As the globalization process in our society grows the awareness about social responsibility of an organization increases. As the 21st century proceeds, the profit creation and an organizations work with sustainability will become increasingly inseparable leading to an intensified influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on stakeholder perception and social legitimacy affecting the economic outcome. The increased influence on stakeholders highlights the importance of communication. Since CSR is a relative question of what constitutes good business practice in the eye of the emerging societal demands that shapes tomorrow’s expectations new ways of communication need to be investigated. The mobility and the novel form of interaction make mobiles and mobile applications suitable for a wide range of different contexts and its suitability for communicating a company’s sustainability initiatives is investigated in this thesis. The empirical findings, based upon a case study on the telecommunication sector, a user survey, mobile technologies, and present sustainability solutions show that mobile applications can be an alternative to existing communication channels used today. However, there are some limitations that come with this medium. The limitations are the usage area of application, the low interest and awareness of CSR communication, the susceptibility among commonalty and what responsibility areas that are suitable to communicate through applications. However, with the limitations of mobile applications as a means to communicate are a few identified solutions and recommendations. The most prominent ones are related to application usage and the ways to adapt sustainability measures to the chosen technology. More specific gamification, visualization, manipulation are identified as vital aspects as well as a focus on application functionalities and providing sustainability as a value add-on.

Thesis (M.S.) -- Middle East Technical University, 2004. / Keywords: Peer-to-peer (P2P), JXTA, web services, BPEL, WSDL, SOAP, J2ME, MIDP, CLDC, mobile applications.

As a more efficient means of supplying computing resources in the form of a utility, cloud computing platforms have been increasingly used to meet the insatiable demand from mobile applications. The research problems we study in this thesis are in the general research area of mobile cloud computing, as we seek to design and implement new algorithms and protocols that straddle the boundary between mobile applications and cloud computing systems, so that their performance can be jointly optimized to provide the best possible user experience, yet operating within the constraints of available resources and operational costs. From the perspective of mobile applications, we show that interactive applications have the need to stream multi-touch gestures among multiple users. Tailored to the nature of multi-touch gesture streams, we propose a new protocol that uses inter-session network coding to reduce the gesture recognizing delays. Towards supporting mobile applications using the cloud resources, we believe that multi-party video conferencing service can benefit from the inter-datacenter networks in the cloud. We apply intra-session network coding to design a new protocol to maximize the total throughput of all conferencing sessions in the cloud, subject to a latency constraint imposed by the nature of video conferencing. Our real-world experiments have shown that the inter-datacenter networks help to achieve substantially improved throughput, with very similar delays compared to traditional peer-to-peer solutions. From the perspective of cloud service providers, we study the challenges involved when resource utilization is to be maximized and when operational costs are to be minimized. To maximize resource utilization, we propose a virtual machine (VM) migration algorithm based on Nash bargaining solutions. To minimize operational costs, we present optimal routing and flow assignment algorithms for the inter-datacenter traffic, with and without store-and-forward capabilities in intermediate datacenters. With efficient and cost-effective utilization of resources in the cloud, and by designing new protocols that are applicable to both mobile applications and cloud computing systems, achieving an optimized level of user experience with interactive mobile applications will become a reality.

As a more efficient means of supplying computing resources in the form of a utility, cloud computing platforms have been increasingly used to meet the insatiable demand from mobile applications. The research problems we study in this thesis are in the general research area of mobile cloud computing, as we seek to design and implement new algorithms and protocols that straddle the boundary between mobile applications and cloud computing systems, so that their performance can be jointly optimized to provide the best possible user experience, yet operating within the constraints of available resources and operational costs. From the perspective of mobile applications, we show that interactive applications have the need to stream multi-touch gestures among multiple users. Tailored to the nature of multi-touch gesture streams, we propose a new protocol that uses inter-session network coding to reduce the gesture recognizing delays. Towards supporting mobile applications using the cloud resources, we believe that multi-party video conferencing service can benefit from the inter-datacenter networks in the cloud. We apply intra-session network coding to design a new protocol to maximize the total throughput of all conferencing sessions in the cloud, subject to a latency constraint imposed by the nature of video conferencing. Our real-world experiments have shown that the inter-datacenter networks help to achieve substantially improved throughput, with very similar delays compared to traditional peer-to-peer solutions. From the perspective of cloud service providers, we study the challenges involved when resource utilization is to be maximized and when operational costs are to be minimized. To maximize resource utilization, we propose a virtual machine (VM) migration algorithm based on Nash bargaining solutions. To minimize operational costs, we present optimal routing and flow assignment algorithms for the inter-datacenter traffic, with and without store-and-forward capabilities in intermediate datacenters. With efficient and cost-effective utilization of resources in the cloud, and by designing new protocols that are applicable to both mobile applications and cloud computing systems, achieving an optimized level of user experience with interactive mobile applications will become a reality.

In information systems design there are two schools of thought about what factors are necessary to create a successful information system. The first, conventional view holds that system performance is a key, so that efficiency characteristics such as system usability and task completion time are primary concerns of system designers. The second, emerging view holds that the visual design is also the key, so that visual interface characteristics such as visual appeal, in addition to efficiency characteristics, are critical concerns of designers. This view contends that visual design enhances system use. Thus, this work examines the effects of visual design on computer systems. Visual design exerts its influence on systems through two mechanisms: it evokes affective responses from IT users, such as arousal and pleasure and it influences individuals’ cognitive assessments of systems. Given that both affective and cognitive reactions are significant antecedents of user behaviors in the IT realm, it is no surprise that visual design plays a critical role in information system success. Human-computer-interaction literature indicates that visual aesthetics positively influences such information success factors as usability, online trust, user satisfaction, flow experience, and so on. Although academic research has introduced visual design into the Information Systems (IS) field and validated its effects, visual design is still very limited in three contexts: product aesthetics in e-commerce, mobile applications and commercial emails. This dissertation presents three studies to help fill these theoretical gaps respectively.

