Invisible Computing

The computer is no longer a tool solely used for enhancing the productivity of organizational tasks. Rather, computing capability now is embedded into our everyday artifacts, enabling our daily activities to become smarter and easier. As a result, the way we interact with computers has radically changed in the past few years: computing is now being designed for activity-oriented users. Thus, as IS and HCI scholars have discussed, computing should be designed to be invisible. By invisible we mean the phenomenon that users are not conscious of the computing that they are using. The degree of invisibility largely depends on user interfaces of computing. The concept of invisibility has been used among IS and HCI scholars. However, detailed analysis on invisibility as a construct has not been conducted. Therefore, in this paper, we will investigate 1) where and how the concept of invisibility has been used in the literature, 2) a new theoretical framework for the concept of invisibility in computing, and 3) how this concept can provide practical implications by applying it to a related case. In this paper, we focus on the relation between computing devices and users at the individual level with respect to degrees of invisibility

Low Effort and Privacy – How Textual Priming Affects Privacy Concerns of Email Service Users

The integration of digital applications and systems into the everyday routines of users is inevitably progressing. Ubiquitous and invisible computing requires the perspective of a new user and the inclusion of insights from related disciplines such as behavioral economics or social psychology. This paper takes up the call for research by Dinev et al. (2015) and examines the influence of textual priming elements on the privacy concerns of users of email accounts. The paper provides an operationalization of a privacy concern as a dependent variable, incorporated in an online experiment with 276 participants. The results show highly significant differences between the groups investigated by the experiment. Specifically, the users of different email providers show interesting results. While users of Gmail show no significant reaction in the experiment, users of other email providers show significant differences in the experimental setting

Ubiquitous computing: Anytime, anyplace, anywhere?

Computers are ubiquitous, in terms that they are everywhere, but does this mean the same as ubiquitous computing? Views are divided. The convergent device (one-does-all) view posits the computer as a tool through which anything, and indeed everything, can be done (Licklider & Taylor, 1968). The divergent device (many-do-all) view, by contrast, offers a world where microprocessors are embedded in everything and communicating with one another (Weiser, 1991). This debate is implicitly present in this issue, with examples of the convergent device in Crook & Barrowcliff's paper and in Gay et al's paper, and examples of the divergent devices in Thomas & Gellersen's paper and Baber's paper. I suspect both streams of technology are likely to co-exist

Estimating the Probability of a Rare Event Over a Finite Time Horizon

We study an approximation for the zero-variance change of measure to estimate the probability of a rare event in a continuous-time Markov chain. The rare event occurs when the chain reaches a given set of states before some fixed time limit. The jump rates of the chain are expressed as functions of a rarity parameter in a way that the probability of the rare event goes to zero when the rarity parameter goes to zero, and the behavior of our estimators is studied in this asymptotic regime. After giving a general expression for the zero-variance change of measure in this situation, we develop an approximation of it via a power series and show that this approximation provides a bounded relative error when the rarity parameter goes to zero. We illustrate the performance of our approximation on small numerical examples of highly reliableMarkovian systems. We compare it to a previously proposed heuristic that combines forcing with balanced failure biaising. We also exhibit the exact zero-variance change of measure for these examples and compare it with these two approximations

The Ubiquitous Interactor - Device Independent Access to Mobile Services

The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service

Ubiquitous Computing meets Ubiquitous Music

Ubiquitous Computing meets Ubiquitous Musi

Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation