A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets

In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers' grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence, and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers' profits and the users' experience

Web information gathering processes for gold and silver price information

This paper presents a research on product-specific web information gathering concept that intends to improve web searching through conventional search engines.Search engines are useful for searching general information; however, the results are not always accurate because they return the results based on key-words occurrences, but not accurateness.Further, users must filter and organize the information accordingly to make the information meaningful.Users must also visit multiple websites independently to check whether the information is relevant.These processes are tedious and very time consuming especially for users who search for specific products information Hence, we propose a web information gathering model that aims to provide a standard for developing product-specific web searching tools. It was applied in a mobile application called Gold-Trader. The mobile application provides gold and silver prices information to individual or personal traders.It can help individual or personal traders to monitor and compare gold and silver prices from multiple websites without the needs to visit them individually

Context storage using NoSQL

With the ubiquity and pervasiveness of mobile computing, together with the increasing number of social networks, end-users have learned to live and share all kinds of information about themselves. As an example, Facebook reports that it has currently 500 million active users, 200 million of which access its services on mobile systems; moreover, users that access Facebook through mobile applications are twice as active as non-mobile users, and it is used by 200 mobile operators in 60 countries [1]. More specific mobile platforms such as Foursquare, which unlike Facebook only collects location information, reports 6.5 million users worldwide, and also has a mobile presence (both with a web application and iPhone / Android applications) [2]. Context- aware architectures intend to explore this increasing number of context information sources and provide richer, targeted services to end-users, while also taking into account arising privacy issues. While multiple context management platform architectures have been devised [3], this paper focuses primarily on Context- Broker-based architectures, such as the ones proposed in the projects Mobilife [4] and C-Cast [5]. More specifically, it focuses on the context management platform XCoA [6]. This platform uses XMPP for its main communication protocol, and publishes context information in a Context-Broker. This context information is provided by Context-Agents, such as mobile terminals, sensor networks and social networks. Due to the nature of the XMPP protocol, the context information is provided in XML form. This paper proposes the usage of a NoSQL storage system for the purpose of context information storage and retrieval in an XMPP broker-based context platform such as XCoA, together with a full-text searching engine. Through a comparison made through prototypes, the paper clearly demonstrates the advantages of NoSQL storage systems applied to the area of Context Management

Personal information search on mobile devices

Today's mobile devices, especially mobile phones, are comparable in computing capability and storage to the desktop computers of a few years ago. The volume and diversity of the information kept on mobile devices has continually increased and users have taken advantage of this. Since information is being stored on multiple devices, searching for and retrieving the desired information has become an important function. This thesis focuses on search with regard to Personal Information Management (PIM) on mobile devices. A search system which involves different types of mobile devices is also introduced.Turkish Army author

Challenges and opportunities of context-aware information access

Ubiquitous computing environments embedding a wide range of pervasive computing technologies provide a challenging and exciting new domain for information access. Individuals working in these environments are increasingly permanently connected to rich information resources. An appealing opportunity of these environments is the potential to deliver useful information to individuals either from their previous information experiences or external sources. This information should enrich their life experiences or make them more effective in their endeavours. Information access in ubiquitous computing environments can be made "context-aware" by exploiting the wide range context data available describing the environment, the searcher and the information itself. Realizing such a vision of reliable, timely and appropriate identification and delivery of information in this way poses numerous challenges. A central theme in achieving context-aware information access is the combination of information retrieval with multiple dimensions of available context data. Potential context data sources, include the user's current task, inputs from environmental and biometric sensors, associated with the user's current context, previous contexts, and document context, which can be exploited using a variety of technologies to create new and exciting possibilities for information access

Mobile information access in the real world: A story of three wireless devices

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2008 ElsevierThe importance of the user perspective to the wireless information access experience cannot be understated: simply put, users will not indulge in devices that are perceived to be difficult to use and in technologies that do not offer quality infotainment – combined information and entertainment – content. In this paper, we investigate the impact that mobile devices have on the user wireless infotainment access experience in practice. To this end, we have undertaken an empirical study placed in a ‘real-world’ setting, in which participants undertook typical infotainment access tasks on three different wireless-enabled mobile devices: a laptop, a personal digital assistant and a head mounted display device. Results show that, with the exception of participants’ level of self-consciousness when using such devices in public environments, the user wireless information access experience is generally unaffected by device type. Location was shown, though, to be a significant factor when users engage in tasks such as listening to online music or navigation. Whilst the interaction between device and environment was found to influence entertainment-related tasks in our experiments, the informational ones were not affected. However, the interaction effects between device and user type was found to affect both types of tasks. Lastly, a user’s particular computing experience was shown to influence the perceived ease of wireless information access only in the case of online searching, irrespective of whether this is done for primarily informational purposes or entertainment ones

Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices

With the recent growth of conversational systems and intelligent assistants such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant, mobile devices are becoming even more pervasive in our lives. As a consequence, users are getting engaged with the mobile apps and frequently search for an information need in their apps. However, users cannot search within their apps through their intelligent assistants. This requires a unified mobile search framework that identifies the target app(s) for the user's query, submits the query to the app(s), and presents the results to the user. In this paper, we take the first step forward towards developing unified mobile search. In more detail, we introduce and study the task of target apps selection, which has various potential real-world applications. To this aim, we analyze attributes of search queries as well as user behaviors, while searching with different mobile apps. The analyses are done based on thousands of queries that we collected through crowdsourcing. We finally study the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models for this task and propose two simple yet effective neural models that significantly outperform the baselines. Our neural approaches are based on learning high-dimensional representations for mobile apps. Our analyses and experiments suggest specific future directions in this research area.Comment: To appear at SIGIR 201