The use of mobile and wireless Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools in geographically distributed project organizations appears to be an appropriate application of new technical capabilities in an existing business environment. But to successfully introduce and adopt a suitable mobile ICT-based project communication platform in an existing operational setting involves a complex framework of socio-technical issues that have to be considered. This Licentiate thesis presents the results of an ongoing doctoral research project. The study explores the implementation process of mobile computing tools at Sweden’s largest construction company, with the aim of improving information management and project communication of production site operations in construction projects. The research project highlights the interdependencies between the creation of usefulness and its resulting benefits. It emphasizes user-oriented implementation as the enabling process for realizing technology fit and user acceptance of the mobile computing tools, as well as achieving long-term benefit and business value of the ICT investment. The studied case specifically addresses the neglected mobile and flexible information needs and communication demands of management staff at construction sites. The fundamental issue is to identify what the usefulness perspective of mobile computing for construction operations consists of relating to both technology and the different groups of people who are supposed to use it. Generic access, mobility of project data and individual adaptation of information and communication resources are technological aspects that are emphasized and discussed in the context of creating usefulness and benefit of mobile computing in construction projects. The often present political dimension of ICT implementation within an organization is also highlighted. The socio-technical introduction and adoption process of mobile computing involves balancing various perspectives and agendas inherent on different organizational levels in order to achieve an acceptable outcome for all the actors involved. Topics for further research are discussed and refined relating to the ongoing case study and the conceptual framework presented. / QC 20101119

With the advances in wireless communication technology and advanced positioning systems, a variety of Location-Based Services (LBS) become available to the public. Mobile users can issue location-based queries to probe their surrounding environments. One important type of query in LBS is moving monitoring queries over mobile objects. Due to the high frequency in location updates and the expensive cost of continuous query processing, server computation capacity and wireless communication bandwidth are the two limiting factors for large-scale deployment of moving object database systems. To address both of the scalability factors, distributed computing has been considered. These schemes enable moving objects to participate as a peer in query processing to substantially reduce the demand on server computation, and wireless communications associated with location updates. In the first part of this dissertation, we propose a distributed framework to process moving monitoring queries over moving objects in a spatial network environment. In the second part of this dissertation, in order to reduce the communication cost, we leverage both on-demand data access and periodic broadcast to design a new hybrid distributed solution for moving monitoring queries in an open space environment. Location-based services make our daily life more convenient. However, to receive the services, one has to reveal his/her location and query information when issuing locationbased queries. This could lead to privacy breach if these personal information are possessed by some untrusted parties. In the third part of this dissertation, we introduce a new privacy protection measure called query l-diversity, and provide two cloaking algorithms to achieve both location kanonymity and query l-diversity to better protect user privacy. In the fourth part of this dissertation, we design a hybrid three-tier architecture to help reduce privacy exposure. In the fifth part of this dissertation, we propose to use Road Network Embedding technique to process privacy protected queries.

We are witnessing exponential growth in the number of powerful, multiply-connected, energy-rich stationary and mobile nodes, which will make available a massive pool of computing and communication resources. We claim that cloud computing can provide resilient on-demand computing, and more effective and efficient utilization of potentially infinite array of resources. Current cloud computing systems are primarily built using stationary resources. Recently, principles of cloud computing have been extended to the mobile computing domain aiming to form local clouds using mobile devices sharing their computing resources to run cloud-based services. However, current cloud computing systems by and large fail to provide true on-demand computing due to their lack of the following capabilities: 1) providing resilience and autonomous adaptation to the real-time variation of the underlying dynamic and scattered resources as they join or leave the formed cloud; 2) decoupling cloud management from resource management, and hiding the heterogeneous resource capabilities of participant nodes; and 3) ensuring reputable resource providers and preserving the privacy and security constraints of these providers while allowing multiple users to share their resources. Consequently, systems and consumers are hindered from effectively and efficiently utilizing the virtually infinite pool of computing resources. We propose a platform for mobile cloud computing that integrates: 1) a dynamic real-time resource scheduling, tracking, and forecasting mechanism; 2) an autonomous resource management system; and 3) a cloud management capability for cloud services that hides the heterogeneity, dynamicity, and geographical diversity concerns from the cloud operation. We hypothesize that this would enable 'Collaborative Computing Cloud (C3)' for on-demand computing, which is a dynamically formed cloud of stationary and/or mobile resources to provide ubiquitous computing on-demand. The C3 would support a new resource-infinite computing paradigm to expand problem solving beyond the confines of walled-in resources and services by utilizing the massive pool of computing resources, in both stationary and mobile nodes. In this dissertation, we present a C3 management platform, named PlanetCloud, for enabling both a new resource-infinite computing paradigm using cloud computing over stationary and mobile nodes, and a true ubiquitous on-demand cloud computing. This has the potential to liberate cloud users from being concerned about resource constraints and provides access to cloud anytime and anywhere. PlanetCloud synergistically manages 1) resources to include resource harvesting, forecasting and selection, and 2) cloud services concerned with resilient cloud services to include resource provider collaboration, application execution isolation from resource layer concerns, seamless load migration, fault-tolerance, the task deployment, migration, revocation, etc. Specifically, our main contributions in the context of PlanetCloud are as follows. 1. PlanetCloud Resource Management • Global Resource Positioning System (GRPS): • Global mobile and stationary resource discovery and monitoring. A novel distributed spatiotemporal resource calendaring mechanism with real-time synchronization is proposed to mitigate the effect of failures occurring due to unstable connectivity and availability in the dynamic mobile environment, as well as the poor utilization of resources. This mechanism provides a dynamic real-time scheduling and tracking of idle mobile and stationary resources. This would enhance resource discovery and status tracking to provide access to the right-sized cloud resources anytime and anywhere. • Collaborative Autonomic Resource Management System (CARMS): Efficient use of idle mobile resources. Our platform allows sharing of resources, among stationary and mobile devices, which enables cloud computing systems to offer much higher utilization, resulting in higher efficiency. CARMS provides system-managed cloud services such as configuration, adaptation and resilience through collaborative autonomic management of dynamic cloud resources and membership. This helps in eliminating the limited self and situation awareness and collaboration of the idle mobile resources. 2. PlanetCloud Cloud Management Architecture for resilient cloud operation on dynamic mobile resources to provide stable cloud in a continuously changing operational environment. This is achieved by using trustworthy fine-grained virtualization and task management layer, which isolates the running application from the underlying physical resource enabling seamless execution over heterogeneous stationary and mobile resources. This prevents the service disruption due to variable resource availability. The virtualization and task management layer comprises a set of distributed powerful nodes that collaborate autonomously with resource providers to manage the virtualized application partitions. / Ph. D.

