Purpose: The purpose of this study was to augment the understanding for how an organisation can facilitate the creation of applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) through increased involvement of employees in the innovation process. Method: This was an explorative study utilising qualitative data that was collected from a single case. Data was collected from a process manufacturing facility owned by a market-leading company through a combination of methods: questionnaire, documentation, observation, and interviews. Findings: It was found that the employee innovation process occurs in eight stages: problem-identification and communication, and idea-generation, communication, assessment, prioritisation, assignment, and implementation. It was also found that to successfully innovate, employees require knowledge, time, and motivation. Further, seven enabling and six inhibiting factors of employee innovation were identified. The process, requirements, and factors were utilised to build a framework to facilitate employee innovation for applications of the IoT. Theoretical contributions: This study merged two rather young bodies of literature, IoT and employee innovation, in a novel way. Innovation related to the IoT is close to unexplored, and employee innovation has never been studied specifically related to the IoT. Further, the eight-stage process of employee innovation is also novel. Managerial implications: There now exists a framework that managers can utilise to facilitate employee innovation in general, and innovation for the IoT in particular. The findings of this study can act as guidance for managers seeking to involve their employees in the innovation process.

This thesis argues that the legal ordering of the natural environment represents a culturally contingent 'order of things'. Within this process of categorisation, Nature is constructed as an 'other' to the human subject. This opposition allows nature to be conceived as either an object of control, as found in property law, or as a wilderness to be preserved apart from human society. This latter view is implicit to the principles informing early environmental laws for the protection of natural heritage in international law and within Australia. More recently, this distinctively western legal ordering has been challenged to be more culturally inclusive and to include concepts that incorporate human interaction with the natural environment. In making this argument, the thesis adopts a theoretical framework derived from Foucault's 'Order of Things'. Modem western understanding of the natural environment is directly informed by western science. Scientific discourses, with origins in the Enlightenment, have been extremely influential in determining the legal ordering of the natural environment. In this context, the thesis provides an overview of the conceptual shift from a pre-scientific, organic conception of the relationship between people and nature to a people/nature dichotomy that persists as the nature/culture meta-narrative in modern society. The rise of a more holistic conception of the natural environment, based in ecological principles, has only partially displaced the latter view. The thesis also examines the manner in which property law constitutes the 'proper' order of the natural world within western culture. The bundle of rights concept, implicit to modern conceptions of property, finds resonances in western scientific understanding of the natural world. In particular, property law replicates the subject /object distinction that is central to modern western thought. The positing of nature as an object of control through the property relationship has been a resilient ordering of the natural environment. It has directly contributed to an instrumental perception of the natural environment. Indeed, the property concept was the central way of 'constructing' the Australian natural environment at law from colonisation to well into the twentieth century. The initial legal designation of Australia as 'terra nullius' allowed received English property law to form the template for ordering the occupation of the Australian natural environment by British civilisation. In the second half of the 20th century the wilderness ideal, in concert with ecological 'balance' concepts, gained currency in international and domestic law as the foundation for the protection of natural heritage. Natural heritage protection was a high profile aspect of early environmental laws in Australia. Thus the World Heritage Convention assumed an importance for natural heritage protection within Australia due to specific historical, political and constitutional factors. The adoption of 'holistic' definitions of environment in many pieces of Australian legislation has served to partially displace the instrumental, proprietary view of nature. However, the legal recognition of natural heritage, when based around wilderness ideals, remains predicated upon the western people/nature dichotomy. More recently, reforms to early environmental laws have been instituted and case law reveals a state of flux in how natural heritage areas are to be identified and valued. The traditional western legal constructions of nature have served to occlude Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander peoples' relationships with 'country'. Such legal frameworks continue to be problematic if a more culturally inclusive and holistic conception of heritage, such as cultural landscapes, is to be adopted. Further, while the recognition of native title has led to a re-examination of many fundamental legal principles, reexamination of our western legal constructs remains incomplete. One of the crucial areas yet to be fully worked through is how to accommodate western dualistic notions of the relationship between people and the natural environment with the legal requirements to establish native title. The need for accommodation has direct practical ramifications in that many world heritage, national estate and other 'wilderness' areas are, or may be, subject to native title claims. Therefore, the thesis considers the need to re-assess western, scientifically derived conceptions of natural heritage as the prevailing principles for environmental preservation. Finally the thesis discusses the contingency of any legal ordering of the natural world. Western representations of nature have exerted tremendous influence upon the legal regimes that have regulated and ordered nature across the Australian continent. These classifications are embedded within a particular cultural narrative. Parts of the Australian natural environment that are designated as property, as natural heritage, as native title, or as cultural heritage do not achieve this legal characterisation due to any inherent value or features of the natural environment itself. These areas are not necessarily property or heritage or native title until incorporated within, or recognised by, western legal frameworks. As such, any decision to ascribe a given legal status to the natural environment as part of the legal ordering needs to be seen as involving issues of choice that have direct distributive justice implications.

