Privacy has been discussed throughout the ages as the world has developed and changed however privacy concerns have been reignited by the development of technology. One of these technologies, Location Based Services (LBS), together with how organisations are using these technologies is pushing the consumers’ privacy boundaries. In order for this technology to become widely adopted these privacy concerns need to be understood and addressed. It is therefore the purpose of this research to examine whether consumers’ privacy concern can be negated through consumers receiving a benefit which caused them to forego this concern.The research used scenarios to evaluate consumers’ comfort levels for four different intrusion levels and five different discounts offered. Due to the nature of the scenarios a repeated measures ANOVA design was used in order to allow for the analysis of each of the scenarios, intrusion levels and discount offered for each respondent.It was found that although privacy concerns can and were influenced by the offers made to the respondents, consumers have not yet gained a complete sense of comfort with the privacy boundaries that are being challenged. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Smartwatches are becoming more and more independent from smartphones, with thousands of applications available to smartwatch users. Some businesses already included smartwatches in their marketing initiatives, and it is only a matter of time until advertisers expand to the smartwatch users´ screens. Smartwatches have been called the most personal devices ever and therefore consumer attitudes are a crucial aspect in the adoption of location-based advertisements. This study investigated smartwatch users´ attitudes towards location-based advertising on smartwatches along with the factors that influence these attitudes by employing a research through design approach. Through semi-structured interviews, focus groups and prototypes of pull and push location-based advertisements on smartwatches, it was possible to discover how smartwatch users perceive location-based advertisements on smartwatches. The result of this study is that smartwatch users are open to receive location-based advertisements on their smartwatches, however their attitudes will be affected by the following factors: relevancy, personalization, informativeness, privacy concerns, context (location, frequency, timing), perceived ease of use and attitude towards advertising in general. Factors such as timing and frequency do not apply to pull location-based advertisements. Relevance is the most important factor and includes the element of control, meaning that smartwatch users can provide feedback on the specific advertisement on their smartwatch. The prototypes that were developed based on smartwatch users´ input provide four ready concepts of how location-based advertisements on smartwatches could look like.

Location plays an ever increasing role in modern web-based applications. Many of these applications leverage off-the-shelf search engine technology to provide interactive access to large collections of data. Unfortunately, these commodity search engines do not provide special support for location-based indexing and retrieval. Many applications overcome this constraint by applying geographic bounding boxes in conjunction with range queries. We propose an alternative technique based on geographic identifiers and suggest it will yield faster query evaluation and provide higher search precision. Our experiment compared the two approaches by executing thousands of unique queries on a dataset with 1.8 million records. Based on the quantitative results obtained, our technique yielded drastic performance improvements in both query execution time and precision.

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

During the dot com era the word 'personalisation' was a hot buzzword. With the fall of the dot com companies the topic has lost momentum. As the killer application for UMTS or the mobile internet has yet to be identified, the concept of Multi-Dimensional-Personalisation (MDP) could be a candidate. Using this approach, a recommendation of mobile advertisement or marketing (i.e., recommendations or notifications), online content, as well as offline events, can be offered to the user based on their known interests and current location. Instead of having to request or pull this information, the new service concept would proactively provide the information and services – with the consequence that the right information or service could therefore be offered at the right place, at the right time. The growing availability of "Location-based Services“ for mobile phones is a new target for the use of personalisation. "Location-based Services“ are information, for example, about restaurants, hotels or shopping malls with offers which are in close range/short distance to the user. The lack of acceptance for such services in the past is based on the fact that early implementations required the user to pull the information from the service provider. A more promising approach is to actively push information to the user. This information must be from interest to the user and has to reach the user at the right time and at the right place. This raises new requirements on personalisation which will go far beyond present requirements. It will reach out from personalisation based only on the interest of the user. Besides the interest, the enhanced personalisation has to cover the location and movement patterns, the usage and the past, present and future schedule of the user. This new personalisation paradigm has to protect the user's privacy so that an approach supporting anonymous recommendations through an extended 'Chinese Wall' will be described.

Nowadays the widespread availability of wireless networks has created an interest in using them for other purposes, such as localization of mobile devices in indoor environments because of the lack of GPS signal reception indoors. Indoor localization has received great interest recently for the many context-aware applications it could make possible. We designed and implemented an indoor localization platform for Wi-Fi nodes (such as smartphones and laptops) that identifies the building name, floor number, and room number where the user is located based on a Wi-Fi access point signal fingerprint pattern matching. We designed and evaluated a new machine learning algorithm, KRedpin, and developed a new web-services architecture for indoor localization based on J2EE technology with the Apache Tomcat web server for managing Wi-Fi signal data from the FAU WLAN. The prototype localization client application runs on Android cellphones and operates in the East Engineering building at FAU. More sophisticated classifiers have also been used to improve the localization accuracy using the Weka data mining tool. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

