Mobile Agents for Mobile Tourists: A User Evaluation of Gulliver's Genie

How mobile computing applications and services may be best designed, implemented and deployed remains the subject of much research. One alternative approach to developing software for mobile users that is receiving increasing attention from the research community is that of one based on intelligent agents. Recent advances in mobile computing technology have made such an approach feasible. We present an overview of the design and implementation of an archetypical mobile computing application, namely that of an electronic tourist guide. This guide is unique in that it comprises a suite of intelligent agents that conform to the strong intentional stance. However, the focus of this paper is primarily concerned with the results of detailed user evaluations conducted on this system. Within the literature, comprehensive evaluations of mobile context-sensitive systems are sparse and therefore, this paper seeks, in part, to address this deficiency

Enabling Personalized Composition and Adaptive Provisioning of Web Services

The proliferation of interconnected computing devices is fostering the emergence of environments where Web services made available to mobile users are a commodity. Unfortunately, inherent limitations of mobile devices still hinder the seamless access to Web services, and their use in supporting complex user activities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a distributed, adaptive, and context-aware framework for personalized service composition and provisioning adapted to mobile users. Users specify their preferences by annotating existing process templates, leading to personalized service-based processes. To cater for the possibility of low bandwidth communication channels and frequent disconnections, an execution model is proposed whereby the responsibility of orchestrating personalized processes is spread across the participating services and user agents. In addition, the execution model is adaptive in the sense that the runtime environment is able to detect exceptions and react to them according to a set of rules

The Role of User-Agent Interactions on Mobile Money Practices in Kenya and Tanzania

Digital financial services have catalyzed financial inclusion in Africa. Commonly implemented as a mobile wallet service referred to as mobile money (MoMo), the technology provides enormous benefits to its users, some of whom have long been unbanked. While the benefits of mobile money services have largely been documented, the challenges that arise -- especially in the interactions between human stakeholders -- remain relatively unexplored. In this study, we investigate the practices of mobile money users in their interactions with mobile money agents. We conduct 72 structured interviews in Kenya and Tanzania (n=36 per country). The results show that users and agents design workarounds in response to limitations and challenges that users face within the ecosystem. These include advances or loans from agents, relying on the user-agent relationships in place of legal identification requirements, and altering the intended transaction execution to improve convenience. Overall, the workarounds modify one or more of what we see as the core components of mobile money: the user, the agent, and the transaction itself. The workarounds pose new risks and challenges for users and the overall ecosystem. The results suggest a need for rethinking privacy and security of various components of the ecosystem, as well as policy and regulatory controls to safeguard interactions while ensuring the usability of mobile money.Comment: To be published in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 202

Exact Resource Allocation for Fair Wireless Relay

In relay-enabled cellular networks, the intertwined nature of network agents calls for complex schemes to allocate wireless resources. Resources need to be distributed among mobile users while considering how relay resources are allocated, and constrained by the traffic rate achievable by base stations and over backhaul links. In this work, we derive a resource allocation scheme that achieves max-min fairness across mobile users. Furthermore, the optimal allocation is found with linear complexity with respect to the number of mobile users and relays

K-Trek: A Peer-to-Peer Approach To Distribute Knowledge In Large Environments

In this paper, we explore an architecture, called K-Trek, that enables mobile users to travel across knowledge distributed over a large geographical area (ranging from large public buildings to a national park). Our aim is providing, dis-tributing, and enriching the environment with location-sensitive information for use by agents on board of mobile and static devices. Local interactions among K-Trek devices and the distribution of information in the larger environment adopt some typical peer-to-peer patterns and techniques. We introduce the architecture, discuss some of its potential knowledge management applications, and present a few experimental results obtained with simulation

Cyber Security Challenges, its Emerging Trends on Latest Information and Communication Technology and Cyber Crime in Mobile Money Transaction Services

