Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Groupware (Computer software) Mobile communication systems'

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2002.
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Changes in work, along with improvements in techniques to statistically model uncertainty, have resulted in a class of groupware tools able to forecast the activities and/or attentional state of their users. This thesis represents an exploration into the design, development, and use of one such system. I describe the design and development of a groupware calendar system called Augur that is augmented with the ability to predict the attendance of its users. Using Bayesian networks, Augur models the uncertain problem of event attendance, drawing inferences based on the attributes of calendar events as well as a history of attendance provided by each user. This system was deployed to an academic workgroup and studied over the course of a semester. To more deeply explore the social implications of Augur and systems like it, I conducted a structured privacy analysis of Augur to examine the vulnerabilities inherent in this type of forecasting groupware system. I present an architecture, user interface, and probabilistic model for Augur. This work also addresses the feasibility of such a system and the challenges faced when deploying it to an academic workgroup. I also report on an exploration of the systems use by individuals, its effects on communication within working relationships, and its effectiveness with respect to the presence of domestic calendars. Finally, I present a set of implications for the workplace social environment with the introduction of Augur. Specifically, I show how the integrity of predictions generated by Augur can have consequences for the privacy of users and their representations through the shared calendar. Overall, this thesis is presented as an early exploration into the potential for a new class of forecasting groupware applications. It offers guidance and lessons learned for both designers and researchers seeking to work in this area. It also presents a complete calendar application as an example for building and studying such systems.

Wiki Message Linking (WML) is a group communication tool that will be used between group members and the group leader. By using WML, group web pages are created and modified easily. From the WML, new pages are created and owned by their creators. The group leader and the page owner can modify the page, and the owner may give permission for other people to modify the web page; member can edit their works online and the leader can review the works and correct the works directly from the WML.

Computer-Support Cooperative Work (CSCW) reflects the change in emphasis from using computers to solve problems to using computers to facilitate human interactions. Most studies, however, have focused on the use of the technology rather than on the human-human interaction (HHI) in these environments due to: the varied perspectives of the investigators; and the lack of a consistent variables. Although numerous studies exist on a variety of products, only limited research has been conducted with the most prevalent of the technologies in the marketplace, Lotus Notes™. This field study, conducted using Lotus Notes™, operationalizes a model proposed, but not tested, for the study of group decision-making in CSCW environments put forth by Kraemer and Pinsonneault (1990). This study examines the use of CSCW in the group decision-making process, the participation rate for group decision-making in CSCW environments, and the criteria for determining quality in group decisions in CSCW environments. The study also proposes a new perspective for examining technology using the human context, recommends extensions for the group study framework and explores areas for future research.

Communication between deaf individuals and hearing individuals can be very difficult. For people who are born deaf, English is often a second language with the first language being American Sign Language (ASL). Very few hearing people in the United States sign or are aware of Deafness, Deaf culture, or how to appropriately communicate with people with hearing loss. In this thesis, I concentrate on the role that mobile technologies can play in ameliorating some of these issues. In formative work with Deaf teenagers in the metro-Atlanta area, I investigate the role that communication technologies play in the lives of many Deaf individuals and examine how these devices have effected their communication patterns and social circles. Specifically, the teens identified problems communicating with hearing individuals such as close friends and family in face-to-face situations. Having identified sign language use at home as one of the earliest interventions for Deaf children, I investigated the use of mobile phones for learning survival-level ASL. I created a prototype software application which presented short ASL lessons via either a mobile phone or desktop web-browser. The software presented the lessons via one of two different scheduling methods designed to take advantage of the spacing effect during learning. I designed and conducted a study of forty individuals with no prior ASL knowledge which compared the effects of both scheduling algorithm and platform. My results show that individuals who used a mobile phone platform and received a group of lessons at one time performed better on post-test receptive and generative ASL metrics than did participants in the three other conditions.

