Context and the cloud: Situational awareness in mobile systems

There has been a paradigm shift in the way users interact with computerized systems and applications. This is driven by the increasing power and ubiquity of 'smart' mobile devices and the traction being generated in Cloud-based systems and the long-term evolution in service provision using Software-as-a-Service. These developments are supported by the rapid and far reaching developments in the related networking infrastructures. This paper considers the nature of Situational Awareness and addresses augmented context, Web 2.0, social media the Internet of Things, and the complexity of context. Mobile networks are considered with large-scale distributed systems and Cloud-based solutions. An illustration of the potential usage of collaborative interactions is presented to demonstrate the benefits which may be derived and the challenges faced. The paper closes with a discussion and conclusions including the identification of future directions for research and open research questions. The paper concludes that augmented context and Situational Awareness forms a central role in the effective provision of services going forward in Cloud-based systems accessed using mobile systems. © 2013 IEEE

A collective intelligence resource management dynamic approach for disaster management: a density survey of disasters occurrence

Currently, there is a growing interest in developing methods, systems and tools for managing disasters in a computational and integrated manner. This is due to the development of several next generation emerging technologies, which seem to be more fit for purpose. Various emerged distributed and computational paradigms include collective intelligence, Internet of things, social networking, context-aware, sensors and collaborative technologies such as grids, clouds and crowds, these are just few to name here. In our previous works, we have discussed and demonstrated the potential of these technologies for disaster management in a manner, which seems to be more synergetic towards an integrated and more informed decision-making. In this paper, the aim is two-fold: firstly, to demonstrate quantitative evidence supporting the increasing occurrence of disasters in terms of costs during the preparedness and recovery disaster stages. Secondly, there is current stagnation in resource matters, that is to say, it would be of particular importance to develop a more focused and resource balanced disaster management approach. Due to the data complexity and volume, our survey is predominantly focused on evidence from disasters occurred in 27 European countries

Nudging through Technology: Choice Architectures and the Mobile Information Revolution

The information revolution has radically changed the way we make decisions and has expanded into mobile devices capable of informing choices at the point at which they are made. However, it is arguable whether the explosion of available information helps or hinders decision making, including in important domains such as healthcare and sustainability. Improving on that is the domain of choice architecture, intended to provide decision-knowledge through understanding choice-implications and so guiding actions in effective and ethical directions (i.e. 'nudging'). Social media has largely evolved as the significant means of choice architecture, but the question remains as to whether decisions based on it are truly effective and ethical, or attracted toward social norms that reinforce poor judgment. This paper explores those issues, including how technologies can be shaped to improve decision-making, and how academic models can be used to nudge toward improved norms

Behavior Modeling in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organizations (VO) consist of a group of agents (individuals, enterprises, or intelligent machines) that collaborate towards achieving some common goals. Partners of the VO are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in working together. While behaving collaboratively facilitates both performing the joint tasks and achieving the common goals of the VO, frictional behavior even if demonstrated by a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to define a suitable framework to be able to model and analyze the partners' behaviors. However, on one hand the VO contracts usually address partners' tasks at the high level only, and on the other hand VOs are dynamic and continuously evolving. Consequently, contract terms do not sufficiently define the detailed daily activities of partners. Rather, partners in the VO perform their daily activities according to the detailed set of tasks planned and agreed together with the VO coordinator. Nevertheless, partners' daily activities comply with the commitments they have made once in their written contracts. This paper introduces a framework in which promises are incrementally made by the agents, to indicate their detailed agreements on the daily tasks to perform, and in turn promises and their fulfillments formalize the VO partners' behavior