Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners

In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of CSEDU 2020 by SciTePres

Dynamic deployment of context-aware access control policies for constrained security devices

Securing the access to a server, guaranteeing a certain level of protection over an encrypted communication channel, executing particular counter measures when attacks are detected are examples of security requirements. Such requirements are identi ed based on organizational purposes and expectations in terms of resource access and availability and also on system vulnerabilities and threats. All these requirements belong to the so-called security policy. Deploying the policy means enforcing, i.e., con guring, those security components and mechanisms so that the system behavior be nally the one speci ed by the policy. The deployment issue becomes more di cult as the growing organizational requirements and expectations generally leave behind the integration of new security functionalities in the information system: the information system will not always embed the necessary security functionalities for the proper deployment of contextual security requirements. To overcome this issue, our solution is based on a central entity approach which takes in charge unmanaged contextual requirements and dynamically redeploys the policy when context changes are detected by this central entity. We also present an improvement over the OrBAC (Organization-Based Access Control) model. Up to now, a controller based on a contextual OrBAC policy is passive, in the sense that it assumes policy evaluation triggered by access requests. Therefore, it does not allow reasoning about policy state evolution when actions occur. The modi cations introduced by our work overcome this limitation and provide a proactive version of the model by integrating concepts from action speci cation languages

Complete Semantics to empower Touristic Service Providers

The tourism industry has a significant impact on the world's economy, contributes 10.2% of the world's gross domestic product in 2016. It becomes a very competitive industry, where having a strong online presence is an essential aspect for business success. To achieve this goal, the proper usage of latest Web technologies, particularly schema.org annotations is crucial. In this paper, we present our effort to improve the online visibility of touristic service providers in the region of Tyrol, Austria, by creating and deploying a substantial amount of semantic annotations according to schema.org, a widely used vocabulary for structured data on the Web. We started our work from Tourismusverband (TVB) Mayrhofen-Hippach and all touristic service providers in the Mayrhofen-Hippach region and applied the same approach to other TVBs and regions, as well as other use cases. The rationale for doing this is straightforward. Having schema.org annotations enables search engines to understand the content better, and provide better results for end users, as well as enables various intelligent applications to utilize them. As a direct consequence, the region of Tyrol and its touristic service increase their online visibility and decrease the dependency on intermediaries, i.e. Online Travel Agency (OTA).Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

QUALITY-OF-SERVICE PROVISIONING FOR SMART CITY APPLICATIONS USING SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING

In the current world, most cities have WiFi Access Points (AP) in every nook and corner. Hence upraising these cities to the status of a smart city is a more easily achievable task than before. Internet-of-Things (IoT) connections primarily use WiFi standards to form the veins of a smart city. Unfortunately, this vast potential of WiFi technology in the genesis of smart cities is somehow compromised due to its failure in meeting unique Quality-of-Service (QoS) demands of smart city applications. Out of the following QoS factors; transmission link bandwidth, packet transmission delay, jitter, and packet loss rate, not all applications call for the all of the factors at the same time. Since smart city is a pool of drastically unrelated services, this variable demand can actually be advantageous to optimize the network performance. This thesis work is an attempt to achieve one of those QoS demands, namely packet delivery latency. Three algorithms are developed to alleviate traffic load imbalance at APs so as to reduce packet forwarding delay. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is making its way in the network world to be of great use and practicality. The algorithms make use of SDN features to control the connections to APs in order to achieve the delay requirements of smart city services. Real hardware devices are used to imitate a real-life scenario of citywide coverage consisting of WiFi devices and APs that are currently available in the market with neither of those having any additional requirements such as support for specific roaming protocol, running a software agent or sending probe packets. Extensive hardware experimentation proves the efficacy of the proposed algorithms

