This thesis is concerned with the problem of designing Mobile Location Services (MLS) - also commonly termed Location-Based Services - that meet user needs. MLS are applications that users access via a portable device such as a mobile phone. They provide services (i.e. information or other functionality) to end-users based on knowledge of the location of individuals and other entities within the environment. The market failure of many mobile services, including MLS, has been attributed in part to failing to provide `value' to the end user. This thesis reviews different theoretical approaches to help understand the notion of `value', and how value may be used to inform design (Chapter 2). Research methods are also discussed, including the particular challenges with doing `mobile' research (Chapter 3). A survey of UK consumers( Chapter4 ) demonstratesa current lack of use, and lack of awarenesso f most forms of MLS in the UK. llowever, overall positive attitudes,a nd a range of behavioural and demographic data, suggest that MLS have the potential to be successful if they can be designed to meet user needs. A qualitative study of users' travelling behaviour (Chapter 5) then demonstrates how effective mobile information delivery can provide considerable value within a dynamic, uncertain and location-varying environment. This added value is highly dependent on contextual and situated factors, including existing information sources, variances in possible outcomes and the intrinsic qualities of information provision. The thesis then focuses on a particular application domain for MLS - drivers navigating in an unfamiliar environment. A literature review (Chapter 6) investigates how drivers navigate, and what their information needs are. Three experimental studies (Chapters 7 to 9) then investigate what information adds value within a navigation context, the impact of contextual influences on driving and navigation performance, and the impact of the quality of the navigation cue on task performance. Good landmarks (such as traffic lights) are shown to add value for drivers navigating an unfamiliar route, depending on the context at particular manoeuvres. This thesis discusses( Chapter 10) how a multi-disciplinary perspectivec an help maximise the acceptance and effectiveness of MLS. 'Value' can be used to design specific services for users, based on offering new freedoms to the individual within a mobile context, employing time and location sensitivity to maximise relevance, taking into account user knowledge, existing information sources and contextual factors, and ensuring impact on real-world outcomes. In conclusion (Chapter 11), specific contributions and avenues for future work are highlighted.

Compared to the use of a traditional mobile phone, a smartphone user may experience advanced computing capability and connectivity. Internet connection along with advanced technology allows users to access the web, GPS navigation system, WIFI hotspot, etc. Today it is considerably easier for smartphone users to benefit from the global Internet connection with its extended range. A service that has expanded enormously and shaped a whole new industry in a short period of time, is location-based services (LBS). The service shows location information using coordinates providing the geographical position of a mobile device. Depending on the user’s location and preferences, mobile service providers may introduce context-related information to the user. However, LBS does not only involve opportunities, improvements, and benefits for societies. The use of digital technologies, with such spread as location-based services has obtained, may result in major integrity issues.   The aim of this qualitative investigation is to explain and describe location-based services. The purpose is to, through structured interviews, create an understanding of the users’ perception of LBS and investigate their attitudes, behavior and privacy concerns. The following understanding might be of value to application development companies regarding the comprehension of user behavior and attitudes. In turn, it could be of assistance for these companies in reaching the users in order to maximize the use of their applications.   The analysis showed that the respondents of this study are receptive to location-based services as long as it provides them with value. However, privacy concerns might intervene but are in most cases overlooked. The user’s perceived value is by the informants considered to be more important than the minor obstacles of LBS. In terms of LBS usage behavior, the respondents willingness to share location information differs among them and is based on different reasonings. The indication of user acceptance also differs. However, the informants’ perception of LBS purpose was discussed from both user and business perspective. It was concluded that it might be an indication of user acceptance since the respondents were able to recognize value deriving from location-based services. Additional LBS behavior is recognized in the process of allowing LBS access to apps.

<p>For the past recent years mobile developers and content providers have been aware of consumers’ engagement in online social networking. New opportunities are presented when using a mobile device as a medium for social interaction, also referred to as mobile social software. An ever growing effort aimed at various mobile design processes and applications have taken place. To achieve a widespread adoption of mobile social software amongst the main stream mobile consumer, several problem areas have to be taken into consideration, such as the technological possibilities and limitations of mobile phones, security issues regarding user privacy and the different aspects of consumers appeal for social media. This research looks into the overall situation of the current field of research and focuses on the interests in mobile social software amongst users. The study was geographically limited to Malmö, Sweden and focused on a population at the ages of 13-18.</p>

