This thesis presents the Simple Internet of Things Enabler (SITE), a smart home solution that allows users to specify and centrally control IoT smart objects. Unlike most existing systems, SITE supports End-User Development (EUD). It includes features that make the system accessible to users that do not possess a background in Information Technology (IT). Hence, it defines a simple language for the specification of control rules for smart objects. It also provides a user interface to graphically illustrate data received from smart objects. Furthermore, we present the SITE architecture and describe the components that enable users to define, register, and operate smart objects within a smart home environment. Since deploying applications on the cloud renders many advantages pertaining to data security, robustness, and elasticity of resources, we additionally propose a cloud-based architecture for SITE. In this case, SITE acts as a service hosted on a cloud platform that realizes monitoring and control of a smart home remotely. Moreover, since most of the objects in any environment are not inherently smart, we propose a framework that affords “everyday” objects the necessary modules to measure and report their state. Hence, users realize the smart objects using a transducer network framework that supports the amalgamation of multiple transducers into a single smart object. To make these objects easily reconfigurable, we apply a plug and play mechanism to enable the clustering of any number of transducers. We propose an algorithm that dynamically detects added and removed transducers from a smart object. To assess the usability of SITE, we conduct an empirical study involving 20 participants belonging to two user groups: users with technical training (IT users) and users without technical training (Non-IT users). We demonstrate that both user groups can satisfactorily build smart objects and define control rules in a smart home environment using SITE.

Die Industrie 5.0 fordert neue Lernansätze und zeitgleich auch passende Lernumgebungen. Parallel müssen diese neben den didaktischen Herausforderungen auch den Transfer- und Übertragungsgedanken auf die industriellen Anwendungen gerecht werden. Durch die täglich steigende Anzahl vielfältiger KI-Tools insbesondere textgenerierenden Tools, braucht es Systeme mit einem breiten Anwendungsbereich. Im Rahmen des vorliegenden Beitrags geben die Autoren einen Einblick in die Wildauer Smart Production, welche den transdisziplinären Gedanken von Lern- und Transferumgebungen Rechnung trägt, Möglichkeiten der Gestaltung komplexer Produktionssysteme widerspiegelt, die Integration menschzentrierter Ansätze ermöglicht und als Forschungsumgebung eingesetzt wird.

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After the Smart City: Global ambitions and urban policymaking in Philadelphia is a study of the relationships between digital information and communication technologies, urban policy initiatives for economic development, and the material, spatial consequences of Philadelphia's shift from an industrial manufacturing city to a node in the globalized economy. The rise of `smart city' policy initiatives signaled a shift in urban governance strategies to use digital, information and communication technologies such as sensors, smartphone applications, and other forms of embedded network equipment, combined with analytic monitoring software, to improve the flow of people, goods, and information through a city. In Philadelphia, the `smart city' acted as a rhetorical device to signal a promising, creative, vibrant, and intelligent city for globally oriented, knowledge and innovation-driven enterprise. The city's primary use of the `smart city' term was to describe a civic-engagement effort to build an online, workforce education application to train low-literacy residents--often living in formerly-industrial, now marginalized neighborhoods--with the skills to compete for entry-level jobs in the globalized economy. Jobs, if they materialized, would likely locate in the premium areas of the globalized economy, continuing the social and economic marginalization of much of the city. The research asks: Did the `smart city' vision and associated programs in Philadelphia, such as Digital On-Ramps, result in a lessening of economic inequality, a key stated goal of the programs and promise of the vision? If not, what alternative impacts resulted from them? This work suggests that one possibility is that the vision and associated programs evolved to form a script that promoted Philadelphia as a global city and ultimately drove a new form of digital and infrastructural inequality grounded in a series of new geographies. The analysis concludes by considering the spatial consequences of the `smart city' discussion, arguing that the `smart city' primarily benefited the already-prominent business districts of the city. This dissertation's findings contribute to literature in critical urban geography by discussing the implications of networked information and communication technologies on policy making and the ways urban policies are enrolled in larger shifts in governance strategies to position cities as relevant and competitive worldwide. The key finding of the dissertation is that rhetoric matters: the rhetorical construction of the `smart city' is closely intertwined with the shaping of the `smart city' through policy, practice and applications. The rhetoric of the smart city acted for economic development, creating a discourse of technological determinism in the actually-existing `smart city'. While much recent scholarship on the `smart city' examines the data, control, and infrastructural change side of the topic, to fully critique the `smart city' necessitates examining both sides which work differently despite using the same descriptive language. This division served to shift attention and resources away from addressing the actual inequality--of failing schools and a lack of skills relevant to employers--towards solving problems through an unproven online and smartphone application-platform. In Philadelphia, which serves as the contextual focus of this dissertation, the resources were deployed on basis of a technocratic ideology that masks inequality behind a curtain of perceived need, which shifted the policy discussion away from affecting widespread, formative change and toward technological solutions. / Geography

