Multimedia Content Distribution Management Using a Distributed Topology

Advertising plays an important role in order for many companies to promote their products and services. It can be expensive to place advertisements with no guarantees that the message will reach the intended persons. In this field, targeted advertising is the mainstream strategy to captivate the potential consumer. People are used to see advertisements everywhere they go in many different forms. One of those is the use of screen displays that are believed to make the ads more engaging. However, using digital screens to advertise may lead to some issues, like down times or unwanted error messages from the device that controls the screens. This can cause a bad experience for both the target audience and the advertiser. This thesis was developed within the scope of a project called Vixtape. It’s a platform with the goal of turning any public screen into an ads displaying device and in the process reward the screen owner by exposing ads to the target audience. It also has the mission of giving the end user a optimal technological experience, no flaws and highly efficient. All these characteristics are accomplished by the use of a new open source technology called Interplanetary File System (IPFS), that allow devices to share content between them in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) topology. This content distribution method saves Internet bandwidth to the end user (i.e., the Vixtape service client) and also enables the devices to work offline in case their Internet connection drops. This will greatly reduce the common problems seen with ads screen, thus giving a better experience to both the audience and the end user. By the end of this document one can see that, adding a distributed topology to the Vixtape platform increased the Internet usage efficiency of the ads devices by always having up-to-date content available. This avoids that a device unnecessarily requests content from any of the other devices that had previously requested it. Additionally, a strategy to target a given audience was employed in order to choose the right ads to play. This further increases the maximum potential consumers the advertisements are shown to

The evolution of business analytics : based on case study research

While business analytics is becoming more significant and widely used by companies from increasing industries, for many the concept remains a complex illusion. The field of business analytics is considerably generic and fragmented, leaving managers confused and ultimately inhibited to make valuable decisions. This paper presents an evolutionary depiction of business analytics, using real-world case studies to illustrate a distinct overview that describes where the phenomenon was derived from, where it currently stands, and where it is heading towards. This paper provides eight case studies, representing three different eras: yesterday (1950s to 1990s), today (2000s to 2020s), and tomorrow (2030s to 2050s). Through cross-case analysis we have identified concluding patterns that lay as foundation for the discussion on future development within business analytics. We argue based on our findings that automatization of business processes will most likely continue to increase. AI is expanding in numerous areas, each specializing in a complex task, previously reserved by professionals. However, patterns show that new occupations linked to artificial intelligence will most probably be created. For the training of intelligent systems, data will most likely be requested more than ever. The increasing data will likely cause complications in current data infrastructures, causing the need for stronger networks and systems. The systems will need to process, store, and manage the great amount of various data types in real-time, while maintaining high security. Furthermore, data privacy concerns have become more significant in recent years, although, the case study research indicates that it has not limited corporations access to data. On the contrary, corporations, people, and devices will most likely become even more connected than ever before.nhhma

DART: the distributed agent based retrieval toolkit

The technology of search engines is evolving from indexing and classification of web resources based on keywords to more sophisticated techniques which take into account the meaning and the context of textual information and usage. Replying to query, commercial search engines face the user requests with a large amount of results, mostly useless or only partially related to the request; the subsequent refinement, operated downloading and examining as much pages as possible and simply ignoring whatever stays behind the first few pages, is left up to the user. Furthermore, architectures based on centralized indexes, allow commercial search engines to control the advertisement of online information, in contrast to P2P architectures that focus the attention on user requirements involving the end user in search engine maintenance and operation. To address such wishes, new search engines should focus on three key aspects: semantics, geo-referencing, collaboration/distribution. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Collaboration distributes storage, processing, and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. In this paper, we describe the studies, the concepts and the solutions developed in the DART project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture

Using mobile devices to support online collaborative learning

Mobile collaborative learning is considered the next step of on-line collaborative learning by incorporating mobility as a key and breakthrough requirement. Indeed, the current wide spread of mobile devices and wireless technologies brings an enormous potential to e-learning, in terms of ubiquity, pervasiveness, personalization, flexibility, and so on. For this reason, Mobile Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning has recently grown from a minor research field to significant research projects covering a fairly variety of formal and specially informal learning settings, from schools and universities to workplaces, museums, cities and rural areas. Much of this research has shown how mobile technology can offer new opportunities for groups of learners to collaborate inside and beyond the traditional instructor-oriented educational paradigm. However, mobile technologies, when specifically applied to collaborative learning activities, are still in its infancy and many challenges arise. In addition, current research in this domain points to highly specialized study cases, uses, and experiences in specific educational settings and thus the issues addressed in the literature are found dispersed and disconnected from each other. To this end, this paper attempts to bridge relevant aspects of mobile technologies in support for collaborative learning and provides a tighter view by means of a multidimensional approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Self-organized Data Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: the Knowledge Networks Approach

