Privacy-knowledge modeling for the Internet of Things: a look back

Together, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing give us the ability to gather, process, and even trade data to better understand users' behaviors, habits, and preferences. However, future IoT applications must address the significant potential threats to privacy posed by such knowledge-discovery activities

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future - Life Annotation in Principle and Practice

The fields of the Semantic Web and Ubiquitous Computing are both relatively new fields within the discipline of Computer Science. Yet both are growing and have begun to overlap as people demand ever-smaller computers with persistent access to the internet. The Semantic Web has the potential to become a global knowledge store duplicating the information on the Web, albeit in a machine-readable form. Such a knowledge base combined with truly ubiquitous systems could provide a great benefit for humans. But what of personal knowledge? Information is generally of more use when linked to other information. Sometimes this information must be kept private, so integrating personal knowledge with the Semantic Web is not desirable. Instead, it should be possible for a computer system to collect and store private knowledge while also being able to augment it with public knowledge from the Web, all without the need for user effort. This thesis begins with a review of both fields, indicating the points at which they overlap. It describes the need for semantic annotation and various processes through which it may be achieved. A method for annotating a human's life using a combination of personal data collected using an ubiquitous system and public data freely available on the Semantic Web is suggested and conceptually compared to human memory. Context-aware computing is described along with its potential to annotate the life of a human being and the hypothesis that today's technology is able to carry out this task is presented. The work then introduces a portable system for automatically logging contextual data and describes a study which used this system to gather life annotations on one specific individual over the course of two years. The implementation of the system and its use is documented and the data collected is presented and evaluated. Finally the thesis offers the conclusion that one type of contextual data is not enough to answer most questions and that multiple forms of data need to be merged in order to get a useful picture of a person's life. The thesis concludes with a brief look into the future of the Semantic Web and how it has the potential to assist in achieving better results in this field of study

A holistic multi-purpose life logging framework

Die Paradigm des Life-Loggings verspricht durch den Vorschlag eines elektronisches Gedächtnisses dem menschlichem Gedächtnis eine komplementäre Assistenz. Life-Logs sind Werkzeuge oder Systeme, die automatisch Ereignisse des Lebens des Benutzers aufnehmen. Im technischem Sinne sind es Systeme, die den Alltag durchdringen und kontinuierlich konzeptuelle Informationen aus der Umgebung des Benutzers erfassen. Teile eines so gesammelten Datensatzes könnten aufbewahrt und für die nächsten Generationen zugänglich gemacht werden. Einige Teile sind es wert zusätzlich auch noch mit der Gesellschaft geteilt zu werden, z.B. in sozialen Netzwerken. Vom Teilen solcher Informationen profitiert sowohl der Benutzer als auch die Gesellschaft, beispielsweise durch die Verbesserung der sozialen Interaktion des Users, das ermöglichen neuer Gruppenverhaltensstudien usw. Anderseits, im Sinne der individuellen Privatsphäre, sind Life-log Informationen sehr sensibel und entsprechender Datenschutz sollte schon beim Design solcher Systeme in Betracht gezogen werden. Momentan sind Life-Logs hauptsächlich für den spezifischen Gebrauch als Gedächtnisstützen vorgesehen. Sie sind konfiguriert um nur mit einem vordefinierten Sensorset zu arbeiten. Das bedeutet sie sind nicht flexibel genug um neue Sensoren zu akzeptieren. Sensoren sind Kernkomponenten von Life-Logs und mit steigender Sensoranzahl wächst auch die Menge der Daten die für die Erfassung verfügbar sind. Zusätzlich bietet die Anordnung von mehreren Sensordaten bessere qualitative und quantitative Informationen über den Status und die Umgebung (Kontext) des Benutzers. Offenheit für Sensoren wirkt sich also sowohl für den User als auch für die Gemeinschaft positiv aus, indem es Potential für multidisziplinnäre Studien bietet. Zum Beispiel können Benutzer Sensoren konfigurieren um ihren Gesundheitszustand in einem gewissen Zeitraum zu überwachen und das System danach ändern um es wieder als Gedächtnisstütze zu verwenden. In dieser Dissertation stelle ich ein Life-Log Framework vor, das offen für die Erweiterung und Konfiguration von Sensoren ist. Die Offenheit und Erweiterbarkeit des Frameworks wird durch eine Sensorklassiffzierung und ein flexibles Model für die Speicherung der Life-Log Informationen unterstützt. Das Framework ermöglicht es den Benützern ihre Life-logs mit anderen zu teilen und unterstützt die notwendigen Merkmale vom Life Logging. Diese beinhalten Informationssuche (durch Annotation), langfristige digitale Erhaltung, digitales Vergessen, Sicherheit und Datenschutz.The paradigm of life-logging promises a complimentary assistance to the human memory by proposing an electronic memory. Life-logs are tools or systems, which automatically record users' life events in digital format. In a technical sense, they are pervasive tools or systems which continuously sense and capture contextual information from the user's environment. A dataset will be created from the collected information and some records of this dataset are worth preserving in the long-term and enable others, in future generations, to access them. Additionally, some parts are worth sharing with society e.g. through social networks. Sharing this information with society benefits both users and society in many ways, such as augmenting users' social interaction, group behavior studies, etc. However, in terms of individual privacy, life-log information is very sensitive and during the design of such a system privacy and security should be taken into account. Currently life-logs are designed for specific purposes such as memory augmentation, but they are not flexible enough to accept new sensors. This means that they have been configured to work only with a predefined set of sensors. Sensors are the core component of life-logs and increasing the number of sensors causes more data to be available for acquisition. Moreover a composition of multiple sensor data provides better qualitative and quantitative information about users' status and their environment (context). On the other hand, sensor openness benefits both users and communities by providing appropriate capabilities for multidisciplinary studies. For instance, users can configure sensors to monitor their health status for a specific period, after which they can change the system to use it for memory augmentation. In this dissertation I propose a life-log framework which is open to extension and configuration of its sensors. Openness and extendibility, which makes the framework holistic and multi-purpose, is supported by a sensor classification and a flexible model for storing life-log information. The framework enables users to share their life-log information and supports required features for life logging. These features include digital forgetting, facilitating information retrieval (through annotation), long-term digital preservation, security and privacy