Smart homes, equipped with sensing, actuation, communication, and computation capabilities, enable automation and adaptation according to the occupants' needs. These capabilities work together to build holistic spatial and living experiences for the occupants. Smart technologies significantly impact spatial experiences, making smart home design an architectural problem along with a technological problem. Nevertheless, smart home research focuses primarily on standalone technological solutions, where the spatial/architectural aspect is largely absent. We argue that addressing the technological aspects isolated from the spatial context leads to reduced experiences for the users/occupants, as this practice blocks the pathways to develop holistic and innovative smart home solutions. Hence, we focus on bridging the gap between architectural and technological components in smart home research. To this end, we studied the design of smart homes from related disciplines, i.e., architecture, human-computer interaction, human--building interaction, industrial manufacturing, and modular assembly. Our research used the triangulation technique to consult with subject matter experts (researchers, practitioners, and professors of related disciplines) to understand current design processes. We conducted ethnographic studies, focus group studies, and in-depth interviews and identified challenges and best practices for smart home design process. Our investigation recognizes a nascent research problem where the technological and architectural aspects come together in the design thinking of smart home designers. We expanded the scope of design thinking to include three primary elements of smart homes- embedded technology, architectural elements, and occupants' needs. This multidisciplinary and complex process requires a well-defined design framework to methodically address all the issues associated with it. Hence, we developed a user-centered design framework, ArTSE, through an iterative Delphi study to guide the smart home design process. ArTSE stands for "Architecture and Technology in Smart Home DEsign". This framework guides user requirements collection using HCI models, technology decision making, interaction modalities selection, the decision support system for schematic design, technology infrastructure development, and production of the necessary documentation. This framework is an evolution of the normative theory in the architectural design process that caters to the needs of smart home design. For defining implementation strategies, we applied the framework to a case study-- a smart reconfigurable space design project. Overall, we document different aspects of the smart home design process and provide a comprehensive guideline for designers, researchers, and practitioners in this area. / Doctor of Philosophy / Smart homes have automation systems so that occupants can monitor and control lighting, heating, electronic devices, etc. remotely using phones/computers. Smart home devices and components are equipped with sensing, actuation, communication, and computation capabilities, to enable automation and adaptation according to the occupants' needs. These capabilities work together to build holistic spatial and living experiences for the occupants. Smart technologies significantly impact spatial experiences, making smart home design an architectural problem along with a technological problem. Nevertheless, smart home research focuses primarily on standalone technological solutions, where the spatial/architectural aspect is largely absent. We argue that addressing the technological aspects isolated from the spatial context leads to reduced experiences for the occupants, as this practice blocks the pathways to develop innovative smart home solutions. Hence, we focus on bridging the gap between architectural and technological components in smart home research. To this end, we studied the design of smart homes from related disciplines, i.e., architecture, human-computer interaction, human--building interaction, industrial manufacturing, and modular construction. We consulted with subject matter experts (researchers, practitioners, and professors of related disciplines) to understand current design processes. We conducted ethnographic studies, focus group studies, and in-depth interviews and identified challenges and best practices for smart home design process. Our investigation recognizes a nascent research problem where the technological and architectural aspects come together in the design thinking of smart home designers. We expanded the scope of design thinking to include three primary elements of smart homes- embedded technology, architectural elements, and occupants' needs. This multidisciplinary and complex process requires a well-defined design framework to methodically address all the issues associated with it. Hence, we developed a user-centered design framework, ArTSE, through an iterative procedure to guide the smart home design process. ArTSE stands for "Architecture and Technology in Smart Home DEsign". This framework guides user requirements collection using HCI models, technology decision making, interaction modalities selection, the decision support system for schematic design, technology infrastructure development, and production of the necessary documentation. For defining implementation strategies, we applied the framework to a case study-- a smart reconfigurable space design project. Overall, we document different aspects of the smart home design process and provide a comprehensive guideline for designers, researchers, and practitioners in this area.

