54,403 research outputs found
Integrated context-aware and cloud-based adaptive home screens for android phones
This is the post-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagThe home screen in Android phones is a highly customizable user interface where the users can add and remove widgets and icons for launching applications. This customization is currently done on the mobile device itself and will only create static content. Our work takes the concept of Android home screen [3] one step further and adds flexibility to the user interface by making it context-aware and integrated with the cloud. Overall results indicated that the users have a strong positive bias towards the application and that the adaptation helped them to tailor the device to their needs by using the different context aware mechanisms
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
"If You Can't Beat them, Join them": A Usability Approach to Interdependent Privacy in Cloud Apps
Cloud storage services, like Dropbox and Google Drive, have growing
ecosystems of 3rd party apps that are designed to work with users' cloud files.
Such apps often request full access to users' files, including files shared
with collaborators. Hence, whenever a user grants access to a new vendor, she
is inflicting a privacy loss on herself and on her collaborators too. Based on
analyzing a real dataset of 183 Google Drive users and 131 third party apps, we
discover that collaborators inflict a privacy loss which is at least 39% higher
than what users themselves cause. We take a step toward minimizing this loss by
introducing the concept of History-based decisions. Simply put, users are
informed at decision time about the vendors which have been previously granted
access to their data. Thus, they can reduce their privacy loss by not
installing apps from new vendors whenever possible. Next, we realize this
concept by introducing a new privacy indicator, which can be integrated within
the cloud apps' authorization interface. Via a web experiment with 141
participants recruited from CrowdFlower, we show that our privacy indicator can
significantly increase the user's likelihood of choosing the app that minimizes
her privacy loss. Finally, we explore the network effect of History-based
decisions via a simulation on top of large collaboration networks. We
demonstrate that adopting such a decision-making process is capable of reducing
the growth of users' privacy loss by 70% in a Google Drive-based network and by
40% in an author collaboration network. This is despite the fact that we
neither assume that users cooperate nor that they exhibit altruistic behavior.
To our knowledge, our work is the first to provide quantifiable evidence of the
privacy risk that collaborators pose in cloud apps. We are also the first to
mitigate this problem via a usable privacy approach.Comment: Authors' extended version of the paper published at CODASPY 201
Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey
As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors
deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown
a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has
predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These
sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to
add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling,
reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays
critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be
successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context
awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by
introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning.
Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a
subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial
solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the
last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our
evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some
possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of
techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and
middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only
to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate
their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201
Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain
With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and
applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its
associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users
to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the
providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally
Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to
automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and
shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the
properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit
mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data
across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a
working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail
along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users
to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the
flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on
Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE
International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017,
Boston, MA, US
Improve the Sustainability of Internet of Things Through Trading-based Value Creation
Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely discussed over the past few years in
technology point of view. However, the social aspects of IoT are seldom studied
to date. In this paper, we discuss the IoT in social point of view.
Specifically, we examine the strategies to increase the adoption of IoT in a
sustainable manner. Such discussion is essential in today's context where
adoption of IoT solutions by non-technical community is slow. Specially, large
number of IoT solutions making their way into the market every day. We propose
an trading-based value creation model based on sensing as a service paradigm in
order to fuel the adoption of IoT. We discuss the value creation and its impact
towards the society especially to households and their occupants. We also
present results of two different surveys we conducted in order to examine the
potential acceptance of the proposed model among the general public.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1307.819
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