<p>Internet of Things (IOT) has become the key theme of the world since 2009 and been considered as the third wave in the information industry after the waves of Computer, Internet and Mobile Radio Communication. It is expected to have a strong influence on small and medium companies (SMEs). However, little research on what and how the influence of IOT on the SME’s development can be found in the literature. The purpose of the thesis is to examine how IOT influences the organizational changes in SMEs. Finally, suggestions for strategy developments will be proposed to assist the SMEs in making their organization changes successfully. Two main models are applied for this part: change model (OD model) and business model. Moreover, the SWOT theory is adopted to identify the SMEs position in IOT era. We collect the primary data through launching the survey on internet. After data documentation, we apply “Approximation of the Probability Hypothesis Testing” Method to conduct data analysis. After researching, we found out the IOT brings “revolution” change to the Logistics of SMEs while only “adapting” change for Manufactures’ business development. Compare to logistic industry, the manufacturing SMEs seldom adopts IT technologies for their selling channel because they are lacking of resources and knowledge for the new technologies. We suggest the logistic SMEs should establish logistic network between the logistic companies to enhance information and resource integration. For the manufacturing SMEs should apply knowledge management and change the companies into learning organizations. In future, IOT will bring radical changes for manufacturers, which are the biggest area with application of IOT technology. Nevertheless, the logistics industry might go out of fashion. In other words, logistics industry may die out or change to other functions.</p>

Internet of Things (IOT) has become the key theme of the world since 2009 and been considered as the third wave in the information industry after the waves of Computer, Internet and Mobile Radio Communication. It is expected to have a strong influence on small and medium companies (SMEs). However, little research on what and how the influence of IOT on the SME’s development can be found in the literature. The purpose of the thesis is to examine how IOT influences the organizational changes in SMEs. Finally, suggestions for strategy developments will be proposed to assist the SMEs in making their organization changes successfully. Two main models are applied for this part: change model (OD model) and business model. Moreover, the SWOT theory is adopted to identify the SMEs position in IOT era. We collect the primary data through launching the survey on internet. After data documentation, we apply “Approximation of the Probability Hypothesis Testing” Method to conduct data analysis. After researching, we found out the IOT brings “revolution” change to the Logistics of SMEs while only “adapting” change for Manufactures’ business development. Compare to logistic industry, the manufacturing SMEs seldom adopts IT technologies for their selling channel because they are lacking of resources and knowledge for the new technologies. We suggest the logistic SMEs should establish logistic network between the logistic companies to enhance information and resource integration. For the manufacturing SMEs should apply knowledge management and change the companies into learning organizations. In future, IOT will bring radical changes for manufacturers, which are the biggest area with application of IOT technology. Nevertheless, the logistics industry might go out of fashion. In other words, logistics industry may die out or change to other functions.

Digital technological breakthroughs have brought about a huge change in the way the society interacts, responds to the immediate environment and the way that people live. Furthermore, Ubiquitous Computing and dirt cheap sensors have created a new paradigm in digital technology where human beings could control their environment in a different approach. In a number of paradigms of digital technology, multiple proprietary solutions in industry results in a huge cost for the end users to use the technology and thus a very sluggish penetration of the technology into the society. Moreover, such unorganized and vendor oriented standards create additional burdens on a person concerned in design and implementation.  This thesis presents existing and emerging technologies in relation to smart home environment having an aim to manifest available open standards and platforms. Smart Home Environment Infrastructures have been presented and discussed. Evaluation and integration of a proprietary elderly care sensor system dubbed   C.STATUSTM and the MediaSense overlay network has also been presented. Performance measurement and comparison has been conducted in relation to the proprietary sensor system running on the top of the peer-to-peer MediaSense Platform with the existing C.STATUSTM centralized sensor system. C.STATUSTM User Interface has been designed and implemented for an Android mobile platform. / smart home environment, Internet of things

There are very few works not associated with the Western canon to have received as much attention as Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (Ogbaa 1). However, contrary to the many post-colonial interpretations of this novel, this essay employs a psychoanalytical literary approach to discuss the cause of the protagonist’s eventual demise, based on the premise that human behaviour is driven by an unconscious process. Consequently, this essay argues that following the ego’s inability to repress the infantile demands of the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious self, ever more compulsive, repetitive and neurotic behaviours are displayed. Furthermore, this essay argues that Okonkwo’s relationship to his mother plays a significant role in explaining the tense relationship with his own father and sons. Subsequently, the protagonist’s self-confidence turns to pride and his masculinity develops into totalitarian rule leading to uncontrollable rage, Okonkwo’s world literally falls apart.