Smartphones are proliferating into the workplace at an ever-increasing rate, similarly the threats that they pose is increasing. In an era of constant connectivity and availability, information is freed up of constraints of time and place. This research project delves into the risks introduced by smartphones, and through multiple cases studies, a maturity measurement model is formulated. The model is based on recommendations from two leading information security frameworks, the COBIT 4.1 framework and ISO27002 code of practice. Ultimately, a combination of smartphone specific risks are integrated with key control recommendations, in providing a set of key measurable security maturity components. The subjective opinions of case study respondents are considered a key component in achieving a solution. The solution addresses the concerns of not only policy makers, but also the employees subjected to the security policies. Nurturing security awareness into organisational culture through reinforcement and employee acceptance is highlighted in this research project. Software consultancies can use this model to mitigate risks, while harnessing the potential strategic advantages of mobile computing through smartphone devices. In addition, this research project identifies the critical components of a smartphone security solution. As a result, a model is provided for software consultancies due to the intense reliance on information within these types of organisations. The model can be effectively applied to any information intensive organisation.

Vision based technology such as motion detection has long been limited to the domain of powerful processor intensive systems such as desktop PCs and specialist hardware solutions. With the advent of much faster mobile phone processors and memory, a plethora of feature rich software and hardware is being deployed onto the mobile platform, most notably onto high powered devices called smart phones. Interaction interfaces such as touchscreens allow for improved usability but obscure the phone’s screen. Since the majority of smart phones are equipped with cameras, it has become feasible to combine their powerful processors, large memory capacity and the camera to support new ways of interacting with the phone which do not obscure the screen. However, it is not clear whether or not these processor intensive visual interactions can in fact be run at an acceptable speed on current mobile handsets or whether they will offer the user a better experience than the current number pad and direction keys present on the majority of mobile phones. A vision based finger interaction technique is proposed which uses the back of device camera to track the user’s finger. This allows the user to interact with the mobile phone with mouse based movements, gestures and steering based interactions. A simple colour thresholding algorithm was implemented in Java, Python and C++. Various benchmarks and tests conducted on a Nokia N95 smart phone revealed that on current hardware and with current programming environments only native C++ yields results plausible for real time interactions (a key requirement for vision based interactions). It is also shown that different lighting levels and background environments affects the accuracy of the system with background and finger contrast playing a large role. Finally a user study was conducted to ascertain the overall user’s satisfaction between keypad interactions and the finger interaction techniques concluding that the new finger interaction technique is well suited to steering based interactions and in time, mouse style movements. Simple navigation is better suited to the directional keypad.

In this project a collaboration multimedia toolkit, JSCMT (Java Synchronized Collaborative Multimedia Toolkit) was developed which is intended to connect a group of people located in different geographical locations who are working on the same project.

Dispositivos móveis, como os tablets e smartphones, ficam mais populares a cada dia. Esta nova classe de dispositivos está evoluindo constantemente em suas capacidades computacionais, permitindo os usuários trocarem computadores maiores por estes dispositivos móveis menores. Diariamente novas aplicações para estes dispositivos são desenvolvidas e publicadas em repositórios de software, possibilitando que os usuários instalem e se beneficiem de novos aplicativos rapidamente. Para gerenciar múltiplas requisições de recursos de diferentes aplicações rodando em paralelo, o design de gestão de recursos do sistema operacional desempenha um papel chave. A vasta maioria dos gerentes de recursos disponíveis nos dispositivos móveis são projetados para maximizar o desempenho do sistema como um todo, nem sempre levando em consideração as características dos processos solicitando recursos na camada de aplicação. Este tipo de estratégia pode levar a casos onde algumas aplicações experimentem tempos de latência mais longos que os desejados durante os acessos aos recursos, comprometendo a Qualidade de Serviço ou a segurança do sistema. Este trabalho tem por objetivo oferecer um novo modelo de gerência de recursos para dispositivos móveis, permitindo a criação de regras que priorizem a alocação de recursos para aplicações específicas de acordo com suas necessidades. Além disso foi implementado um prototótipo como prova de conceito deste modelo, usando a plataforma Android, para confirmando a viabilidade do mesmo.
Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are becoming more popular everyday. This new devices class is constantly evolving on what concerns computing capabilities, allowing users to switch from larger computers to smaller mobile devices in several cases. Everyday new apps for these devices are developed and published in software repositories, enabling users to quickly install and benefit from new software. In order to deal with the multiple resource requests from different applications running in parallel, the operating system’s resource management design plays a key role. Most resource managers available to mobile phones are designed to maximize the performance of the system as a whole, not always taking into account the characteristics of the processes requiring resources in the application layer. This type of strategy can lead to cases where some applications experience longer latencies than desired while accessing resources, compromising the Quality of Service or system security. This work aims to offer a new resource management model for mobile devices, allowing the creation of rules that can prioritize the resource allocation for specific applications according to their needs. Also it implemented a proof of concept prototype version of this model, using the Android platform, confirming its viability.

