Privacy-Preserving Vehicle Assignment for Mobility-on-Demand Systems

Urban transportation is being transformed by mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems. One of the goals of MoD systems is to provide personalized transportation services to passengers. This process is facilitated by a centralized operator that coordinates the assignment of vehicles to individual passengers, based on location data. However, current approaches assume that accurate positioning information for passengers and vehicles is readily available. This assumption raises privacy concerns. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a method that protects passengers' drop-off locations (i.e., their travel destinations). Formally, we solve a batch assignment problem that routes vehicles at obfuscated origin locations to passenger locations (since origin locations correspond to previous drop-off locations), such that the mean waiting time is minimized. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, we formalize the notion of privacy for continuous vehicle-to-passenger assignment in MoD systems, and integrate a privacy mechanism that provides formal guarantees. Second, we present a scalable algorithm that takes advantage of superfluous (idle) vehicles in the system, combining multiple iterations of the Hungarian algorithm to allocate a redundant number of vehicles to a single passenger. As a result, we are able to reduce the performance deterioration induced by the privacy mechanism. We evaluate our methods on a real, large-scale data set consisting of over 11 million taxi rides (specifying vehicle availability and passenger requests), recorded over a month's duration, in the area of Manhattan, New York. Our work demonstrates that privacy can be integrated into MoD systems without incurring a significant loss of performance, and moreover, that this loss can be further minimized at the cost of deploying additional (redundant) vehicles into the fleet.Comment: 8 pages; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 201

Impact of Positioning Technology on Human Navigation

In navigation from one place to another, spatial knowledge helps us establish a destination and route while travelling. Therefore, sufficient spatial knowledge is a vital element in successful navigation. To build adequate spatial knowledge, various forms of spatial tools have been introduced to deliver spatial information without direct experience (maps, descriptions, pictures, etc.). An innovation developed in the 1970s and available on many handheld platforms from the early 2000s is the Global Position System (GPS) and related map and text-based navigation support systems. Contemporary technical achievements, such as GPS, have made navigation more effective, efficient, and comfortable in most outdoor environments. Because GPS delivers such accurate information, human navigation can be supported without specific spatial knowledge. Unfortunately, there is no universal and accurate navigation system for indoor environments. Since smartphones have become increasingly popular, we can more frequently and easily access various positioning services that appear to work both indoors and outdoors. The expansion of positioning services and related navigation technology have changed the nature of navigation. For example, routes to destination are progressively determined by a “system,” not the individual. Unfortunately we only have a partial and nascent notion of how such an intervention affects spatial behaviour. The practical purpose of this research is to develop a trustworthy positioning system that functions in indoor environments and identify those aspects those should be considered before deploying Indoor Positioning System (IPS), all towards the goal of maintaining affordable positioning accuracy, quality, and consistency. In the same way that GPS provides worry free directions and navigation support, an IPS would extend such opportunities to many of our built environments. Unfortunately, just as we know little about how GPS, or any real time navigation system, affects human navigation, there is little evidence suggesting how such a system (indoors or outdoors) changes how we find our way. For this reason, in addition to specifying an indoor position system, this research examines the difference in human’s spatial behaviour based on the availability of a navigation system and evaluates the impact of varying the levels of availability of such tools (not available, partially available, or full availability). This research relies on outdoor GPS, but when such systems are available indoors and meet the accuracy and reliability or GPS, the results will be generalizable to such situations

Health & You University: A Business Proposal and Marketing Plan for Weight Loss Programs Everywhere

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100222/1/BBAWung2003.pd

Strategic leadership process in business schools : a political perspective

This study focuses on the political perspective of the process and context of strategic leadership, in three top international Business Schools, IMD, INSEAD and London Business School. It remedies three inadequacies in the current literature. These are: first, the scarcity of empirical studies on strategic leadership with a processual perspective, despite the interest demonstrated in theoretical studies on leadership in the last decades, second, the lack of links between the leadership and strategy fields; third, scholars' call for studies on leadership from a political perspective. Longitudinal and comparative case studies were conducted with the purpose of describing the Strategic Leadership Process (SLP) in each and across the three Business Schools, over the period 1990-2004, through strategic agenda-building and -executing, in relation to a specific strategic initiative: Becoming a top international Business School. Findings show firstly, that among the three key actors (Board, Dean and Faculty), the Dean is the main key actor in the SLP because of his critical role of building and executing the School's strategic agenda. Secondly, for the Dean to succeed, it is crucial to deliver an inclusive approach with regard to the other key actors' (Board and Faculty) interests and priorities. Thirdly, Performance represents a precondition for the Dean to be credible and receive support from Faculty and Board. Fourthly, for an effective direction-setting, the Dean's capacity to scan and understand the external voice, signals and trends and raise them to the School's strategic agenda is fundamental. Fifthly, the ability to articulate and communicate vision through coalition-building combined with adequate delegation, represent critical competences to raise and execute breakthrough initiatives for the School

Exploration of Adoption of Service Innovations Through Technology Road-Mapping: Case of Location Based Services

Exploration of Adoption of Service Innovations through Technology Road-Mapping: Case of Location Based Services: 10.4018/jssmet.2010040105: This paper utilizes a technology road-mapping approach to demonstrate how a traditional technology management process can be applied to improve plannin

