PhD (Business Information Systems) / Department of Business Information Systems / Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) is a never-ending challenge in complex-problem situations where multiple actors are involved. Complex-problem situations involve problems that are ill-defined, ill-structured and wicked such as terrorism. Problems of this nature usually warrant a collaborative effort between actors (organizations) with multiple skill-sets and expertise that at times might be at variance with each other. In order to address this gap, three sub-objectives were postulated from the main research objective, “To determine how optimal/effective CDM can be realized amongst counter-terrorism organizations through context-aware technologies.” Using the theory of synergetics and following deductive thematic analysis, the socio-technical nature of the terrorism problem was depicted by postulating a Digital Terrorism Ecology that consists of Open Digital Infrastructure (ODI), Digital Information Ecosystem (DIE), Digital Terrorism Enactment (DTE), Digital Capability and Digital Enslavement. Based on institutional theory and using PLS-SEM technique, Group/departmental relationships, Organizational co-operation, Organizational form, Technical infrastructure and interoperability, Information and knowledge sharing were identified as the factors influencing attainment of Optimal/effective CDM amongst counter-terrorism organizations. In order to explicate the role of context-aware technologies in enhancing CDM amongst counter-terrorism organizations, a context-aware CDM framework was developed following Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. In this study it was evident from the findings that attainment of OCDM in counter-terrorism contexts is challenging even though it is essential. Among the factors considered as possible influencers of attainment of OCDM, Organizational form (OF) was found to influence Organizational cooperation (OC) and Technical infrastructure and inter-operability (TI). Group/departmental relationships (GDR) were found to influence OF and OC. TI was found to influence OC and GDR and further, Information and knowledge sharing (IKS) was found to influence Optimal/effective CDM (OCDM). Of the three pillars of institutional theory, the regulative pillar offered more insights on issues related to rules, discourse and practice and hence the challenges of OCDM attainment. Practically, this study aims to re-orient the thinking of counter-terrorism organizations by presenting the socio-technical nature of the terrorism problem as well as explicating the role of digital technologies in terrorism. / NRF

No description available.

Recommender systems are helpful tools employed abundantly in online applications to help users find what they want. This thesis re-purposes a collaborative filtering recommender built for incorporating social media (hash)tags to be used as a context-aware recommender, using time of day and activity as contextual factors. The recommender uses a matrix factorization approach for implicit feedback, in a music streaming setting. Contextual data is collected from users' mobile phones while they are listening to music. It is shown in an offline test that this approach improves recall when compared to a recommender that does not account for the context the user was in. Future work should explore the qualities of this model further, as well as investigate how this model's recommendations can be surfaced in an application.

This master’s thesis project “A Presence Server for Context-aware Applications” was carried out at KTH Center for Wireless Systems (Wireless@KTH). The overall goal of this thesis project is to implement a context aware infrastructure to serve as middleware for different kinds of context aware applications, such as a context-aware printing application, location based notifier application, etc. This thesis examines different types of context aware architectures and considers different forms of context modeling. Additionally the thesis also explores some of the related technology, in order to provide the reader with suitable background information to understand the rest of the thesis. By using the SIP Express Router (SER) and its presence module (pa) a context server has been designed, implemented, and evaluated. Evaluation reveals that the critical bottleneck is the increasing service time as the number of Publish messages for different events in the SER database increases, i.e. the time required for handling and sending the Notify messages when a new Publish message is received increases as a function of the number of earlier Publish messages. The evaluation also shows that the dependence of SER upon the MySQL database as incorrect database queries can cause SER to crash. Additionally the performance of the database limits the performance of the context server. A number of future improvements are necessary to address security issues (in particular the authentication of Watchers) and adding policy based control in order to send Notify messages only to the Watchers authorized to receive information for a specific event. / Examensarbetet "A Presence Server for Context-aware Applications" genomfördes på Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, KTH Center for Wireless Systems (Wireless@KTH). Det övergripande målet med detta examensarbetsprojekt är att implementera en kontextmedveten infrastruktur som fungerar som "middleware" för olika typer av kontextmedvetna applikationer. Exempel på dessa är kontextmedveten utskriftsapplikation och platsberoende meddelarapplikation osv. Rapporten undersöker olika typer av kontextmedvetna arkitekturer och betraktar olika former av kontextmodellering. Rapporten utforskar även vissa besläktade teknologier för att kunna tillhandahålla läsaren med en passande bakgrundsinformation och därmed öka förståelsen för resten av examensarbetet. Genom att använda Sip Express Routern (SER) och dess närvaromodul (presence module, PA) har en kontextserver designats, implementerats och utvärderats. Utvärderingen visar att den kritiska flaskhalsen är tiden det tar för SER servern att svara på nya Publish meddelanden, för olika händelser, i SER databasen. Svarstiden ökar allteftersom databasen fylls med mer data. Detta påverkar hantering och sänding av Notify meddelande när en ny Publish meddelande är mottagen. Uvärderingen visar också att en viktig fråga är relationen mellan SER servern och MySQL databasen, eftersom felaktiga förfrågningar till databasen kan krascha SER servern. De viktigaste framtida förbättringarna är säkerhetsaspekter (mer specifikt autenticering av Watchers) och tillägg av policybaserad sändning av Notify meddelanden endast till auktoriserade Watchers för specifika händelser.