Integrated Web Accessibility Guidelines for Users on the Autism Spectrum - from Specification to Implementation

This research presented a compendium of web interface design guidelines and their implementation on a transport-planning website based on the needs and preferences of users on the autism spectrum. Results highlighted the importance of having simple navigation and meaningful headings, icons, labels and text to facilitate understanding and readability; these findings offer guidelines for the design of web user interfaces to continue improving the web experience of autistic users, and therefore of the whole community

Augmenting Autobiographical Memory: An Approach Based on Cognitive Psychology

This thesis investigates how an interactive software system can support a person in remembering their past experiences and information related to these experiences. It proposes design recommendations for augmented autobiographical memory systems derived from Cognitive Psychology research into human memory – a perspective missing from prior work. Based on these recommendations, a conceptual design of an augmented autobiographical memory system is developed that aims to support users in retrieving cues and factual information related to experiences as well as in reconstructing those experiences. The retrieval aspects of this design are operationalised in an interactive software system called the Digital Parrot. Three important factors in the design and implementation are the context of an experience, semantic information about items in the system and associations between items. Two user studies evaluated the design and implementation of the Digital Parrot. The first study focused on the system's usability. It showed that the participants could use the Digital Parrot to accurately answer questions about an example memory data set and revealed a number of usability issues in the Digital Parrot's user interface. The second study embodied a novel approach to evaluating systems of this type and tested how an improved version of the Digital Parrot supported the participants in remembering experiences after an extended time period of two years. The study found that the Digital Parrot allowed the participants to answer questions about their own past experiences more completely and more correctly than unaided memory and that it allowed them to answer questions for which the participants' established strategies to counteract memory failures were likely to be unsuccessful. In the studies, associations between items were the most helpful factor for accessing memory-related information. The inclusion of semantic information was found to be promising especially in combination with textual search. Context was used to access information by the participants in both studies less often than expected, which suggests the need for further research. Identifying how to appropriately augment autobiographical memory is an important goal given the increasing volume of information to which users are exposed. This thesis contributes to achievement of this goal by stating the problem in Cognitive Psychology terms and by making design recommendations for augmented autobiographical memory systems. The recommendations are confirmed by the design and implementation of such a system and by empirical evaluations using an evaluation method appropriate for the field