Augmented Reality (AR) has become a popular interactive technique in the last few years. One of the critical challenges is to identify the real-life objects. Further, how to fully exert the advantages of the AR technique under the limited resources available on the mobile devices is another critical challenge. To resolve the above issue, firstly this thesis reviewed the real-life object tagging and identification techniques. Secondly this thesis studied the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Interface and the environmental sensors on the mobile phones. Lastly this thesis implemented a Multiple Real-life Object Identification Algorithm along with the development of the Multi Object Identification Augmented Reality (MOIAR) application. Subsequently, the MOIAR application has been implemented in the location-based mobile learning environment, where the Legislative Assembly of Alberta is included as an example real-life learning object. This MOIAR implementation has applied the tagging and identification technique review as well as the HCI and sensors study, to prove the usability and practicability of the MOIAR application. / 2012-01

For the past recent years mobile developers and content providers have been aware of consumers’ engagement in online social networking. New opportunities are presented when using a mobile device as a medium for social interaction, also referred to as mobile social software. An ever growing effort aimed at various mobile design processes and applications have taken place. To achieve a widespread adoption of mobile social software amongst the main stream mobile consumer, several problem areas have to be taken into consideration, such as the technological possibilities and limitations of mobile phones, security issues regarding user privacy and the different aspects of consumers appeal for social media. This research looks into the overall situation of the current field of research and focuses on the interests in mobile social software amongst users. The study was geographically limited to Malmö, Sweden and focused on a population at the ages of 13-18.

Depuis quelques dizaines d’années, l’utilisation de téléphones contenant un capteur GPS a fortement augmenté. Cependant, tous ces usages ne sont pas sans menace pour la vie privée des utilisateurs. En effet, les données de mobilité qu’ils envoient à ces services peuvent être utilisées pour inférer des informations sensibles telles que leur domicile ou leur lieu de travail. C’est à ce moment qu’entrent en action les mécanismes de protection, visant à redonner aux utilisateurs le contrôle sur leur vie privée. Nous commençons par répertorier les mécanismes de protection existants et les métriques utilisées pour les évaluer. Cette première analyse met en avant une information particulièrement sensible : les points d’intérêt. Ces derniers représentent tous les lieux où les utilisateurs passent la majeure partie de leur temps. Cela nous conduit à proposer un nouveau mécanisme de protection, PROMESSE, dont le but principal est de cacher ces points d’intérêt. Les mécanismes de protection sont en général configurés par des paramètres, qui ont un grand impact sur leur efficacité. Nous proposons ALP, une solution destinée à aider les utilisateurs à configurer leurs mécanismes de protection à partir d’objectifs qu’ils ont spécifié. Enfin, nous présentons Accio, un logiciel regroupant la majeure partie du travail de cette thèse. Il permet de lancer facilement des expériences destinées à étudier des mécanismes de protection, tout en renforçant leur reproductibilité. / In the past decades, the usage of GPS-enabled smartphones has dramatically risen. However, all these usages do not come without privacy threats. Indeed, location data that users are sending to these services can be used to infer sensitive knowledge about them, such as where they live or where they work. This is were protection mechanisms come into play, whose goal is to put users back in control of their privacy. We start by surveying existing protection mechanisms and metrics used to evaluate them. This first analysis highlights a particularly sensitive information, namely the points of interest. These are all the places where users use to spend most of their time. This leads us towards building a new protection mechanism, PROMESSE, whose main goal is to hide these points of interest. Protection mechanisms tend to be configured by parameters, which highly impact their effectiveness in terms of privacy and utility. We propose ALP, a solution to help users to configure their protection mechanisms from a set of objectives they specified. Finally, we introduce Accio, which is a software encompassing most of our work. Its goal is to allow to easily launch location privacy experiments and enforce their reproducibility.

Les fournisseurs de services géo-localisés (LBS) offrent des données textuelles et spatiales complémentaires, parfois incohérentes et imprécises, représentant les différents points d’intérêt (POI) sur un territoire donné. Ainsi, une même requête lancée auprès de divers fournisseurs de services touristiques peut donner des résultats différents et parfois incohérents, pour les attributs terminologiques et/ou les attributs spatiaux. De plus, chaque fournisseur utilise sa propre convention graphique pour représenter les POIs. L’intégration de ces données spatiales hétérogènes dans un contexte dynamique, large échelle, utilisant des sources incomplètes et de qualités variables est actuellement un verrou technologique. Dans ce travail de thèse, nous cherchons une solution à cette intégration aussi bien au niveau des données que de leur représentation. / Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant geospatial information based on a geographic position or address. The amount of geospatial data is constantly increasing, making it a valuable source of information for enriching LBS applications. However, these geospatial data are highly inconsistent and contradictory from one source to another. We assume that integrating geospatial data from several sources may improve the quality of information offered to users. In this thesis, we specifically focus on data representing Points of Interest (POIs) that tourists can get through LBS. Retrieving, matching and merging such geospatial entities lead to several challenges. We mainly focus on three main challenges including (i) detecting and merging corresponding entities across multiple sources and (ii) considering the uncertainty of integrated entities and their representation in LBS applications.