This paper aimed to discover how player satisfaction is affected by context-aware elements based on physical, real-world factors in an action role-playing game. The possibility of utilizing player modelling to counteract the reduction in player empowerment in a game heavily influenced by external factors was also explored. This was accomplished by creating an ARPG heavily integrated with various weather, and daytime, context data obtained from web-based APIs. Followed by conducting qualitative tests with help of eleven participants during a time period of a week. The evaluated results were presented in a manner of relevance for both context-driven applications as a whole, and for further exploration within game developments utilization of state of the art technology.

L'objectif de cette thèse est de contribuer à l'élaboration d'une méthode de test de systèmes mobiles. L'approche développée est fondée sur la description de tests à l'aide de scénarios et leurs vérifications sur une trace d'exécution. Un scénario modélise le comportement et les interactions que l'on souhaite observer entre un ensemble de nœuds. Les caractéristiques des systèmes mobiles nous ont conduit à représenter un scénario sous deux points de vue différents et complémentaires. Un premier représente des événements de communications entre les nœuds et un second représente la topologie des liens entre ces nœuds. Notre approche est décomposée en deux étapes : une étape de spécification des cas de tests à l'aide de scénarios et une étape de vérification de ces scénarios sur des traces d'exécutions. La première consiste à spécifier à l'aide du langage dédié TERMOS les cas de test de l'application mobile à vérifier. Ce langage TERMOS a été mis en œuvre au sein de l'atelier UML Papyrus. À partir des scénarios décrits de manière graphique, nous générons pour chacun d'eux un automate ainsi qu'une séquence de topologie que nous utilisons dans l'étape suivante. La deuxième étape consiste à vérifier chaque scénario sur des traces d'exécutions provenant de l'application à tester. Pour cela un premier outil recherche les occurrences de la séquence de topologie du scénario dans la trace d'exécution. Pour chacune d'entre elles, l'automate est exécuté et conclut à un verdict. L'analyse de l'ensemble des verdicts d'un scénario permet de détecter les fautes présentes dans le système. / The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to elaborating a mobile system test method. The proposed approach is based on test definition using scenarios and their verification on an execution trace. A scenario modelizes the behavior and the interactions we want to achieve on a set of nodes. Considering the characteristics of mobile systems we represented scenarios from two different but complementary points of view. The first represents communication events between nodes and the second represents the link topology between the nodes. Our approach is composed of two steps : a first step to specify the test cases by using scenarios and a second step to verify these scenarios on execution flows. The first step consists in using the dedicated TERMOS language in order to specify the test cases of the mobile application. The TERMOS language has been developed in the UML Papyrus workshop. Based on the graphically defined scenarios, we generate an automaton for each one of them, as well as a sequence of topologies which we will be using in the next step. The second step consists in verifying each scenario by using execution traces from the application to be tested. Therefore a first tool detects scenario topology sequences in the execution flow. For each one of them the automaton is executed and comes out with a verdict. The analysis of all the verdicts of a scenario allows the detection of faults in the system.

Music listening is considered one of the most ubiquitous activities in everyday life, and one of the main reasons why people listen is to affect and regulate their mood. The vast availability and unlimited access of music has made it difficult to find relevant music that fits both the context and the preferences of the music listener. The aim of this project was to investigate the personalized relationship between music and mood using everyday technologies, focusing on how a listening experience could be adapted to the desired affect of a music listener while also taking the user’s individual listening history into account. In large, the project concentrated on the possibility of using context-aware music recommendation to generate personalized playlists by focusing on the audio features and corresponding mood of the music. A web-based application was developed to act as a prototype for the study, where the application allowed users to connect to Spotify, pick a desired mood and generate a playlist. By allowing people to access music in this personalized way, a user study could be conducted in order to investigate their music listening while incorporating this recommendation tool. The findings showed that the users’ found the experience to be engaging in that they could use the application as a companion to everyday tasks in addition to it being a tool for getting new, personalized music recommendations. Overall, the participants also found the generated playlists to be accurate to their music preferences and desired affective state.

