Ubiquitous Connectivity and Students’ Well-being: a Situational Analysis in a UK University

Recent research underlined as ubiquitous connectivity has changed the nature of traditional campus universities by creating technology-mediated environments where physical and virtual domains integrate and overlap. The aim of this research is to investigate how ubiquitous connectivity is impacting on university students’ daily lives and consequent wellbeing. On-campus undergraduate and postgraduate university students and staff members from the same department were involved using a qualitative survey, semi-structured interviews and a variation of the Experience Sampling Method. The data analysis followed two different steps: firstly, a socio-constructivist framework was adopted to highlight how students’ experiences with ubiquitous connectivity are socially and discursively constructed. Secondly, the results were discussed in the light of the two main well-being approaches existing in literature: hedonic and eudaimonic. The results show that the hedonic perspective seems to be prominent among students. Ubiquitous connectivity is mainly appreciated for its capability to make university day-to-day experiences easier to manage. Moreover, stress avoidance or relief seems to be one of the main goals that learners seek to obtain through ubiquitous connectivity. However, technologies also play an active role in disrupting learners’ well-being by increasing their level of stress due to difficulties in accessing resources, info overload or unorganised online materials

End-User Development Success Factors and their Application to Composite Web Development Environments

The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user-service interaction is still an open issue. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. The weakness lies in the abstraction of the underlying service front-end architecture rather than the infrastructure technologies themselves. In our opinion, the best approach is to offer end-to-end composition from user interface to service invocation, as well as an understandable abstraction of both building blocks and a visual composition technique. In this paper we formalize our vision with regard to the next-generation front-end Web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. We present a novel reference architecture designed to empower non-technical end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications. A tool implementing this architecture has been developed as part of the European FP7 FAST Project and EzWeb Project, allowing us to validate the rationale behind our approach

Innovative user engagement and playfulness on adoption intentions of technological products: evidence from SEM-based multivariate approach

Using ubiquitous computing devices, also UCD, is a conscious decision made by consumers, success of which depends on how much it involves and engages the user that results in functional, hedonic and social experiences in user’s context and long-term success for organization. User engagement, tested in multifarious concepts, indicates that experiences that are significantly hedonic create an affective bond with the device and deliver high value to the consumer. This study verifies and investigates the dispositional and impacting factors that influence a consumer’s adoption intention for radical or incremental innovation or loyalty to an incumbent ubiquitous computing device through concept of user engagement, self-congruity theory, innovativeness and playfulness. The research was based on a survey questionnaire collected from users of ubiquitous computing devices (UCDs) belonging to an educated urban population from an age group of 18 to 35 years residing in Karachi through convenience and self-selection sampling. In total, 654 complete responses were received coded in SPSS and the model was analysed through AMOS 23.0. Results indicate that three dimensions of user engagement are significant for ubiquitous computing devices (UCDs): focused attention, interaction appeal and perceived usability. The first two are significantly positive towards playfulness creating an association with self-concept leading to innovative consumer’s innovation adoption and others having loyalty with incumbent device. The research theoretically contributes by identification of user engagement dimensions and significance of incumbent loyalty in innovation adoption phenomeno

Smart Grid based Wireless Communication in 5G Network for Monitoring and Control Systems in Renewable Energy Management

Wireless networks are becoming ubiquitous and as the cost of equipment decreases and performance increases, it becomes both economically and technologically feasible to deploy wireless networks in power systems and industrial environments for a wide range of applications. They have advantage of providing diverse controlling features through a unified communication platform. Application of such networks in the smart grid/industrial environments is under active research and expected to become an integral part of the power system. This research propose novel technique smart grid communication in wireless 5G networks for monitoring and controlling management. Here the smart grid designing has been done based on wireless communication networks. The smart grid network for renewable energy has been controlled using Stackelberg equilibrium based SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) method. The control method based collected data has been monitored for detection of malicious activities in the network using supervised radial basis fuzzy systems. The experimental analysis has been carried out based on control system and network malicious activities. Here the control system based parameters analysed are Scalability of 65%, QoS of 71%, Power consumption of 41%, Network Efficiency of 92%. Then machine learning based malicious activities detection in terms of accuarcy of 96%, network security of 88%, throughput of 94%, Network delay of 41%. Proposed method supports interoperability of multiple types of inverters, is scalable and flexible, and transmits data over a secure communication channel

Intelligent Personal Assistants Solutions in Ubiquitous Environments in the Context of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) will create the opportunity to develop new types of businesses. Every tangible object, biologic or not, will be identified by a unique address, creating a common network composed by billions of devices. Those devices will have different requirements, creating the necessity of finding new mechanisms to satisfy the needs of all the entities within the network. This is one of the main problems that all the scientific community should address in order to make Internet of Things the Future Internet. Currently, IoT is used in a lot of projects involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensors are generally cheap and small devices able to generate useful information from physical indicators. They can be used on smart home scenarios, or even on healthcare environments, turning sensors into useful devices to accomplish the goals of many use case scenarios. Sensors and other devices with some reasoning capabilities, like smart objects, can be used to create smart environments. The interaction between the objects in those scenarios and humans can be eased by the inclusion of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, IPAs have good reasoning capabilities, improving the assistance they give to their owners. Artificial intelligence (AI), new learning mechanisms, and the evolution assisted in speech technology also contributed to this improvement. The integration of IPAs in IoT scenarios can become a case of great success. IPAs will comprehend the behavior of their owners not only through direct interactions, but also by the interactions they have with other objects in the environment. This may create ubiquitous communication scenarios where humans act as passive elements, being adequately informed of all the aspects of interest that surrounds them. The communication between IPAs and other objects in their surrounding environment may use gateways for traffic forwarding. On ubiquitous environments devices can be mobile or static. For example, in smart home scenarios, objects are generally static, being always on the same position. In mobile health scenarios, objects can move from one place to another. To turn IPAs useful on all types of environments, static and mobile gateways should be developed. On this dissertation, a novel mobile gateway solution for an IPA platform inserted on an IoT context is proposed. A mobile health scenario was chosen. Then, a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is always monitoring a person, giving the real time feedback of his/her health status to another person responsible by him (designated caretaker). On this scenario, a mobile gateway is needed to forward the traffic between the BSN and the IPA of the caretaker. Therefore, the IPA is able to give warnings about the health status of the person under monitoring, in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype, where the more important aspects for IPAs and IoT networks are considered