Location based services (LBS) are gaining widespread user acceptance and increased daily usage. GPS based mobile navigation systems (Garmin), location-related social network updates and "check-ins" (Facebook), location-based games (Nokia), friend queries (Foursquare) and ads (Google) are some of the popular LBSs available to mobile users today. Despite these successes, current user services fall short of a vision where mobile users could ask for continuous location-based services with always-up-to-date information around them, such as the list of friends or favorite restaurants within 15 minutes of driving. Providing such a location based service in real time faces a number of technical challenges. In this dissertation research, we propose a suite of novel techniques and system architectures to address some known technical challenges of continuous location queries and updates. Our solution approaches enable the creation of new, practical and scalable location based services with better energy efficiency on mobile clients and higher throughput at the location servers. Our first contribution is the development of RoadTrack, a road network aware and query-aware location update framework and a suite of algorithms. A unique characteristic of RoadTrack is the innovative design of encounter points and system-defined precincts to manage the desired spatial resolution of location updates for different mobile clients while reducing the complexity and energy consumption of location update strategies. The second novelty of this dissertation research is the technical development of Dandelion data structures and algorithms that can deliver superior performance for the periodic re-evaluation of continuous road-network distance based location queries, when compared with the alternative of repeatedly performing a network expansion along a mobile user's trajectory. The third contribution of this dissertation research is the FastExpand algorithm that can speed up the computation of single-issue shortest-distance road network queries. Finally, we have developed the open source GT MobiSim mobility simulator, a discrete event simulation platform to generate realistic driving trajectories for real road maps. It has been downloaded and utilized by many to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the location query and location update algorithms, including the research efforts in this dissertation.

Location-sharing services have become increasingly popular with the proliferation of smartphones and online social networks. People share their locations with each other to record their daily lives or satisfy their social needs. At the same time, inappropriate disclosure of location information poses threats to people's privacy. One of the reasons why people fail to protect their location privacy is the difficulty of using the current mechanisms to manually configure location-privacy settings. Since people's location-privacy preferences are context-aware, manual configuration is cumbersome. People's incapability and unwillingness to do so lead to unexpected location disclosures that violate their location privacy. In this thesis, we investigate the feasibility of using recommender systems to help people protect their location privacy. We examine the performance of location-privacy recommender systems and compare it with the state-of-the-art. We also conduct online user studies to understand people's acceptance of such recommender systems and their concerns. We revise our design of the systems according to the results of the user studies. We find that user-based collaborative filtering can accurately recommend location-privacy preferences and outperform the state-of-the-art when training data are insufficient. From users' perspective, their acceptance of location-privacy recommender systems is affected by the openness and the context of recommendations and their privacy concerns about the systems. It is feasible to use data obfuscation or decentralisation to alleviate people's concerns and meanwhile keep the systems robust against malicious data attacks.

Digital technologies have a substantial impact on the tourism industry by affecting thetraveller's behaviour before, during and at the end of the trip and by transforming thetraditional travellers to the digital travellers and smart tourism. Data lies at the core ofall smart tourism activities and received considerable attention in the context of tourists'privacy concerns, precisely, location-based service (LBS). LBS is an example of smarttechnology to enhance travellers' experience and to provide significant benefits to users.Although, LBS become popular among tourists due to high information availability, easeof use, and cheapness, lack of location information protection make the users vulnerable.The latter is a great concern for users when they unintentionally allow the LBS providersto collect all information related to their location. Therefore, this study was conductedby focusing on the general concept of privacy to determine the issues related to the LBSusing in Småland tourism industry. The tourists' perceptions and understanding ofprivacy while using LBC were considered as a general concept of privacy.The study was performed through qualitative research by collecting data from thestructured-interview based on open-ended questions. The qualitative research presentedin this study was based on different viewpoints of interviewees. Thematic analysis wasused to obtain a comprehensive understanding of interviewees' privacy concerns to useLBS. The result indicated four major themes, such as personal information, privacybreach, hesitancy/conditionally and hedonic, that impact differently on tourists' intentionto use LBS. Furthermore, the personality of people, their perceptions and demands couldenhance their privacy concerns for using LBS. These concerns, however, might besuspended when the benefits of gaining information from LBS is considerable. Someother factors, such as the ease of use, user-friendly design, pleasant impression, alongwith providing useful information in the tourism destination, were also considered asessential for LBS adoption among tourists.