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

Developments in information technology and their implications for psychological research: Disruptive or diffusive change?

The notion of technology-induced disruptive change has generally been applied within academia to teaching and learning. Less explored is the disruption that occurs to research as mainstream technology develops. This article examines the effects of technological change on research in psychology, in particular focussing on the development of web-based empirical research procedures over the past 15 years or so. I discuss the history, challenges and potential of these developments, and put forward some qualified suggestions for some of the future directions that technology will allow research in psychology to take

HoPP: Robust and Resilient Publish-Subscribe for an Information-Centric Internet of Things

This paper revisits NDN deployment in the IoT with a special focus on the interaction of sensors and actuators. Such scenarios require high responsiveness and limited control state at the constrained nodes. We argue that the NDN request-response pattern which prevents data push is vital for IoT networks. We contribute HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a robust publish-subscribe scheme for typical IoT scenarios that targets IoT networks consisting of hundreds of resource constrained devices at intermittent connectivity. Our approach limits the FIB tables to a minimum and naturally supports mobility, temporary network partitioning, data aggregation and near real-time reactivity. We experimentally evaluate the protocol in a real-world deployment using the IoT-Lab testbed with varying numbers of constrained devices, each wirelessly interconnected via IEEE 802.15.4 LowPANs. Implementations are built on CCN-lite with RIOT and support experiments using various single- and multi-hop scenarios

A planned study of the impact of B2C logistics service quality on shopper satisfaction and loyalty

Purpose of the paper: This paper reports on an in-progress study of the impact of business to consumer (B2C) logistics service quality (LSQ) on in-store shopper satisfaction and loyalty. Methodology: A comparative research approach is being used across the UK, France and Germany to also investigate country-specific differences of consumer shopping behaviour and channel strategies. The first stage, in-line with a deliberate integrated supply chain approach, consists of structured in-depth interviews conducted with managers at the producer/retailer interface, e.g. producer category captains and retail category managers. This qualitative stage will be followed-up by a quantitative survey stage targeting consumers as shoppers to determine how their expectations of retail LSQ and associated activities influence their satisfaction and ongoing loyalty. Findings: A broad literature review has generated over 40 variables of interest for both LSQ and loyalty, and almost 10 variables of satisfaction. This study will contribute theoretically by considering a B2C setting for LSQ, which is the final aspect of point of origin to point-of-consumption, whereas most general LSQ literature and LSQ’s impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty has been dominated by business to business (B2B) designs from point-of-origin to point of sale, that is they assume consumer expectations are a given or a different domain. Research limitations: Although covering three major European grocery retail markets, this study might not be considered as representative, especially when adopting a world-wide perspective. Practical implications: As this study emphasises consequences of B2C LSQ on downstream or consumer satisfaction and loyalty, rather than considering the upstream origins of related problems that dominate extant research, it will contribute practically by providing managers with an understanding of the components of LSQ considered critical by consumers

Exploring Security, Privacy, and Reliability Strategies to Enable the Adoption of IoT

The Internet of things (IoT) is a technology that will enable machine-to-machine communication and eventually set the stage for self-driving cars, smart cities, and remote care for patients. However, some barriers that organizations face prevent them from the adoption of IoT. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore strategies that organization information technology (IT) leaders use for security, privacy, and reliability to enable the adoption of IoT devices. The study population included organization IT leaders who had knowledge or perceptions of security, privacy, and reliability strategies to adopt IoT at an organization in the eastern region of the United States. The diffusion of innovations theory, developed by Rogers, was used as the conceptual framework for the study. The data collection process included interviews with organization IT leaders (n = 8) and company documents and procedures (n = 15). Coding from the interviews and member checking were triangulated with company documents to produce major themes. Through methodological triangulation, 4 major themes emerged during my analysis: securing IoT devices is critical for IoT adoption, separating private and confidential data from analytical data, focusing on customer satisfaction goes beyond reliability, and using IoT to retrofit products. The findings from this study may benefit organization IT leaders by enhancing their security, privacy, and reliability practices and better protect their organization\u27s data. Improved data security practices may contribute to social change by reducing risk in security and privacy vulnerabilities while also contributing to new knowledge and insights that may lead to new discoveries such as a cure for a disease