A key enabler of pervasive computing is the ability to drive service delivery through the analysis of situations: Semantically meaningful classifications of system state, identified through analysing the readings from sensors attached to the everyday objects that people interact with. Situation recognition is a mature area of research, with techniques primarily falling into two categories. Knowledge-based techniques use inference rules crafted by experts; however often they compensate poorly for sensing peculiarities. Learning-based approaches excel at extracting patterns from noisy training data, however their lack of transparency can make it difficult to diagnose errors. In this thesis we propose a novel hybrid approach to situation recognition that combines both techniques. This offers improvements over each used individually, through not sacrificing the intelligibility of the decision processes that the use of machine learning alone often implies, and through providing better recognition accuracy through robustness to noise typically unattainable when developers use knowledge-based techniques in isolation. We present an ontology model and reasoning framework that supports the uniform modelling of pervasive environments, and infers additional knowledge from that which is specified, in a principled way. We use this as a basis from which to learn situation recognition models that exhibit comparable performance with more complex machine learning techniques, while retaining intelligibility. Finally, we extend the approach to construct ensemble classifiers with either improved recognition accuracy, intelligibility or both. To validate our approach, we apply the techniques to real-world data sets collected in smart-office and smart-home environments. We analyse the situation recognition performance and intelligibility of the decision processes, and compare the results to standard machine learning techniques and results published in the literature.

A Smart Grid is a digitally enabled electric power grid that integrates the computation and communication technologies from cyber world with the sensors and actuators from physical world. Due to the system complexity, typically the high cohesion of communication and power system, the Smart Grid innovation introduces new and fundamentally different security vulnerabilities and risks. In this work, two important research aspects about cyber-physical security of Smart Grid are addressed: (i) The construction, impact and countermeasure of data integrity attacks; and (ii) The design and implementation of general cyber-physical security experiment platform. For data integrity attacks: based on the system model of state estimation process in Smart Grid, firstly, a data integrity attack model is formulated, such that the attackers can generate financial benefits from the real-time electrical market operations. Then, to reduce the required knowledge about the targeted power system when launching attacks, an online attack approach is proposed, such that the attacker is able to construct the desired attacks without the network information of power system. Furthermore, a network information attacking strategy is proposed, in which the most vulnerable meters can be directly identified and the desired measurement perturbations can be achieved by strategically manipulating the network information. Besides the attacking strategies, corresponding countermeasures based on the sparsity of attack vectors and robust state estimator are provided respectively. For the experiment platform: ScorePlus, a software-hardware hybrid and federated experiment environment for Smart Grid is presented. ScorePlus incorporates both software emulator and hardware testbed, such that they all follow the same architecture, and the same Smart Grid application program can be tested on either of them without any modification; ScorePlus provides a federated environment such that multiple software emulators and hardware testbeds at different locations are able to connect and form a unified Smart Grid system; ScorePlus software is encapsulated as a resource plugin in OpenStack cloud computing platform, such that it supports massive deployments with large scale test cases in cloud infrastructure.

The goal of this master thesis was to evaluate the field of Smart home applications run on mobile platforms such as smart phones. This was at the time a relatively new field that has attracted the attention of Smart phone giants like Apple and Google. This raised the question whether or not the users willingness to embrace the technology. To evaluate the field, a literature study was conducted covering the Smart home technology, and Apple’s and Google’s Smart home solutions. The rendered in a prototype for a Smart home communication application which was run on the Android platform. The prototype was then used in user tests focusing on the usability of the application and the field of Smart home smart phone applications. Even though the usability of the application was regarded fairly low, positive results were obtained regarding the evaluation of the field it self. This points to promising progress of Smart home applications run on smart phones.