No description available.

Context-aware systems use data about their environment for adaptation at runtime, e.g., for optimization of power consumption or user experience. Ontology-based data access (OBDA) can be used to support the interpretation of the usually large amounts of data. OBDA augments query answering in databases by dropping the closed-world assumption (i.e., the data is not assumed to be complete any more) and by including domain knowledge provided by an ontology. We focus on a recently proposed temporalized query language that allows to combine conjunctive queries with the operators of the well-known propositional temporal logic LTL. In particular, we investigate temporalized OBDA w.r.t. ontologies in the DL EL, which allows for efficient reasoning and has been successfully applied in practice. We study both data and combined complexity of the query entailment problem.

Ambientes Pervasivos são ambientes povoados por diversos dispositivos (sensores, atuadores, etc.) e aplicações de software (locais ou distribuídas) incorporadas nestes ambientes físicos de forma transparente para o usuário. Ambientes deste tipo devem ser capazes de interagir e satisfazer as requisições do usuário de forma autônoma e transparente. Nesse sentido, um dos maiores desafios de pesquisa em ambientes pervasivos é a de estabelecer mecanismos automáticos para compor, de forma dinâmica, funcionalidades que satisfaçam as requisições dos usuários. Nesse sentido, nós partimos da hipótese que mecanismos automáticos de interação entre ambientes e usuários podem ser abordados como um problema de composição automática de serviços em ambientes pervasivos. Portanto, nossa proposta é desenvolver um modelo referência, a partir do qual podem ser implementados sistemas que permitam ao ambiente pervasivo interagir com o usuário de forma natural, automática e dinâmica. Desta forma, o sistema de composição de serviços gerencia e automatiza o processo de resolução de requisições feitas pelo usuário (de forma implícita e/ou explicita) através das funcionalidades (serviços) disponíveis no ambiente ou através de novas funcionalidades criadas pelo processo de composição. Para tal fim, este trabalho apresenta um Modelo de Referência que permita projetar, implementar e avaliar sistemas de composição de serviços que gerenciem e automatizem o processo de interação em diversos tipos de ambientes pervasivos. Nossa proposta traz vantagens como: o baixo acoplamento e a interoperabilidade, isto porque é possível selecionar, integrar e reutilizar de forma eficiente e efetiva serviços heterogêneos provenientes de diversos tipos de dispositivos e/ou aplicações. Além disso, o modelo ontológico WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology) nos permite descrever semanticamente as capacidades dos serviços como também as informações contextuais presentes no ambiente, o que torna nosso sistema mais perto de um ambiente pervasivo real como o idealizado por Mark Weiser. / Pervasive environments are populated by several devices (sensors, actuators, etc.) and software applications (local or distributed) incorporated these physical environments transparently to the user. Environments of this type should be able to interact and process user requests autonomously and transparently. In this sense, one of the biggest research challenges in pervasive environments is to establish automatic mechanisms to compose dynamically, features that meet the user requirements. In this sense, we set the hypothesis that automatic mechanisms of interaction between users and environments can be addressed as a problem of automatic composition of services in pervasive environments. Therefore, our proposal is to develop a reference model, from which systems can be implemented to enable the pervasive environment interact with the user in a natural, automatic and dynamic. Thus, the system service composition management and automates the process of resolving requests made by the user (implicitly and / or explicitly) through the functionality (services) available in the environment or through new features created by the process of composition. To this end, this paper presents a Reference Model that allows to design, implement and evaluate systems of composition of services that manage and automate the interaction process in different types of pervasive environments. Our proposal brings benefits such as loose coupling and interoperability, because it is possible to select, integrate and reuse in an efficient and effective heterogeneous services from different types of devices and / or applications. Furthermore, the ontological model WSMO (Web Services Modeling Ontology) allows us to semantically describe the capabilities of the services as well as contextual information in the environment, which makes our system closer to a real pervasive environment as conceived by Mark Weiser.