How people create and use information scraps, the small informal messages that people write to themselves to help them complete a task or remember something, has changed rapidly in the age of mobile computing. As recently as 2008, information scraps had continued to resist technological support. Since then, however, people have adopted mobile connected devices at a rate unimagined in the pre-smartphone era. Developers have, in turn, created a varied and growing body of smartphone software that supports many common information scrap use-cases. In this thesis, we describe our research into how and why people have adopted smartphone technology to serve their information scrap needs. The results of our survey show broad adoption of smartphones for many common information scrap tasks, particularly ones involving prospective memory. In addition, the results of our diary studies show that mobile contexts or locations are highly correlated with people's choosing to use smartphones to record information scraps. Our analysis of our diary study data also provides fresh understanding of the information scrap lifecycle and how mobile digital technology affects it. We find people's smartphone information scraps tend toward automatic archival, and we find their information scraps in general tend toward substantial role overlap regardless of medium. We use these findings to formulate a new information scrap lifecycle that is inclusive of mobile technology. These insights will help mobile technology creators to better support information scraps, which, in turn will allow users to enjoy the huge benefits of digital technology in their information scrap tasks. / Master of Science

Yes / A new generation of satellite systems that support regenerative on-board processors (OBPs) and multiple spot beam technology have opened new and efficient possibilities of implementing IP multicast communication over satellites. These new features have widened the scope of satellite-based applications and also enable satellite operators to efficiently utilize their allocated bandwidth resources. This makes it possible to provide cost effective satellite network services. IP multicast is a network layer protocol designed for group communication to save bandwidth resources and reduce processing overhead on the source side. The inherent broadcast nature of satellites, their global coverage (air, land, and sea), and direct access to a large number of subscribers imply satellites have unrivalled advantages in supporting IP multicast applications. IP mobility support in general and IP mobile multicast support in particular on mobile satellite terminals like the ones mounted on long haul flights, maritime vessels, continental trains, etc., still remain big challenges that have received very little attention from the research community. This paper proposes how Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6)-based IP multicast mobility support defined for terrestrial networks can be adopted and used to support IP mobile multicast in future satellite networks, taking cognizance of the trend in the evolution of satellite communications.

No / As the Internet and World Wide Web continue to influence corporate and private activities, systems are needed that mimic human-to-human interface, to simplify the human-to-computer interface. Intelligent Agents are likely to play a significant role in the design of such interfaces, and this book explores how they could influence media-based systems. Throughout, the text maps out the considerable advances that have already been made, paving the way toward a future where computers will be truly described as an intelligent aid to our personal and business lives.

In the past 10 years, the growth of machine learning technology has been significant, largely due to the availability of large datasets for training. However, gathering a sufficient amount of data on a central server can be challenging. Additionally, with the rise of mobile networking and the large amounts of data generated by IoT devices, privacy and security issues have become a concern, resulting in government regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and ADPPA. Under these circumstances, traditional centralized machine learning methods face a problem in that sensitive data must be kept locally for privacy reasons, making it difficult to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Federated learning (FL) offers a solution to this by allowing for a global shared model to be trained by exchanging locally computed optimums instead of sharing the actual data. Despite its success as a natural solution for IoT machine learning implementation, Federated learning (FL) still faces challenges with regards to security and performance. These include high communication costs between IoT devices and the central server, the potential for sensitive information leakage and reduced model precision due to the aggregation process in the distributed IoT network, and performance concerns caused by the heterogeneity of data and devices in the network. In this dissertation, I present practical and effective techniques with strong theoretical supports to address these challenges. To optimize communication resources, I introduce a new multi-server FL framework called MS-FedAvg. To enhance security, I propose a robust defense algorithm called LoMar. To address data heterogeneity, I present FedLGA, and for device heterogeneity, I propose FedSAM.

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