Numerous reports have been published detailing a wide variety of strategies for the production of many different prototype screen-printed biosensors, hmvever, few of these devices have been developed to the commercialisation stage. There is an unquestionable need for disposable biosensors suitable for decentralised analysis that can be mass-produced at low cost by a simple process; screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs) fulfil both of these criteria. Conventional methods for producing biosensors based on this technology usually involve the deposition of a biological recognition element (typically an enzyme) onto a SPCE which has been printed using an organic solvent-based ink. The removal of organic solvents from the manufacturing process is a highly desirable goal as it should result in improved health and safety and also the possibility of incorporation of enzymes directly into the ink. The latter is difficult to achieve with conventional screen-printing inks as enzymes are inactivated by both the organic solvents themselves and the elevated temperatures required in the curing step. The studies described in this thesis utilise a screen-printing ink which incorporates a water-based binder and the electro catalytic mediator cobalt phthalocyanine (CoPe.) It is demonstrated that the addition of different oxidase enzymes directly into this ink allows for the one-step manufacture of biosensors with desirable performance characteristics, notably high precision and outstanding stability. A water-based carbon ink incorporating CoPC was used to produce robust and precise SPCEs which were found to act as effective sensors for H20 2• The sensors were operated in stirred solutions at an applied potential of +0.5 V, which was shown to be a significant reduction in the potential required for H20 2 detection at an un-modified electrode. The ink was modified further by adding glucose oxidase (GOD) to its bulk prior to printing. This allowed for the one-step printing of glucose biosensors which dried at room temperature. These biosensors were investigated using amperometry in stirred solution which revealed long-term operational stability and a shelf-life of at least 18 months. The analytical signal was shown to arise from the electro catalytic oxidation of the H20 2 produced by the enzyme in the presence of glucose and O2. Using these biosensors with a background correction technique, it was possible to determine the concentration of glucose present in a bovine serum sample with a good degree of both accuracy and precision. This demonstrated that the newly-developed glucose biosensors were capable of operating reliably in a biological sample. In order to extend the linear range, the ink composition was re-formulated and chronoamperometry was used as the measurement technique. The sensitivity of these new glucose biosensors was found to be comparable to that of the earlier system, and the upper limit of the linear range was successfully extended. A simple method for interference removal was developed, which involved the use of 'dummy' sensors that did not contain any enzyme. Using this system, it was possible to quantify glucose in dilute human plasma samples which had been spiked with glucose in order to represent diabetic samples. The generic nature of the CoPC modified water-based ink was illustrated by adding a different enzyme, lactate oxidase (LOD,) which is known to be much more delicate than GOD, into the ink. Even under un-optimised conditions, the LOD-containing biosensors gave a measurable response to lactate over a clinically useful range. Owing to their unusual properties, the study of materials with dimensions smaller than 100 nm is playing an increasingly important role in the development of biosensors. In an attempt to extend the linear range of the GOD-containing biosensors to higher glucose concentrations, the possibility of using nanoscaled cobalt phthalocyanine (n-CoPC) as a mediator was investigated. It was shown that the response of the n-CoPC containing sensors towards H20 2 was superior to those incorporating the bulk mediator. GOD was added to the n-CoPC modified ink, and the resulting glucose biosensors displayed a superior sensitivity and linear range to the bulk-CoPC containing biosensors produced earlier. The increased sensitivity was attributed to the increased sensitivity of the base transducer, and further experiments were conducted to determine the reason for the extended linear range. Remarkably, it was discovered that the n-CoPC modified biosensors were capable of operating in the absence of O2, which implied that the n-CoPC must be interacting in some way with the redox centre of GOD. Such direct electron transfer has been reported for biosensors incorporating other types of nanomaterials but, as far as is known, never for CoPC. In order to investigate the possibility of determining another clinically important analyte, cholesterol oxidase was introduced into the n-CoPC modified water-based ink. Although the resulting cholesterol biosensors did not display the same Orindependent operation, a good sensitivity and a linear response up to at least 2 mM cholesterol was achieved. Free cholesterol was determined in 40 dilute human plasma samples which had been spiked with cholesterol to represent a clinically useful range of total cholesterol concentrations; the results agreed well with a standard reference method (R2 = 0.95.)

<p>Syftet med den här studien var att ta reda på hur lärare och elever ställer sig till användandet av de interaktiva skrivtavlorna inom matematiken. Studien bygger på flera olika metoder då detta är en fallstudie. I undersökningen framkom det att elever och lärare är positivt inställda till de interaktiva skrivtavlorna. Det framkom även att lärarna inte använder den interaktiva skrivtavlan alls eller att de använder den som en filmduk.</p>