In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy depicts a world constituted by small things, and each small thing attaches its significance with those who live in Ayemenem, especially for the twins Rahel and Estha. By remapping the small things scattered in Ayemenem, this thesis aims to explore the interrelation between place, people, and space. Place is meaningful for those who live there when their personal history, social relation, and personal experience produce life space and thus have the sense of place. Therefore, place is defined by the personal experience, not the changes of landscape or political history. The sense of place is developed from life space which is formed by small things that people perceive and conceive. Chapter One focuses that place is identified by personal history and experience, not by the changes of landscape. The twins are traumatized by the small things that trace Velutha¡¦s death and are confined in the space constructed by the past memories. Even though the landscape and people of Ayemenem become different, the twins still sense Ayemenem consistent with its past. The small things are left in Ayemenem by the god of small things, Velutha, who belongs to subaltern group. Chapter two illustrates the social relation between place and people through the dilemma and oppression he faces. By remapping the small things of the novel, Chapter Three represents how people identify place to produce their life space. Life space is produced from the interrelation between people and place, while the sense of place is constructed by people¡¦s life experience and life space.

The proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in the creation of an unprecedented amount of context about their users. Furthermore, the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) has begun and it will bring with it even more context and the ability for users to effect their environment through digital means. Applications that exist in the IoT ecosystem must treat context as a first class citizen and use it to simplify what would otherwise be an unmanageable amount of information. This thesis proposes the use of context to build a new class of applications that are focused on enhancing normal human behaviour and moving complexity away from the user. We present Yakkit—a location based messaging application that allows users to communicate with others nearby. The use of context allows Yakkit to be used without the creation of a login or a profile and enhances the normal way one would interact in public. To make Yakkit work we explore different ways of modelling location context and application deployment through experimentation. We model location in an attempt to predict a user’s final destination based on their current position and the trajectories of past users. Finally, we experiment deploying the Yakkit service on different servers to observe the effect of distance on the message transit time of Yakkit messages. / Graduate / przemek@uvic.ca

Due to the requirements of the Web 2.0 applications and the relational databaseshave a limitation in horizontal scalability. NoSQL databases have become moreand more popular in recent years. However, it is not easy to select a databasethat is suitable for a specific use. This thesis describes the detailed design, im plementation and final performance evaluation of a key-value NoSQL databasefor the SensibleThings platform, which is an Internet of Things platform. Thethesis starts by comparing the different types of NoSQL databases to select themost appropriate one. During the implementation of the database, the algorithms for data partition, data access, replication, addition and removal ofnodes, failure detection and handling are dealt with. The final results for theload distribution and the performance evaluation are also presented in this pa per. At the end of the thesis, some problems and improvements that need betaken into consideration in the futures.

With the rapid development of the Internet connected technologies and applications, people are keen on embracing the convenience and practi-­‐‑ calities they brings. As all kinds of technologies improve, the Internet of Things matures and is able to provide more advanced services to people, which connects a variety of devices, systems and applications beyond traditional machine-­‐‑to-­‐‑machine. However, it covers a variety of devices, protocols and applications, which makes it much more complex than a normal network. Nevertheless, equipped with appropriate security solutions, the Internet of Things is promising to bring us more conven-­‐‑ iences and be widely applied in our daily life. And like the main appli-­‐‑ cation areas, wireless sensor networks with a frequent but short com-­‐‑ munication character, it requires an efficient and flexible protocol to protect the information. To protect the traffic of the Internet of Things is the focal point of this research work. Although many protocols for the Internet have been put forward, it is still not enough to meet the increas-­‐‑ ingly complex requirements from applications. Many of them are not efficient enough to adapt the device diversity and timely communica-­‐‑ tion environment. This research work is trying to address this problem, by proposing a peer-­‐‑to-­‐‑peer security protocol to satisfy this varied environment. Secure communication is implemented on an open sourced platform for the Internet of Things. The philosophy of the platform it implemented on is also inherited to this protocol and the implementation. It avoids unnecessary handshakes between entities, which makes it more efficient in a wireless sensor network. Modulariza-­‐‑ tion and unit test are adapted in implementation to enhance the robust of the system. Its dynamic security level adjustment feature satisfies the realistic demand on one platform this protocol is implemented on. Finally, with a comparison test and an analysis using the BAN logic, the result shows that the proposed protocol is efficient to meet the specific goals and applicable for the platform. / SensibleThings Platform