Another aim of the thesis is to discover if users can comprehend and smoothly interact with systems that are adapting. To evaluate Domino, a multiplayer game called Castles has been developed, in which game buildings are in fact software modules that are recommended and transferred between players. This evaluation showed that people are comfortable receiving semi–automated software recommendations; these complement traditional recommendation methods such as word of mouth and online forums, with the system’s support freeing users to discuss more in–depth aspects of the system, such as tactics and strategies for use, rather than forcing them to discover, acquire and integrate software by themselves

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

SmartPowerchair: characterisation and usability of a pervasive System of Systems

A characterisation of a pervasive System of Systems called the SmartPowerchair is presented, integrating pervasive technologies into a standard powered wheelchair (powerchair).The SmartPowerchair can be characterised as a System of Systems (SoS) due to focusing on selection of the correct combination of independent and interoperable systems that are networked for a period of time to achieve the specific overall goal of enhancing the quality of life for people with disability. A high-level two-dimensional SoS model for the SmartPowerchair is developed to illustrate the different SoS lifecycle stages and levels. The results from a requirements elicitation study consisting of a survey targeting powerchair users was the input to a Hierarchical Task Analysis defining the supported tasks of the SmartPowerchair. The system architecture of one constituent system (SmartATRS) is described as well as the results of a usability evaluation containing workload measurements. The establishment of the SmartAbility Framework was the outcome of the evaluation results that concluded Range of Movement (ROM) was the determinant of suitable technologies for people with disability. The framework illustrates how a SoS approach can be applied to disability to recommend interaction mediums, technologies and tasks depending on the disability,impairments and ROM of the user. The approach therefore, creates a‘recommender system’ by viewing Disability Type, Impairments, ROM, Interaction Medium, Technologies and Tasks as constituent systems that interact together in a SoS