Although there are several Software Development kits and Application Programming Interfaces for client-side location-based services development, they mostly involve the creation of self-referencing location-based services. Self-referencing location-based services include services such as geocoding, reverse geocoding, route management and navigation which focus on satisfying the location-based requirements of a single mobile device. There is a lack of open-source Software Development Kits for the development of client-side location-based services that are cross-referencing. Cross-referencing location-based services are designed for the sharing of location information amongst different entities on a given network. This project was undertaken to assemble, through incremental prototyping, a client-side Java Micro Edition location-based services Software Development Kit and a Mobicents location server to aid mobile network operators and developers alike in the quick creation of the transport and privacy protection of cross-referencing location-based applications on Session Initiation Protocol bearer networks. The privacy of the location information is protected using geolocation policies. Developers do not need to have an understanding of Session Initiation Protocol event signaling specifications or of the XML Configuration Access Protocol to use the tools that we put together. The developed tools are later consolidated using two sample applications, the friend-finder and child-tracker services. Developer guidelines are also provided, to aid in using the provided tools.

In the United States, between 90 and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. In most circumstances, the birth of a deaf child is the first experience these parents have with American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community. Parents learn ASL as a second language to provide their children with language models and to be able to communicate with their children more effectively, but they face significant challenges. To address these challenges, I have developed a mobile learning application, SMARTSign, to help parents of deaf children learn ASL vocabulary. I hypothesize that providing a method for parents to learn and practice ASL words associated with popular children's stories on their mobile phones would help improve their ASL vocabulary and abilities more than if words were grouped by theme. I posit that parents who learn vocabulary associated with children's stories will use the application more, which will lead to more exposure to ASL and more learned vocabulary. My dissertation consists of three studies. First I show that novices are able to reproduce signs presented on mobile devices with high accuracy regardless of source video resolution. Next, I interview hearing parents with deaf children to discover the difficulties they have with current methods for learning ASL. When asked which methods of presenting signs they preferred, participants were most interested in learning vocabulary associated with children's stories. Finally, I deploy SMARTSign to parents for four weeks. Participants learning story vocabulary used the application more often and had higher sign recognition scores than participants who learned vocabulary based on word types. The condition did not affect participants' ability to produce the signed vocabulary.

In developing countries, acute respiratory infections (ARIs) are responsible for two million deaths per year. Most victims are children who are less than 5 years old. Pneumonia kills 5000 children per day. The statistics for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are even more alarming. According to a 2009 report from the World Health Organization (WHO), CVDs kill 17 million people per year. In many resource-poor parts of the world such as India and China, many people are unable to access cardiologists, pulmonologists, and other specialists. Hence, low skilled health professionals are responsible for screening people for ARIs and CVDs in these areas. For example, in the rural areas of the Philippines, there is only one doctor for every 10,000 people. By contrast, the United States has one doctor for every 500 Americans. Due to advances in technology, it is now possible to use a smartphone for audio recording, signal processing, and machine learning. In my thesis, I have developed an Android application named Smart Auscultation. Auscultation is a process in which physicians listen to heart and lung sounds to diagnose disorders. Cardiologists spend years mastering this skill. The Smart Auscultation application is capable of recording and classifying heart sounds, and can be used by public or clinical health workers. This application can detect abnormal heart sounds with up to 92-98% accuracy. In addition, the application can record, but not yet classify, lung sounds. This application will be able to help save thousands of lives by allowing anyone to identify abnormal heart and lung sounds.

