Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.

Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed

Fashion Education in Sustainability: Change Through Experiential Crossings

Sustainability is distinguished by its multidimensional, messy, big and small transformational change processes that impact the world on all scales and timelines that are both short and long. This is, whilst challenging, full of diverse possibilities. To be path makers and navigators through this complexity requires us to teach and learn skills, knowledge and understanding of our relationships with each other and with our natural world. It requires us to hone our skills of imagination as well as our practical skills of creation and communication. Education for sustainability offers us a means to unlock the current fashion educational paradigm, which has become, in many cases, a service led model of educational provision for current business functions. It offers the means to change towards education that is based on a nurturing of culture, creativity and critical thinking, so that we are capable of responding to global and local contexts to contribute towards thriving societies, cultures and economies. The places, players, and their roles in this process differ substantially from traditional fashion education hierarchical models. This paper explores this changing paradigm through a case study at London College of Fashion, guided by Dilys Williams, Director Centre for Sustainable Fashion. The project worked with thirty undergraduate students across disciplines in fashion design and communication, their tutors, and a world leading sportswear brand’s design, communication and education teams. The author has developed an experiential and reflexive learning process through a number of iterations to explore design for sustainability (DfS) through teaching and learning methods that visualize our interdependence, support a mutual learning environment, and begin to explore cause and effect of our actions and interactions. This project engages this approach to explore ways in which the business could de-couple success from the throughput of material goods through this project based in the UK and the US

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Culture and disaster risk management - citizens’ reactions and opinions during Citizen Summit in Frankfurt, Germany

The analyses and results in this document are based on the data collected during the fourth Citizen Summit held in Frankfurt/Germany on June 14th 2017. As the previous three Citizen Summits held in Romania, Malta and Italy, this Citizen Summit was designed as a one-day event combining public information with feedback gathering through different methods of data collection. In the morning session, 42 questions with pre-defined answer options were posed to the audience and collected via an audience response system. In the afternoon session, small moderated group discussions of approximately 1.5 hours duration were held, which followed a detailed set of questions and discussion guidelines, including a short association exercise. All questions and discussions aimed to explore cultural factors in citizens’ attitudes, feelings, and perceptions towards disaster risks, as well as their identification in relation to disaster preparation, response and recovery. In coordination with the Work Package 11 briefs, the definition and design of the questions was based on: 1) Results from Citizen Summits 1 and 2, complementing in particular the data related to risk perception with the aim to build up a comprehensive base for cultural comparison across all six summits; 2) Results from Stakeholder Assemblies 1 and 2, in particular regarding the identification of non-professional (“cultural”) leaders in disaster situations, motivators for improving disaster preparedness, and the role of trust/distrust; 3) Results from Work Package 3, aiming to complement and increase knowledge about citizens’ uptake of mobile phone apps and interest in usage of different features, also in contrast to social media use; 4) Results from Work Package 4, in particular regarding recent research findings in the relationships between perceived disaster preparedness and actual disaster preparedness, and in the ambivalent relationships between trust in authorities and citizens’ personal preparedness; 5) Results from Work Package 7, aiming to complement the research regarding citizen empowerment by exploring trust as a bi-directional relationship between citizens and disaster managers; and 6) Results from Work Package 8, taking into account the role of media in all phases of disaster management. For a detailed overview of all questions asked and topics discussed please see Appendix A. Overall, 105 citizens participated in this Germany event. The total sample shows a relatively even gender and age distribution, which is unsurprising given the target quotas that were requested from the recruiting local market research agency. The comparatively low number of senior citizens aged 65 and above was expected and reflects mobility issues. Participants were asked about three key aspects of experience of disasters and disaster risk perception that could potentially have an impact on how other questions were answered. Two out of three respondents indicated that they themselves, or a close friend or family member, have experienced a disaster, more than half (54%) felt that they were living in an area that is specifically prone to disasters, and 62% answered that they know other people in the area where they live who they think are particularly vulnerable or exposed to disasters. Slight gender differences (as well as age-related differences) were found to be not statistically significant (p>=.05). This report is structured in five main sections: After this introduction, the second section will provide an overview of the different methods applied. The third section, based on the quantitative data collected via the audience response system, presents the results from questions on general disaster risk perceptions, disaster preparedness, behaviours in disaster situations with a particular focus on the use of mobile phone apps and social media, and trust between citizens and different authorities including trust in different social media sources. In the fourth section, based on the qualitative data collected in the ten discussion groups, the analyses will take up the topics introduced in the previous section, focusing first on the role of citizens’ trust in different entities, in particular towards different authorities, “non-professional” leaders, and the media. Furthermore, this section will report on the participating citizens’ attitudes towards improving their disaster preparedness through different measures. In all topics, the analyses seek to identify different cultural aspects which may play a role in an improved disaster preparedness and response. The final section compares and contrasts the results from Sections 3 and 4, draws some tentative conclusions, and identifies topics and issues that should feed into the last round of events in 2018, i.e. the 3rd Stakeholder Assembly, as well as the 5th and 6th Citizen Summits.The project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Horizon2020 Programme (2014-2020).peer-reviewe

Multiplicative Approximations, Optimal Hypervolume Distributions, and the Choice of the Reference Point

Many optimization problems arising in applications have to consider several objective functions at the same time. Evolutionary algorithms seem to be a very natural choice for dealing with multi-objective problems as the population of such an algorithm can be used to represent the trade-offs with respect to the given objective functions. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective problems. We consider indicator-based algorithms whose goal is to maximize the hypervolume for a given problem by distributing {\mu} points on the Pareto front. To gain new theoretical insights into the behavior of hypervolume-based algorithms we compare their optimization goal to the goal of achieving an optimal multiplicative approximation ratio. Our studies are carried out for different Pareto front shapes of bi-objective problems. For the class of linear fronts and a class of convex fronts, we prove that maximizing the hypervolume gives the best possible approximation ratio when assuming that the extreme points have to be included in both distributions of the points on the Pareto front. Furthermore, we investigate the choice of the reference point on the approximation behavior of hypervolume-based approaches and examine Pareto fronts of different shapes by numerical calculations

Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild

In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches: identifier renaming, string encryption, Java reflection, and packing. To obtain the meaningful statistical results, we designed efficient and lightweight detection models for each obfuscation technique and applied them to our massive APK datasets (collected from Google Play, multiple third-party markets, and malware databases). We have learned several interesting facts from the result. For example, malware authors use string encryption more frequently, and more apps on third-party markets than Google Play are packed. We are also interested in the explanation of each finding. Therefore we carry out in-depth code analysis on some Android apps after sampling. We believe our study will help developers select the most suitable obfuscation approach, and in the meantime help researchers improve code analysis systems in the right direction