Location spoofing

The ability to blur and lie about our location does deserve consideration and should not be treated as entirely malevolent. It will be up to designers to allow the user to have full responsibility and freedom over the access control of their location information, rather than force adherence to uncomfortable regimes of dictated access control

Modeling location for pervasive environments

The representation of spaces, locations and the entities they contain is of great importance to location aware systems and pervasive computing scenarios. There has been an active research community in developing many diverse models of location, resulting in significant progress in the area. Various types of location model have evolved through experiment and experience however there still remains many challenges to be met by the research community. This paper aims to highlight previous trends in location modeling, discuss the research challenges ahead and to outline the initial design of a location model for the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure [?]

SpaceSemantics: an architecture for modeling environments

The notion of modeling location is fundamental to location awareness in ubiquitous computing environments. The investigation of models and the integration with the myriad of location sensing technologies makes for a challenging discipline. Despite notable development of location models, we believe that many challenges remain unresolved. Complexity and scalability, diverse environments coupled with various sensors and managing the privacy and security of sensitive information are open issues. In this paper we discuss our previous experience combining location sensing with mobile agents and how the lessons learnt have lead to the conception of SpaceSemantics, an open architecture for modeling environments

Question: where would you go to escape detection if you wanted to do something illegal on the Internet? Hint: shush!

The background to this paper is the introduction of public access IT facilities in public libraries. These facilities have seen recorded instances of misuse alongside weaknesses in checking identities of users and in explaining Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) to users. The FRILLS (Forensic Readiness of Local Libraries in Scotland) project, funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council, attempted to survey the situation in Scottish public libraries and develop a forensic readiness logging regime for use in them. There is in depth discussion of the use of logging in public library computer facilitie

Towards a middleware for generalised context management

It is widely accepted in the Pervasive Computing community that contextual interactions are the key to the delivery of truly calm technology. However, there is currently no easy way to incorporate contextual data into an application. If contextual data is used, it is generally in an ad hoc manner, which means that developers have to spend time on low-level details. There have been many projects investigating this area, however as yet none of them provide support for all of the key issues of dynamic composition and flexible representation of contextual information as well as the problems of scalability and adaptability to environmental changes. In this paper we present the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure (SCI), a middleware infrastructure for discovery, aggregation, and delivery of context information

Decentralised discovery of mobile objects

The partially connected nature of mobile and ubiquitous computing environments presents software developers with hard challenges. Mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifying software development for these environments. However, existing strategies for discovering mobile code assume an underlying fixed, stable network. An alternative approach is required for mobile environments, where network size may be unknown and reliability cannot be guaranteed. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile object platform augmented with a structure overlay network that provides a fully decentralised approach to the discovery of mobile objects. We demonstrate how this technique has better reliability and scalability properties than existing strategies, with minimal communication overhead. Building upon this novel discovery strategy, we show how load balancing of mobile objects in an AMOS network can be achieved through probabilistic means

FRILLS

This powerpoint presentation looks at Public access IT facilities in public libraries, “Open Gateway or Guarded Fortress” project, FRILLS project (“Forensic Readiness for Local Libraries in Scotland”

Finding interest in the stream

Interest, the curious emotion, plays a crucial role as an intrinsic motivator to encounter new things. It also plays a role in the establishment of longer term interests that people develop. Providing support for the experience of interest, and managing the development of enduring interests has potential to augment the effectiveness of information streaming applications. This poster briefly surveys 'interest' and considers the implications of a hypothetical Interest Machine that is able to measure interest and model interests

Making the news interesting: understanding the relationship between familiarity and interest

News feeds are an important element of information encountering, feeding our (new) interests but also leading to a state of information overload. Current solutions often select information similar to the user's interests. However, long-term interest in one topic, and being highly familiar with that topic, does not necessarily imply an actual interest response will occur when more of the same topic is selected. This study explores how important familiarity is in predicting an interest response. In a study with 30 subjects, interest was manipulated by topical familiarity using novel stimuli from a popular news source. This study shows, within this context, familiarity is moderately important for an interest response: familiarity does indeed make the news interesting, but only to a certain extent. The results set a baseline for predicting interest during information encountering, indicating familiarity is important, but not the only influential variable a system should consider when selecting information for users

An International Investigation into Student Concerns regarding Transition into Higher Education Computing

The experience of transitioning into and starting higher education is very much an individual one, with some applicants viewing the prospect of higher education as an unknown entity. For those who are first in their family or community to consider higher education, it can seem to be an "alien environment". This is just one of the issues that lead to applicants experiencing levels of concern when considering a transition into higher education. This international working group aims to answer the following research question: "What are the concerns that computing students have with regards to their transition into higher education?" A survey was administered and the results evaluated