WHAT IS SMART ABOUT SERVICES? BREAKING THE BOND BETWEEN THE SMART PRODUCT AND THE SERVICE

While the conceptual delineation between conventional and smart products is rather conspicuous, the distinction between conventional services and their smart counterparts remains elusive. This study develops a conceptual framework for understanding the distinctive attributes of smart services and their relationship to smart products. In a systematic literature review of publications from top information systems outlets, 30 contributions holding relevant information on smart services are identified and subjected to content analysis. The analysis reveals a variety of different definitions and characterizations of smart services and relations to concepts like data-driven services and services associated to smart products and smart objects. These findings are used to examine artifacts developed in rather design-oriented papers to derive five dimensions that impact the level of smartness of services: richness of the data, the knowledge intensiveness of the engine for decision support, the level of sophistication of the outcome delivered to the service user(s), the architecture of the stakeholders, and the automation level of the service processes. Within this scope, the product can have four roles: sensor, computer, interface, or integrator. The paper concludes by identifying some gaps in the overall research landscape and provides directions for future research

Foggy clouds and cloudy fogs: a real need for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud computing systems

The recent advances in cloud services technology are fueling a plethora of information technology innovation, including networking, storage, and computing. Today, various flavors have evolved of IoT, cloud computing, and so-called fog computing, a concept referring to capabilities of edge devices and users' clients to compute, store, and exchange data among each other and with the cloud. Although the rapid pace of this evolution was not easily foreseeable, today each piece of it facilitates and enables the deployment of what we commonly refer to as a smart scenario, including smart cities, smart transportation, and smart homes. As most current cloud, fog, and network services run simultaneously in each scenario, we observe that we are at the dawn of what may be the next big step in the cloud computing and networking evolution, whereby services might be executed at the network edge, both in parallel and in a coordinated fashion, as well as supported by the unstoppable technology evolution. As edge devices become richer in functionality and smarter, embedding capacities such as storage or processing, as well as new functionalities, such as decision making, data collection, forwarding, and sharing, a real need is emerging for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud (F2C) computing systems. This article introduces a layered F2C architecture, its benefits and strengths, as well as the arising open and research challenges, making the case for the real need for their coordinated management. Our architecture, the illustrative use case presented, and a comparative performance analysis, albeit conceptual, all clearly show the way forward toward a new IoT scenario with a set of existing and unforeseen services provided on highly distributed and dynamic compute, storage, and networking resources, bringing together heterogeneous and commodity edge devices, emerging fogs, as well as conventional clouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Ontology-based Classification and Analysis of non- emergency Smart-city Events

Several challenges are faced by citizens of urban centers while dealing with day-to-day events, and the absence of a centralised reporting mechanism makes event-reporting and redressal a daunting task. With the push on information technology to adapt to the needs of smart-cities and integrate urban civic services, the use of Open311 architecture presents an interesting solution. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses an existing Open311 ontology to classify and report non-emergency city-events, as well as to guide the citizen to the points of redressal. The use of linked open data and the semantic model serves to provide contextual meaning and make vast amounts of content hyper-connected and easily-searchable. Such a one-size-fits-all model also ensures reusability and effective visualisation and analysis of data across several cities. By integrating urban services across various civic bodies, the proposed approach provides a single endpoint to the citizen, which is imperative for smooth functioning of smart cities

Medical data processing and analysis for remote health and activities monitoring

Recent developments in sensor technology, wearable computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless communication have given rise to research in ubiquitous healthcare and remote monitoring of human\u2019s health and activities. Health monitoring systems involve processing and analysis of data retrieved from smartphones, smart watches, smart bracelets, as well as various sensors and wearable devices. Such systems enable continuous monitoring of patients psychological and health conditions by sensing and transmitting measurements such as heart rate, electrocardiogram, body temperature, respiratory rate, chest sounds, or blood pressure. Pervasive healthcare, as a relevant application domain in this context, aims at revolutionizing the delivery of medical services through a medical assistive environment and facilitates the independent living of patients. In this chapter, we discuss (1) data collection, fusion, ownership and privacy issues; (2) models, technologies and solutions for medical data processing and analysis; (3) big medical data analytics for remote health monitoring; (4) research challenges and opportunities in medical data analytics; (5) examples of case studies and practical solutions

A people-oriented paradigm for smart cities

Most works in the literature agree on considering the Internet of Things (IoT) as the base technology to collect information related to smart cities. This information is usually offered as open data for its analysis, and to elaborate statistics or provide services which improve the management of the city, making it more efficient and more comfortable to live in. However, it is not possible to actually improve the quality of life of smart cities’ inhabitants if there is no direct information about them and their experiences. To address this problem, we propose using a social and mobile computation model, called the Internet of People (IoP) which empowers smartphones to recollect information about their users, analyze it to obtain knowledge about their habits, and provide this knowledge as a service creating a collaborative information network. Combining IoT and IoP, we allow the smart city to dynamically adapt its services to the needs of its citizens, promoting their welfare as the main objective of the city.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Use of Smart Phone among Para-Professional Librarians in Olabisi Onabanjo University Library, Nigeria