Pervasive computing services exploit information about the physical world both to adapt their own behavior in a context-aware way and to deliver to users enhanced means of interaction with their surrounding environment. The technology to acquire digital information about the physical world is increasingly available, making services at risk of being overwhelmed by such growing amounts of data. This calls for novel approaches to represent and automatically organize, aggregate, and prune such growing amounts of data before delivering it to services. In particular, individual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology in which, by linking and combining with each other into sorts of “knowledge networks”, they can be able to provide to services compact and easy to be managed higher-level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need to evolve from models of “context-awareness” towards models of “situation-awareness” via proper self-organized “knowledge networks” tools, and introduce a general reference architecture for knowledge networks. Second, we describe the design and implementation of a knowledge network toolkit we have developed, and exemplify algorithms for knowledge self-organization integrated within it. Open issues and future research directions are also discussed

Istunnon aloitusprotokollaan pohjautuvat mobiilivertaisverkot

This work continues on my Master's Thesis work done between July 2005 and January 2006. In my Master's Thesis, we presented how a mobile peer-to-peer file-sharing application can be implemented using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the underlying signaling protocol. The main objective of this thesis is to evaluate what kind of special requirements mobile environment poses for peer-to-peer application design, and present how peer-to-peer based services can be efficiently realized in next-generation mobile networks by using SIP with some enhancements as the peer-to-peer signaling protocol. This thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, we present different peer-to-peer architectures and search algorithms, and evaluate their suitability for mobile use. We also review some mobile peer-to-peer middleware and file-sharing applications. Then, in the second part, we present our hybrid mobile peer-to-peer architecture consisting of a Symbian based mobile client and a SIP Application Server based super-peer. Key findings of this thesis are that the mobile peer-to-peer application based on SIP signaling and hybrid peer-to-peer architecture is suitable for mobile use as it minimizes overhead in mobile nodes and allows mobile operator to have control on its users in multi-operator environment. Also, the performance of the application satisfies user requirements.Tämä työ on jatkoa diplomityölleni, joka tehtiin Heinäkuu 2005 – Tammikuu 2006 välisenä aikana. Diplomityössäni esitimme kuinka mobiilivertaisverkkosovellus voidaan toteuttaa käyttäen Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protokollaa allaolevana signalointiprotokollana. Tämän työn päätavoite on selvittää, mitä erikoisvaatimuksia mobiiliympäristö vertaisverkkosovelluksen suunnittelulle asettaa sekä kuinka vertaisverkkopalveluita voidaan tehokkaasti toteuttaa seuraavan sukupolven mobiiliverkoissa käyttämällä laajennettua SIP protokollaa sovelluksen merkinantoprotokollana. Tämä työ on jaettu kahteen osaan. Ensimmäisessa osassa käsittelemme eri vertaisverkkoarkkitehtuureja ja hakualgoritmeja, sekä arvioimme näiden sopivuutta mobiilikäyttöön. Käymme myös läpi joitain mobiilivertaisverkkotiedostojako-ohjelmia sekä middleware-alustoja. Työn toisessa osassa esittelemme oman mobiilivertaisverkkoarkkitehtuurimme, joka koostuu Symbian mobiilisovelluksesta sekä SIP sovelluspalvelin super-peer solmusta. Tutkimuksen päälöydökset ovat seuraavat: SIP protokollaa käyttävä hybridi-vertaisverkkosovellus toimii hyvin matkapuhelinympäristössä, koska se minimoi puhelimeen kohdistuvan rasituksen ja tekee mahdolliseksi matkapuhelinoperaattorin hallita sovelluksen käyttäjiä myöskin monioperaattoriympäristössä. Tämän lisäksi ohjelmiston suorituskyky täyttää käytäjien sille asettamat vaatimukset