121,629 research outputs found
Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.
The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial
services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and
innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the
same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto-
peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial
services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing
financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the
possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an
effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services.
The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully
determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative
effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical
infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or
on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our
partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible
technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no.
EP/K012304/1)
Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks
Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing
capabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), which
provides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging
mobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limited
computation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services of
high quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloaded
with an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we propose
collaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to share
computation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computation
workload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novel
SBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional game
theory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems,
including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services,
cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address these
challenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBS
association stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultra
dense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism that
implements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions,
and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSs
due to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carried
out to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, which
shows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.4501 by other author
Named data networking for efficient IoT-based disaster management in a smart campus
Disasters are uncertain occasions that can impose a drastic impact on human life and building infrastructures. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a vital role in coping with such situations by enabling and integrating multiple technological resources to develop Disaster Management Systems (DMSs). In this context, a majority of the existing DMSs use networking architectures based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) focusing on location-dependent communications. However, IP-based communications face the limitations of inefficient bandwidth utilization, high processing, data security, and excessive memory intake. To address these issues, Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a promising communication paradigm, which is based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture. An NDN is among the self-organizing communication networks that reduces the complexity of networking systems in addition to provide content security. Given this, many NDN-based DMSs have been proposed. The problem with the existing NDN-based DMS is that they use a PULL-based mechanism that ultimately results in higher delay and more energy consumption. In order to cater for time-critical scenarios, emergence-driven network engineering communication and computation models are required. In this paper, a novel DMS is proposed, i.e., Named Data Networking Disaster Management (NDN-DM), where a producer forwards a fire alert message to neighbouring consumers. This makes the nodes converge according to the disaster situation in a more efficient and secure way. Furthermore, we consider a fire scenario in a university campus and mobile nodes in the campus collaborate with each other to manage the fire situation. The proposed framework has been mathematically modeled and formally proved using timed automata-based transition systems and a real-time model checker, respectively. Additionally, the evaluation of the proposed NDM-DM has been performed using NS2. The results prove that the proposed scheme has reduced the end-to-end delay up from 2% to 10% and minimized up to 20% energy consumption, as energy improved from 3% to 20% compared with a state-of-the-art NDN-based DMS
Data centric trust evaluation and prediction framework for IOT
© 2017 ITU. Application of trust principals in internet of things (IoT) has allowed to provide more trustworthy services among the corresponding stakeholders. The most common method of assessing trust in IoT applications is to estimate trust level of the end entities (entity-centric) relative to the trustor. In these systems, trust level of the data is assumed to be the same as the trust level of the data source. However, most of the IoT based systems are data centric and operate in dynamic environments, which need immediate actions without waiting for a trust report from end entities. We address this challenge by extending our previous proposals on trust establishment for entities based on their reputation, experience and knowledge, to trust estimation of data items [1-3]. First, we present a hybrid trust framework for evaluating both data trust and entity trust, which will be enhanced as a standardization for future data driven society. The modules including data trust metric extraction, data trust aggregation, evaluation and prediction are elaborated inside the proposed framework. Finally, a possible design model is described to implement the proposed ideas
Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things
The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are
accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous
pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large
concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people
from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an
overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure
towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives
by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find
sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has
also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to
connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for
efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today
infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services
using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a
service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to
investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological,
economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and
issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014
(Accepted for Publication
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