This thesis looks at the problem of discovering nearby friends and nearby places of interest in a privacy-preserving way using location-based services on mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). First, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol for the discovery of nearby friends. In this scenario, Alice wants to verify whether any of her friends are close to her or not. This should be done without disclosing any information about Alice to her friends and also any of the other parties’ information to Alice. We also demonstrate that our approach can be efficiently applied to other similar problems; in particular, we use it to provide a solution to the socialist millionaires' problem. Second, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol for discovering nearby places of interest. In this scenario, the proposed protocol allows Alice to learn whether there is any place that she is looking for near her. However, the location-based service (LBS) that tries to help Alice to find nearby places does not learn Alice’s location. Alice can send a request to the LBS database to retrieve nearby places of interest (POIs) without the database learning what Alice fetched by using private information retrieval (PIR). Our approach reduces the client side computational overhead by applying the grid square system and the POI types ideas to block-based PIR schemes to make it suitable for LBS smartphone applications. We also show our second approach is flexible and can support all types of block-based PIR schemes. As an item of independent interest, we also propose the idea of adding a machine learning algorithm to our nearby friends’ Android application to estimate the validity of a user's claimed location to prevent users from sending a fake location to the LBS application.

This report documents the development of a concept and prototype for a mobile application with the purpose of making the megalith graves surrounding the town of Falköping more engaging and interactive for visitors. Because of the limitations of working with heritage sites that cannot be altered to support a gaming experience, the usage of escape room game mechanics is explored. Because escape room games depend on the user's observation and exploration of their environment, they serve as a usable inspiration for applications with the purpose of making visitors experience a location in a similar way. The prototype developed for the project contains puzzles designed for four different megalith grave sites which were then tested with groups of children and parents playing together.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology. / Department of Computer and Information Science

O fenômeno metafórico, caro às ciências da linguagem, tem recentemente adentrado também os estudos cognitivos, visto que se tem advogado que a metáfora não ocorre apenas na linguagem, mas constitui processos do pensamento. Argumento aqui que a metaforização articula singularidades que operam na contiguidade entre linguagem e cognição e, nela, na invenção de si e do mundo. Para tanto, um projeto de pesquisa-intervenção foi cartografado, através da criação de um método com retalhos, denominado pat(c)hwork. No projeto, desenvolvido pelo Núcleo de Pesquisas em Ecologias e Políticas Cognitivas (NUCOGS-UFRGS), um jogo digital móvel baseado em localização foi produzido para ser jogado no Parque Jardim Botânico de Porto Alegre, em um contexto não formal de aprendizagem. O jogo foi testado por estudantes do 4º e 5º ano do ensino fundamental de uma escola pública conveniada com o parque e com o grupo de pesquisa, através de oficinas. O foco cartográfico enfatizou o linguajar como agir humano na linguagem, com especial atenção à hipótese de que o mesmo caracteriza-se também pela metaforicidade O referencial teórico apóia-se na teoria autopoiética, por meio da concepção de linguagem como linguajar, entrelaçada ao emocionar e ao conversar, compondo redes de conversação; na teoria da enação, mediante a noção de cognição incorporada; na linguística cognitiva, especialmente na teoria da metáfora conceitual, como processo de fabricação e organização que pressupõe a corporeidade; e na cognição inventiva, pela costura dos conceitos de políticas, ecologias e tecnologias cognitivas. Ao cartografarmos retalhos linguageiros de conexões entre os domínios físico e digital, necessários à jogabilidade de um jogo móvel de localização, esperamos contribuir para uma compreensão do fenômeno metafórico como modulador da linguagem e da cognição como ações corporificadas, emergentes e acentradas, processos e produtos de recorrências e recursões operadas no entrelaçamento linguajar-conhecer ao longo do viver. / The metaphorical phenomenon, dear to the sciences of language, has also recently entered the cognitive studies, since it has been argued that metaphor does not occur only in language, but constitutes processes of thought. I argue here that metaphorization articulates singularities that operate in the contiguity between language and cognition and, within it, in the invention of oneself and of the world. For this, a research-intervention project was mapped through the creation of a patchwork method, called pat(c)hwork. In the project, developed by the research group Núcleo de Ecologias e Políticas Cognitivas (NUCOGS-UFRGS), a location-based mobile game was produced to be played at the Botanical Garden of Porto Alegre, in a non-formal learning context. The game was tested by students from the 4th and 5th grades of an elementary public school that entered a partnership with the park and the research group, through workshops. The cartographic focus emphasized languaging as human action in language, with special attention to the hypothesis that it is also characterized by metaphoricity The theoretical research framework is based on autopoietic theory, through the conception of language as languaging, intertwined with emotion and conversation, composing conversation networks; on enactivism, through the notion of incorporated cognition; on cognitive linguistics, especially on the theory of conceptual metaphor, as a process of fabrication and organization that presupposes corporeality; and on inventive cognition, by sewing the concepts of cognitive policies, ecologies and technologies. By mapping patches of connections between the physical and the digital domains, necessary for the gameplay of a location-based mobile game, we hope to contribute to an understanding of the metaphorical phenomenon as a modulator of embodied, emerging and decentralized language and cognition as modes of actions, processes and products of recurrences and recursions operated in the intertwining of languaging and knowing along living.