Designing for empowerment

Technology bears the potential to empower people - to help them tackle challenges they would otherwise give up on or not even try, to make experiences possible they did not have access to before. One type of such technologies - the application area of this thesis - is health and wellbeing technology (HWT), such as digital health records, physical activity trackers, or digital fitness coach applications. HWTs often claim to empower people to live healthier and happier lives. However, there is reason to challenge and critically reflect on these claims and underlying assumptions as more and more researchers are finding that technologies aiming or claiming to be empowering often turn out to be disempowering. This critical reflection is the starting point of this thesis: Can HWTs really empower people in their everyday lives? If so, how should we go about designing them to foster empowerment and avoid disempowerment? To this aim, this thesis makes three main contributions: First, it presents a framework of empowering technologies that aims to introduce conceptual and terminological clarity of empowerment in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As a literature review conducted for this thesis reveals, the understandings of empowerment in HCI diverge substantially, rendering the term a subsumption of diverse research endeavors. The presented framework is informed by the results of the literature review as well as prior work on empowerment in social sciences, psychology, and philosophy. It aims to help other researchers to analyze conceptual differences between their own work and others’ and to position their research projects. In the same way, this thesis uses the proposed framework to analyze and reflect on the conducted case studies. Second, this thesis explores how HWT can empower people in a number of studies. Technologies that are investigated in these studies are divided into three interaction paradigms (derived from Beaudouin-Lafon’s interaction paradigms): Technologies that follow the computer-as-tool paradigm include patient-controlled electronic health records, and physical activity trackers; technologies in the computer-as-partner paradigm include personalized digital fitness coaches; and technologies in the computer-as-intelligent-tool paradigm includes transparently designed digital coaching technology. For each of these paradigms, I discuss benefits and shortcomings, as well as recommendations for future work. Third, I explore methods for designing and evaluating empowering technology. Therefore, I analyze and discuss methods that have been used in the different case studies to inform the design of empowering technologies such as interviews, observations, personality tests, experience sampling, or the Theory of Planned Behavior. Further, I present the design and evaluation of two tools that aimed to help researchers and designers evaluate empowering technologies by eliciting rich, contextualized feedback from users and fostering an empathic relationship between users and designers. I hope that my framework, design explorations, and evaluation tools will serve research on empowering technologies in HCI to develop a more grounded understanding, a clear research agenda, and inspire the development of a new class of empowering HWTs.Technologie für Empowerment — im Deutschen am besten mit Befähigung oder Ermächtigung übersetzt: diese Vision ist sowohl in medizinischen und technischen Fachkreisen als auch in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur im Feld Mensch-Maschine Interaktion (MMI) weit verbreitet. Technologie kann — laut dieser Vision — Menschen helfen Herausforderungen zu meistern, die sie sonst nicht schaffen oder nicht mal versuchen würden, oder Ihnen komplett neue Erfahrungen ermöglichen. Eine Art von “empowernden”, also befähigenden Technologien sind Technologien für Gesundheit und Wohlbefinden (health and wellbeing technologies, HWT), wie beispielsweise digitale Krankenakten, Schrittzähler, oder digitale Fitnesstrainer. Sowohl Werbung als auch Forschung über HWTs preist diese häufig als Schlüssel zu einem gesünderen und glücklicheren Leben an. Es gibt aber durchaus Gründe diesen Behauptungen kritisch gegenüberzustehen. So haben bereits einige Forschungsprojekte über vermeintlich “empowernde” Technologien ergeben, dass diese eher entmächtigen — also Ihre Nutzer mehr einschränken als Ihnen mehr Möglichkeiten zu verschaffen. Eine kritische Reflexion der Annahme, dass HWTs ihre Nutzer empowern stellt den Ausgangspunkt dieser Dissertation dar: Können HWTs ihre Nutzer wirklich empowern? Falls dem so ist, wie sollten sie am besten gestaltet werden? Der Beitrag meiner Dissertation zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen wird in drei Teilen präsentiert: Im ersten Teil stelle ich ein konzeptuelles Framework vor, mit dem Ziel terminologische Klarheit im Bereich Empowerment in MMI zu fördern. Eine Literaturanalyse im Rahmen dieser Dissertation hat ergeben, dass die Verwendungen des Begriffs “Empowerment” in der MMI Literatur sehr stark voneinander abweichen. Beispielsweise wird der Begriff in Literatur über Technologien für Barrierefreiheit anders verstanden als in Literatur über Technologien für bürgerliches Engagement. Folglich schert das Schlagwort “Technologien für Empowermen”, das in Präsentationen und Denkschriften weit verbreitet ist, komplett unterschiedliche Ansätze über einen Kamm. Das Framework, das in dieser Dissertation vorgestellt wird, zeigt die Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten bei der Verwendung des Empowermentbegriffs auf. Es entstand als Resultat der Literaturanalyse und integriert gleichzeitig Erkenntnisse von Empowermenttheorien die in Sozialwissenschaften, Psychologie und Philosophie diskutiert wurden. In dieser Dissertation wird das vorgestellte Framework verwendet, um die präsentierten Studien über HWTs einzuordnen und zu diskutieren. Im zweiten Teil präsentiere ich verschiedene empirische und technische Studien mit dem Ziel zu verstehen wie HWTs Menschen empowern können. Die Technologien, die dabei untersucht werden teile ich in drei Interaktionsparadigmen ein (die von den Interaktionsparadigmen von Beaudouin-Lafon abgeleitet sind): Technologien im Paradigma Computerals- Werkzeug sind beispielsweise digitale Krankenakten und Schrittzähler; Technologien im Paradigma Computer-als-Partner sind beispielsweise digitale personalisierte Fitnesstrainer und Technologien im Paradigma Computer-als-intelligentes-Werkzeug sind beispielsweise transparent gestaltete digitale personalisierte Gesundheitsberater oder Fitnesstrainer. Vorund Nachteile von Technologien in diesen drei Paradigmen werden diskutiert und Empfehlungen für zukünftige Forschung in diesen Bereichen abgeleitet. Im dritten Teil, untersuche ich, welche Methoden für die Gestaltung und Evaluierung von empowernden Technologien geeignet sind. Einerseits diskutiere ich die Vor- und Nachteile der Methoden, die in den einzelnen Untersuchungen von HWTs (im zweiten Teil) verwendet wurden, wie zum Beispiel Interviews, Observationen, die Experience Sampling Methode oder Fragebögen basierend auf der Theorie des geplanten Verhaltens. Andererseits berichte ich über die Gestaltung und Entwicklung von zwei Applikationen mit dem Ziel Forschern und Designern die Evaluation von empowernden Technologien zu erleichtern. Konkret hat die erste Applikation das Ziel es Testnutzern zu ermöglichen immer und überall für sie wichtige Aspekte des Nutzererlebnisses an das Entwicklungsteam weiterzugeben. Bei der Entwicklung der zweiten Applikation stand dagegen die Förderung von Empathie zwischen Nutzern und Designern im Vordergrund. Ich hoffe, dass das vorgestellte Framework, die Studien über HWTs und Evaluationswerkezeuge die Forschung über empowernde Technologien voranbringen, zu einer klaren Forschungsagenda beitragen, und die Entwicklung von neuartigen HWTs anregen werden