Designing and evaluating a user interface for continous embedded lifelogging based on physical context

PhD ThesisAn increase in both personal information and storage capacity has encouraged people to store and archive their life experience in multimedia formats. The usefulness of such large amounts of data will remain inadequate without the development of both retrieval techniques and interfaces that help people access and navigate their personal collections. The research described in this thesis investigates lifelogging technology from the perspective of the psychology of memory and human-computer interaction. The research described seeks to increase my understanding of what data can trigger memories and how I might use this insight to retrieve past life experiences in interfaces to lifelogging technology. The review of memory and previous research on lifelogging technology allows and support me to establish a clear understanding of how memory works and design novel and effective memory cues; whilst at the same time I critiqued existing lifelogging systems and approaches to retrieving memories of past actions and activities. In the initial experiments I evaluated the design and implementation of a prototype which exposed numerous problems both in the visualisation of data and usability. These findings informed the design of novel lifelogging prototype to facilitate retrieval. I assessed the second prototype and determined how an improved system supported access and retrieval of users’ past life experiences, in particular, how users group their data into events, how they interact with their data, and the classes of memories that it supported. In this doctoral thesis I found that visualizing the movements of users’ hands and bodies facilitated grouping activities into events when combined with the photos and other data captured at the same time. In addition, the movements of the user's hand and body and the movements of some objects can promote an activity recognition or support user detection and grouping of them into events. Furthermore, the ability to search for specific movements significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to retrieve data related to specific events. I revealed three major strategies that users followed to understand the combined data: skimming sequences, cross sensor jumping and continued scanning

Technology Mediated Memories in Networked Societies: ScanMemories, Himba Chronotopes and Wearable Absence

Memories are the windows to the past, metaphysical relationships that are developed and associated within the mind, preserved, and shared with others, even sent into the future. Individuals, communities, cultures, and even countries have memories that may be dramatically important to their very existence or simply the directions to the nearest coffee shop. As early as language and communication, the need to save and share memories has been important, whether to share concepts, lessons, or even simply for entertainment. Contributions of this research are focused on the applications of technology regarding memory and memory storage. Using an action research design, the exploration of new technologies occurs through project designs and testing of memory technologies and how they will benefit society in the future, from ability to preserve memories more completely, regain them, historical value, and preservation of culture through memory sharing. Each project explores specific applications that present new ideas on how memories influence our lives and how the future of memories can influence new generations through technology. This research includes the work presented in the appendix regarding the various projects and concepts of Scan Memories, HimbaChronotopes, and Wearable Absence, with an overview of the items covered in the chapters. Memory objects, memory spaces, digital and physical space, interactive memory making, collective and social memory are explored in relationship to potential real-world applications in daily living. Finally, the work concludes with how project interrelates with the exploration into research and application of the technology, the risks, the future, and implications

User Data Privacy in Web Services Context Using Semantic Desktop – SemanticLIFE Case Study Abstract

The growing number of Web Services technologies and their use have revolutionized the web. Web Services will play an important role in the next web generation (i.e. Semantic Web) together with Semantic Web technologies. As a matter of fact, Web Services and Semantic Web are two building blocks to provide machine process-able services. One of the biggest challenges in both Web Services and Semantic Web is privacy issues. Privacy means which part of information should be hidden and which should be visible. In the web services context, no matter if it is a simple or a complex service, the requester and provider of the service has to disclose information for handshaking, so privacy issues will always exist. In the utilization of web services, there exist exchange and storage of information, so the protection of personal information is very important. To acquire any service, one has to disclose personal information (e.g. home address, DoB, mobile number, credit card information etc.) so as to fulfill the requirement and utilize the service properly. But the problem arises when the submitted information is shared with a third party. In collaborative environment, where different people are interacting with each other and also the information is being shared among different people, the sharing of information without exposing unrelated information becomes a difficult task. The problem statement and its solution explained in this paper are focused in the domain of health information systems, but they can be used in a collaborative enterprise environment. In this paper we have introduced ontology-based user data privacy in the web services domain using the semantic desktop’s (SemanticLIFE) SOPA framework. 1