Nowadays smartphones and smartphone-applications are a part of our daily life. There are variety of different operating systems in the market that are unalike, which are an obstacle to developers when it comes to developing a single application for different operating system. Furthermore, hybrid application development has become a potential substitute. The evolution of new hybrid approach has made companies consider hybrid approach as a viable alternative when producing mobile applications. This research paper aims to compare native and hybrid application development on a feature level to provide scientific evidence for researchers and companies choosing application development approach as well as providing vital information about both native and hybrid applications.This study is based on both a literature study and an empirical study. The sources used are Summon@BTH, Google Scholar and IEEE Xplore. To select relevant articles, the Snowballing approach was used, with Inclusion and Exclusion criteria’s.The authors concluded that native development is a better way to develop more advanced applications which uses more device-hardware, while hybrid is a perfectly viable choice when developing content-centric applications.

Consumer acceptance of buying goods and services online via the Internet is growing, although e-ecommerce has been mostly a mirror of traditional methods of pricing transactions – fixed price or auctions. The proliferation of personal mobile devices with pervasive Internet access and localization capability means a richer set of pricing parameters can be used. Allowing buyers and sellers to more explicitly price requests and filter offers, including information about time and place, allows for better transaction results for both parties. This paper examines the impacts of including the time and place of performance of a service as part of the price. A system for implementation is proposed, a simulation of the system is evaluated, and the results presented. / text

Over the last few years, research about trust in e-commerce has been conducted. Research has found different elements that might induce trust in such a website. However, this paper examines how trust in mobile travel applications and applications where the users can meet new people can be increased, by conducting an online survey and interviews. Different trust increasing elements are found, while using the application Travls as a case study in this research.

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Antonio R. Asebedo / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) have been in commercial use since the1980’s and over 8-12% of its current uses are in the agricultural sector, but only involving limited uses like surveying, mapping and imaging, which is expected to increase to 47% according to AUVSI with the association of Artificial Intelligence over the next decade. Our research is one such effort to help farmers utilize advanced sUAS technology coupled with Artificial Intelligence and give them meaningful results in a widely used and user friendly interface, like a mobile application. The vision for this application is to provide a completely automated experience to the farmer for a repetitive and periodic analysis of his/her crops where all the instruction needed from the farmer is a push of a button on a one time configured application and ultimately providing results in seconds. This would help the farmer scout their crops, assess yield potential, and determine if additional inputs are needed for increasing grain yield and profit per acre. For making this application we focused on user-friendliness by abstracting crop algorithms, minimized necessary user inputs, and automate the construction of flight paths. Due to internet connection not always being available at farm fields, processing was kept to on-board compute systems and the mobile device to give live results to farmers without reliance on cloud-based analytics. The application is configured to work with DJI Aircraft using OpenCv for video processing and mobile vision, GIS and GPS data for accurate mapping, locating device, sUAS on the mobile application, and FFMPEG for encoding and decoding compressed video data. An algorithm developed by Precision-Ag Lab at the K-State Agronomy Department was implemented into the sUAS application for providing real time yield estimations and nitrogen recommendation algorithm for winter wheat.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-105). / There exist several challenges in supporting mobile applications. For example, creating a separate target application for each device type, leaving developers with a huge maintenance chore. Most desktop applications run on largely homogenous hardware so instead of writing the same code over and over again, developers only need to write modules to implement a particular need. This is because even though there are differences in PC hardware configurations, the same desktop application will work fine on any hardware as the operating system provides an abstract layer. This is the way mobile applications are expected to work. However, this has been divided into dozens of ill-assorted versions. Java mobile applications developers spend more time rewriting code to run on different versions of mobile devices more than they do actually creating application in the first place. This is an intolerable burden for small mobile developers, and it stifles mobile software innovation overall. Mobile devices differ in a variety of attributes, such as screen size, colour depth and the optional hardware devices they support such as cameras, GPS etc. The differences often require special code or project settings for successful deployment for each device a developer is targeting but this creates a huge logistical overhead. One potential solution that is shipped with NetBeans IDE is to add a new configuration for each device, modify the project properties, add some pre-processing code, then build and deploy the application. In most cases, one configuration for each distribution of the Java Archive (JAR) one plans to build for the project is created. For example, if a developer is planning to support three· different screen sizes using two sets of vendor specific APIs, one needs to create six configurations. This reduces the performance of the application drastically and increases the size at the same time. This is not acceptable for mobile devices where memory size and processor performance are limited. The goal of this research work is to support mobile application development through a Java IDE (the NetBeans IDE in this case). Therefore, our approach will be to modify the NetBeans IDE to better address the difficulty that was mentioned above - namely targeting applications for different platforms. Our solution is to integrate another type of a preprocessor into the NetBeans IDE that will help alleviate the problems of the existing tool. Our approach is to directly implement this inside the NetBeans IDE to further support mobile application development with the NetBeans IDE.