43,167 research outputs found

    Creating the Ideal Digital Self: 3G Mobile Phone Content Production and Distribution as Social Communication

    Get PDF
    Mobile phone ownership presents users with the opportunity to regularly update others of their actions through the digital documentation and circulation of their experiences. There is a sense that an event is not complete until it is shared through text, voice or images. An empirical study of 35 users aged 18-30, conducted for the Smart Internet Technology CRC [3] revealed that when members of a social group cannot be together physically, circulating digitised accounts of an activity becomes an authentic way to share the event. Furthermore, the study indicated that with the convergence of 3G mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet, users are taking advantage of the best of all three communication channels to create, circulate, distribute and archive content in new and dynamic ways. Through this process users are creating the 'ideal digital self' by which to communicate socially. However, the effectiveness of these new practices is eroded by specific design and technological limitations, thus a distinct set of user problems emerged. This paper illustrates how the Trophy Room scenario, which is a 3G phone and web application, was developed to address the user needs identified in the study

    A comparative study of mobile technology adoption in remote Australia

    Get PDF
    The paper presents a comparative study of mobile technology adoption\ud and use by two communities – one Aboriginal and the other non-Aboriginal –\ud both located in a remote region of Australia, the Bloomfield River Valley of Cape\ud York. Both communities have high levels of ownership of mobile phones relative\ud to, on the one hand, the low uptake of other ICT such as fixed-line phones by the\ud Aboriginal community at Wujal Wujal and, on the other hand, the poor mobile\ud coverage in the non-Aboriginal community at Bloomfield. For both groups\ud communication is of paramount importance, followed by listening to music. In\ud addition, the Aboriginal community make extensive use of other multimedia and\ud Internet features of their devices. Key factors in the motivation to acquire mobile\ud phones, in comparison to other ICT, are the superior cost management that\ud mobiles offer for Aboriginal people and the convenience of being able to\ud communicate while away from home for Bloomfield residents. The authors\ud conclude that mobile technology needs to be taken seriously, even in areas of\ud limited coverage such as the Bloomfield River Valley

    APIs and Your Privacy

    Get PDF
    Application programming interfaces, or APIs, have been the topic of much recent discussion. Newsworthy events, including those involving Facebook’s API and Cambridge Analytica obtaining information about millions of Facebook users, have highlighted the technical capabilities of APIs for prominent websites and mobile applications. At the same time, media coverage of ways that APIs have been misused has sparked concern for potential privacy invasions and other issues of public policy. This paper seeks to educate consumers on how APIs work and how they are used within popular websites and mobile apps to gather, share, and utilize data. APIs are used in mobile games, search engines, social media platforms, news and shopping websites, video and music streaming services, dating apps, and mobile payment systems. If a third-party company, like an app developer or advertiser, would like to gain access to your information through a website you visit or a mobile app or online service you use, what data might they obtain about you through APIs and how? This report analyzes 11 prominent online services to observe general trends and provide you an overview of the role APIs play in collecting and distributing information about consumers. For example, how might your data be gathered and shared when using your Facebook account login to sign up for Venmo or to access the Tinder dating app? How might advertisers use Pandora’s API when you are streaming music? After explaining what APIs are and how they work, this report categorizes and characterizes different kinds of APIs that companies offer to web and app developers. Services may offer content-focused APIs, feature APIs, unofficial APIs, and analytics APIs that developers of other apps and websites may access and use in different ways. Likewise, advertisers can use APIs to target a desired subset of a service’s users and possibly extract user data. This report explains how websites and apps can create user profiles based on your online behavior and generate revenue from advertiser-access to their APIs. The report concludes with observations on how various companies and platforms connecting through APIs may be able to learn information about you and aggregate it with your personal data from other sources when you are browsing the internet or using different apps on your smartphone or tablet. While the paper does not make policy recommendations, it demonstrates the importance of approaching consumer privacy from a broad perspective that includes first parties and third parties, and that considers the integral role of APIs in today’s online ecosystem

    Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services

    Get PDF
    In recent years, the UK’s emergency call and response has shown elements of great strain as of today. The strain on emergency call systems estimated by a 9 million calls (including both landline and mobile) made in 2014 alone. Coupled with an increasing population and cuts in government funding, this has resulted in lower percentages of emergency response vehicles at hand and longer response times. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges of emergency services and overview of previous solutions. In addition, we propose a new system call Smart Hospital Emergency System (SHES). The main aim of SHES is to save lives through improving communications between patient and emergency services. Utilising the latest of technologies and algorithms within SHES is aiming to increase emergency communication throughput, while reducing emergency call systems issues and making the process of emergency response more efficient. Utilising health data held within a personal smartphone, and internal tracked data (GPU, Accelerometer, Gyroscope etc.), SHES aims to process the mentioned data efficiently, and securely, through automatic communications with emergency services, ultimately reducing communication bottlenecks. Live video-streaming through real-time video communication protocols is also a focus of SHES to improve initial communications between emergency services and patients. A prototype of this system has been developed. The system has been evaluated by a preliminary usability, reliability, and communication performance study

    Fast parallel volume visualization on cuda technology

    Get PDF
    In the medical diagnosis and treatment planning, radiologists and surgeons rely heavily on the slices produced by medical imaging scanners. Unfortunately, most of these scanners can only produce two dimensional images because the machines that can produce three dimensional are very expensive. The two dimensional images from these devices are difficult to interpret because they only show cross-sectional views of the human structure. Consequently, such circumstances require highly qualified doctors to use their expertise in the interpretation of the possible location, size or shape of the abnormalities especially for large datasets of enormous amount of slices. Previously, the concept of reconstructing two dimensional images to three dimensional was introduced. However, such reconstruction model requires high performance computation, may either be time-consuming or costly. Furthermore, detecting the internal features of human anatomical structure, such as the imaging of the blood vessels, is still an open topic in the computer-aided diagnosis of disorders and pathologies. This study proposed, designed and implemented a visualization framework named SurLens with high performance computing using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), augmenting the widely proven ray casting technique in terms of superior qualities of images but with slow speed. Considering the rapid development of technology in the medical community, our framework is implemented on Microsoft .NET environment for easy interoperability with other emerging revolutionary tools. The Visualization System was evaluated with brain datasets from the department of Surgery, University of North Carolina, United States, containing 109 datasets of MRA, T1-FLASH, T2-Weighted, DTI and T1-MPRAGE. Significantly, at a reasonably cheaper cost, SurLens Visualization System achieves immediate reconstruction and obvious mappings of the internal features of the human brain, reliable enough for instantaneously locate possible blockages in the brain blood vessels without any prior segmentation of the datasets
    • 

    corecore