This paper investigates the challenges emerging trends on latest Information and Communication Technology and cybercrime in mobile money transaction services in Tanzania. The objective of this is to evaluate the challenges associated with this rapid growth in ICT and to determine factors influencing Cybersecurity readiness and Cybercrimes in mobile money transaction services.  Cyber Security plays a significant role in the field of Information and Communication Technology especially on mobile money transaction services. The study recognizes the provision of mobile money services by both telecommunication companies and local banks, the fact is that whenever we think about the cyber security, the first thing that comes to our mind is “cybercrimes” which are increasing extremely day to day and become a threat. Cybercrimes are mostly practiced through both internet and mobile money services. Securing the information has become one of the major challenges in the present day. Various Governments and companies are taking measures in order to prevent these cybercrimes. Besides cyber security remains concern to many. This paper mainly focuses on challenges faced by cyber security on the latest information and communication technology and cybercrime especially in mobile money transaction services in Tanzania. Its latest techniques, ethics and trends that change the face of cyber security. Relevant data was collected from the Forensic Section of the Tanzania Police Force, Mobile banking mobile money agents and users of the mobile-money services. This study also used the Pearson correlation and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to establish different facts and determine whether the independent variables had a combined effect on the dependent variable. The findings of the study revealed that there is a positive and significant correlation between users’ awareness, mobile money agents training, top management support, technical and logical controls and cybersecurity readiness. The study also concluded that effective training programs aimed to enlighten the users and mobile money agents on cybersecurity issues are an important ingredient for cybersecurity readiness in cybercrime in mobile money transaction services

Multimodal agent interfaces and system architectures for health and fitness companions

Multimodal conversational spoken dialogues using physical and virtual agents provide a potential interface to motivate and support users in the domain of health and fitness. In this paper we present how such multimodal conversational Companions can be implemented to support their owners in various pervasive and mobile settings. In particular, we focus on different forms of multimodality and system architectures for such interfaces

A Java Simulation-Based Performance Evaluation of Mobile Agent Platforms.

Mobile agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for the design and implementations of distributed applications .Manyof these Mobile Agent platforms have been developed, new one, and new versions of old agents, kept on appearing everyyear, so choosing the right or most suitable platform for a particular application area; based on their performance is achallenge for both the developers and the users. This paper carried out a qualitative comparison across three selected, Javabased Mobile Agent System, Aglet Tracy, and JADE. Two of them (Aglets and JADE) were selected for quantitativeevaluation on their time of transfer/retrieval of compressed data files. In our implementation, Aglet version 2.02 and JADE3.4.1 were used. A java simulation program was developed and used in measuring the performance of the two mobileagents, using transmission time and compressed time as performance metrics. In this paper work, a unique portnumber(2080) was chosen for the loading of classes and mobility of agents. Ten dummy data files (also refer to as Load orMessage) were created with sizes ranges from 100Kb to 1 Mb. A gzip compression tool was used to compress each of thesefiles and sent through the Aglet and JADE enabled network. The transmission time (in milliseconds) for each correspondingfiles size (in Bytes) in the two Mobile agents were recorded. We deduced from our qualitative results that, Tracy plug-infeatures give users room for reusability and extension. Aglets provide weak security and poorly scalable. JADE has astrong security, scalable and its multi agent feature will enrich its usage on the internet. Our quantitative results show thattransferring/retrieving of compressed data file is faster in JADE than in Aglets. The integrity of the files are also kept safe, inboth mobile agents, that is after decompressions they can still be reused.Keywords: Aglet, Gzip, JADE, Compression ratio, Mobile Agent Networ

Distributed Information Management with Mobile Agents

With more users taking advantage of publicly accessible networks, such as corporate intranets and the Internet, larger amounts of information is becoming electronically distributed and disseminated. Distributed information management is an emerging technology for dealing with the problems of managing information that is spread across networks, users and applications. We present four categories that we consider being necessary to developing tools to undertake distributed information management tasks. To help model the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of a user's distributed information, we advocate the use of agents and agent technologies when building distributed information management applications. We present an agent-oriented architecture which is based around a concept of mobile agents, since they provide a convenient abstraction for modelling distributed applications