This study attempted to investigate how para-professional librarians (Library Officers cadre and only Assistant Library Officers) in Olabisi Onabanjo University (O.O.U) Library, Nigeria used smart phone to embrace academic library services. A questionnaire and an interview schedule were used to collect data for the study. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The study revealed that all the library paraprofessional staff had and used smart phones for personal, official and library services, but the use for library services and routines (across the items for library services) were on a lower side. The study further revealed that gender of para-professional librarians does not influence smart phone use amongst other findings. The study thus recommended provision of good telecommunication facilities, integration of full mobile library applications and services into academic library functions and services and training of library staff for effective deployment of phone use for library services amongst others. Keywords: Library Services, Mobile Phones Use, Nigerian Para-Professional Librarians, Smart Phone Use, Smart Phone Use for Library Services, New Media

Enhancing Security and Privacy on Smart City’s Collected Data: A Fog Computing Perspective

Smart cities use information and communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens. Use of ICT makes them to be more intelligent and efficient in usage of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life. Smart cities are expected to be the fundamental pillars of continued economic growth and improved services delivery. Smart City technology is having ability to constantly gather information about the city, sharing the data with people, devices and technologies or borrowing relevant data from elsewhere, for analysis to enable informed decision making. For instance internet of things has emerged as a technological driving force in real time service delivery in smart cities. These applications provide new abilities, enhancing monitoring, and provision of action oriented process on control and device management. Smart devices are a major source of big data in smart cities. With expected increase of billions of smart devices and sensors in smart city by the year 2020, more data will be generated which will reduce efficiency of cloud access, due to increased volume. Security and privacy of data is a challenge in smart city, negligence in data security and privacy can be amplified in folds resulting to faulty applications, services along with paralyzing the entire city through Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, Spear Phishing Attacksand Brute-Force Attacks among others.Fog computing FC is a new paradigm that is intended to extend cloud computing CC through deployment of processing and localized units into the network edge, enabling low latency, offering location awareness and latency sensitiveness. Homomorphism for encryption, authorization, authentication, and classification are performed on collected data in smart cities to improve security and privacy. In this paper assimilation and analysis, is performed with fog computing aspects of decentralization, different policies for datacenter transferstrategies being analyzed.Processing time, access time, request time, response time and cost analysis show system efficiency

Enhancing Security and Privacy on Smart City’s Collected Data: A Fog Computing Perspective

Smart cities use information and communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens. Use of ICT makes them to be more intelligent and efficient in usage of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life. Smart cities are expected to be the fundamental pillars of continued economic growth and improved services delivery. Smart City technology is having ability to constantly gather information about the city, sharing the data with people, devices and technologies or borrowing relevant data from elsewhere, for analysis to enable informed decision making. For instance internet of things has emerged as a technological driving force in real time service delivery in smart cities. These applications provide new abilities, enhancing monitoring, and provision of action oriented process on control and device management. Smart devices are a major source of big data in smart cities. With expected increase of billions of smart devices and sensors in smart city by the year 2020, more data will be generated which will reduce efficiency of cloud access, due to increased volume. Security and privacy of data is a challenge in smart city, negligence in data security and privacy can be amplified in folds resulting to faulty applications, services along with paralyzing the entire city through Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, Spear Phishing Attacksand Brute-Force Attacks among others.Fog computing FC is a new paradigm that is intended to extend cloud computing CC through deployment of processing and localized units into the network edge, enabling low latency, offering location awareness and latency sensitiveness. Homomorphism for encryption, authorization, authentication, and classification are performed on collected data in smart cities to improve security and privacy. In this paper assimilation and analysis, is performed with fog computing aspects of decentralization, different policies for datacenter transferstrategies being analyzed.Processing time, access time, request time, response time and cost analysis show system efficiency

Arm Mbed – AWS IoT System Integration [Open access]

This project explores the different Internet of Things (IoT) architectures and the available platforms to define a general IoT Architecture to connect Arm microcontrollers to Amazon Web Services. In order to accommodate the wide range of IoT applications, the architecture was defined with different routes that an Arm microcontroller can take to reach AWS. Once this Architecture was defined, a performance analysis on the different routes was performed in terms of communication speed and bandwidth. Finally, a Smart Home use case scenario is implemented to show the basic functionalities of an IoT system such as sending data to the device and data storage in the Cloud. Furthermore, a Cloud ML algorithm is triggered in real time by the Smart Home to receive a prediction of the current Comfort Level in the room