Predicting bicycle arrivals in a Bicycle Sharing System network: A data science driven approach grounded in Zero-Inflated Regression

The adoption of bicycle sharing systems (BSS) is growing in order to improve the way people move around cities, but also to stimulate the development of a more sustainable urban mobility. For the proper functioning of a BSS, it is important to have bicycles permanently available at the stations for users to start their trips, so the literature has undertaken efforts, from the perspective of the service operator, to improve the process of redistribution of bicycles and thus ensure their availability at the different stations. Since the guarantee of available bicycles cannot be assured, this work proposes to develop, from the cyclist's perspective, a proof of concept on the feasibility of informing the user about the possibility of starting a trip in a pre-defined time interval. The main contributions of this work are: (i) the ability to predict how many bicycles will arrive at a given station is a feasible improvement for BSS, (ii) the models developed through the Zero-Inflated Regression approach are a path that can be explored to improve prediction and (iii) unprecedented methodological contribution to the literature on BSS focusing on the end-user's decision power about whether or not it will soon be possible to start a trip.A adoção de sistemas de bicicletas partilhadas (BSS) vem crescendo com o objetivo de melhorar a forma como as pessoas se deslocam pelas cidades, mas também para estimular o desenvolvimento de uma mobilidade urbana mais sustentável. Para o bom funcionamento de um BSS é importante que haja bicicletas permanentemente disponíveis nas estações para os utilizadores iniciarem as suas viagens, pelo que a literatura tem empreendido esforços, sob a ótica do operador do serviço, para melhorar o processo de redistribuição das bicicletas e assim garantir a sua disponibilidade nas diferentes estações. Como a garantia de bicicletas disponíveis não pode ser assegurada, este trabalho propõe-se desenvolver, sob a ótica do ciclista, uma prova de conceito sobre a viabilidade de informar o utilizador acerca da possibilidade de iniciar uma viagem num intervalo de tempo pré-definido. As principais contribuições deste trabalho são: (i) a capacidade de previsão de quantas bicicletas chegarão a uma determinada estação é uma melhoria viável para os BSS, (ii) os modelos desenvolvidos através da aproximação Zero-Inflated Regression são um caminho que pode ser explorado para melhorar a previsão e (iii) contributo metodológico inédito à literatura sobre os BSS com foco no poder decisório do utilizador final sobre se será, ou não, possível iniciar uma viagem em breve

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules through Technology

Historically, law and government regulation have established default rules for information policy, including constitutional rules on freedom of expression and statutory rights of ownership of information. This Article will show that for network environments and the Information Society, however, law and government regulation are not the only source of rule-making. Technological capabilities and system design choices impose rules on participants. The creation and implementation of information policy are embedded in network designs and standards as well as in system configurations. Even user preferences and technical choices create overarching, local default rules. This Article argues, in essence, that the set of rules for information flows imposed by technology and communication networks form a “Lex Informatica” that policymakers must understand, consciously recognize, and encourage

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future