Adaptive, reliable, and accurate positioning model for location-based services

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis presents a new strategy in achieving highly reliable and accurate position solutions fulfilling the requirements of Location-Based Services (LBS) pedestrians’ applications. The new strategy is divided into two main parts. The first part integrates the available positioning technology within the surrounding LBS application context by introducing an adaptive LBS framework. The context can be described as a group of factors affecting the application behaviour; this includes environmental states, available resources and user preferences. The proposed adaptive framework consists of several stages, such as defining the contextual factors that have a direct effect on the positioning performance, identifying preliminary positioning performance requirements associated with different LBS application groups, and introducing an intelligent positioning services selection function. The second part of this work involves the design and development of a novel positioning model that is responsible for delivering highly reliable, accurate and precise position solutions to LBS users. This new model is based on the single frequency GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS). Additionally, it is incorporated within the adaptive LBS framework while providing the position solutions, in which all identified contextual factors and application requirements are accounted. The positioning model operates over a client-server architecture including two main components, described as the Localisation Server (LS) and the Mobile Unit (MU). Hybrid functional approaches were developed at both components consisting of several processing procedures allowing the positioning model to operate in two position determination modes. Stand-alone mode is used if enough navigation information was available at the MU using its local positioning device (GPS/EGNOS receiver). Otherwise, server-based mode is utilised, in which the LS intervenes and starts providing the required position solutions. At the LS, multiple sources of GPS augmentation services were received using the Internet as the sole augmentation data transportation medium. The augmentation data was then processed and integrated for the purpose of guaranteeing the availability of valid and reliable information required for the provision of accurate and precise position solutions. Two main advanced position computation methods were developed at the LS, described as coordinate domain and raw domain. The positioning model was experimentally evaluated. According to the reported results, the LS through the developed position computation methods, was able to provide position samples with an accuracy of less than 2 meters, with high precision at 95% confidence level; this was achieved in urban, rural, and open space (clear satellite view) navigation environments. Additionally, the integrity of the position solutions was guaranteed in such environments during more than 90% of the navigation time, taking into consideration the identified integrity thresholds (Horizontal Alert Limits (HAL)=11 m). This positioning performance has outperformed the existing GPS/EGNOS service which was implemented at the MU in all scenarios and environments. In addition, utilising a simulation evaluation facility the developed positioning model performance was quantified with reference to a hybrid positioning service that will be offered by future Galileo Open Service (OS) along with GPS/EGNOS. Using the statistical t-test, it was concluded that there is no significant difference in terms of the position samples’ accuracy achieved from the developed positioning model and the hybrid system at a particular navigation environment described as rural area. The p-value was 0.08 and the level of significance used was 0.05. However, a significant difference in terms of the service integrity for the advantage of the hybrid system was experienced in all remaining scenarios and environments more especially the urban areas due to surrounding obstacles and conditions

Location reliability and gamification mechanisms for mobile crowd sensing

People-centric sensing with smart phones can be used for large scale sensing of the physical world by leveraging the sensors on the phones. This new type of sensing can be a scalable and cost-effective alternative to deploying static wireless sensor networks for dense sensing coverage across large areas. However, mobile people-centric sensing has two main issues: 1) Data reliability in sensed data and 2) Incentives for participants. To study these issues, this dissertation designs and develops McSense, a mobile crowd sensing system which provides monetary and social incentives to users. This dissertation proposes and evaluates two protocols for location reliability as a step toward achieving data reliability in sensed data, namely, ILR (Improving Location Reliability) and LINK (Location authentication through Immediate Neighbors Knowledge). ILR is a scheme which improves the location reliability of mobile crowd sensed data with minimal human efforts based on location validation using photo tasks and expanding the trust to nearby data points using periodic Bluetooth scanning. LINK is a location authentication protocol working independent of wireless carriers, in which nearby users help authenticate each other’s location claims using Bluetooth communication. The results of experiments done on Android phones show that the proposed protocols are capable of detecting a significant percentage of the malicious users claiming false location. Furthermore, simulations with the LINK protocol demonstrate that LINK can effectively thwart a number of colluding user attacks. This dissertation also proposes a mobile sensing game which helps collect crowd sensing data by incentivizing smart phone users to play sensing games on their phones. We design and implement a first person shooter sensing game, “Alien vs. Mobile User”, which employs techniques to attract users to unpopular regions. The user study results show that mobile gaming can be a successful alternative to micro-payments for fast and efficient area coverage in crowd sensing. It is observed that the proposed game design succeeds in achieving good player engagement

Enhancing integrated indoor/outdoor mobility in a smart campus

A Smart City relies on six key factors: Smart Governance, Smart People, Smart Economy, Smart Environment, Smart Living and Smart Mobility. This paper focuses on Smart Mobility by improving one of its key components: positioning. We developed and deployed a novel indoor positioning system (IPS) that is combined with an outdoor positioning system to support seamless indoor and outdoor navigation and wayfinding. The positioning system is implemented as a service in our broader cartography-based smart university platform, called SmartUJI, which centralizes access to a diverse collection of campus information and provides basic and complex services for the Universitat Jaume I (Spain), which serves as surrogate of a small city. Using our IPS and based on the SmartUJI services, we developed, deployed and evaluated two end-user mobile applications: the SmartUJI APP that allows users to obtain map-based information about the different facilities of the campus, and the SmartUJI AR that allows users to interact with the campus through an augmented reality interface. Students, university staff and visitors who tested the applications reported their usefulness in locating university facilities and generally improving spatial orientation

Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device