Acompanha: Tecnologia móvel no ensino e aprendizagem de língua inglesa na escola
O ensino de língua estrangeira no Brasil tem sido motivo de muitas discussões em torno de abordagens teóricas e metodológicas que ofereçam melhorias ao processo de ensino e aprendizagem. A inclusão das novas tecnologias aplicadas ao contexto escolar pode auxiliar esse processo, uma vez que os alunos, desde muito pequenos, já têm contato com essas ferramentas, o que facilita o trabalho do professor. Assim, a presente pesquisa tem por objetivos: produzir um aplicativo para auxiliar o ensino de língua inglesa no Ensino Médio; aplicar o protótipo em sala de aula; relatar os aspectos positivos e negativos da proposta e analisar a participação dos alunos e da professora regente durante a aplicação. Os fundamentos teóricos que nortearam a pesquisa foram as teorias de aprendizagem por dispositivos móveis de Lemos (2010), Lévy (2010); os conceitos de mídias digitais e m-learning de Sharples, Taylor e Vavoula (2007), Barbosa, Amarolinda e Schlemmer (2011), Marçal, Andrade e Rios (2005) e Moura (2010); a teoria do desenvolvimento social e aprendizagem ou sociointeracionismo, interação e aprendizagem de acordo com os estudos de Vigotsky (1999) e Vigotsky e Cole (1998); o conceito de aprendizagem de língua estrangeira pela abordagem comunicativa de aquisição e desenvolvimento no convívio multicultural e contextualizado de Foster e Ohta (2005) e Krashen (1987) e, por último, os conceitos de affordance na perspectiva de Gibson e Pick (2000) e Cakmak et al. (2007). Para a realização do estudo, utilizamos os tipos de pesquisa: descritiva, bibliográfica, de campo, experimental e analítica. Os participantes do estudo foram quinze alunos do primeiro ano do Ensino Médio da rede pública da cidade de Londrina, Paraná. Os resultados mostraram que os smartphones e tablets oferecem possibilidades reais de aprendizagem, se explorados apropriadamente pelo professor. A aprendizagem de língua inglesa pelo uso das mídias móveis maximizou a aquisição de habilidades e competências linguísticas, permitindo que os alunos tivessem contato com contextos multiculturais e contextualizados de produção oral, a qualquer hora, em qualquer lugar, auxiliando na criação de um ambiente descontraído, motivador e produtivo, otimizando o tempo de estudo.
The foreign language teaching in Brazil has been subject of lots of discussions around the theoretical approaches and methodologies, which offer improvement to the learning process. The inclusion of the new technologies applied to the school context may support this process, once students since very early get in touch with such tools, what may make facilitate the teacher’s job. The arrival of the mobile devices (smartphones e tablets), with the instantaneous and ubiquitous into the classrooms it has shown itself as being an important pedagogical support, which makes the didactic contents more authentic, appealing and challenging. Therefore, this current research has the following objectives: produce an application to support the English Language Teaching at High School; apply the prototype in the classroom; report the positive and negative aspects of this application; analyze the participation of the students and teacher in class during the application. The theoretical base that guided the learning theories through the use of the mobile devices of Lemos (2010), Lévy (2010); the concept of digital and of m-learning of Sharples, Taylor and Vavoula (2007), Barbosa, Amarolinda e Schlemmer (2011), Marçal, Andrade e Rios (2005) and Moura (2010); the theory of social development and learning or sociointeracionism, interaction and learning according to the studies of Vigotsky (1999) and Vigotsky and Cole (1998); the conception of learning of foreign language through the communicative approach of acquisition and development in multicultural and contextualized of Foster and Ohta (2005) and Krashen (1987); and lastly the concept of affordance under the perspective of Gibson and Pick (2000) and Cakmak et al. (2007). In order to be able to carry out this study we used the following kinds of research: descriptive, bibliographic, experimental, and analytical. The participants of the research were 15 students of the first grade of High School of the Public Educational system from the city of Londrina, Paraná state. The results showed that the mobile devices offer real learning possibilities, provide that the teacher taps them appropriately. The learning of the English language by the use of the mobile Medias has promoted an improvement on the language acquisition, allowing students to create a friendly, motivating and productive environment, optimizing the studying time.

The availability of numerous mobile agent systems with its own strengths and weaknesses poses a problem when deciding on a particular mobile agent system. In this dissertation, factors based on mobility, communication and security of the mobile agent systems are presented and used as a means to address this problem. To facilitate in the process of selection, a grouping scheme of the agent system was proposed. Based on this grouping scheme, mobile agent systems with common properties are grouped together and analyzed against the above-mentioned factors. In addition, an application was developed using the Aglet Software Development Toolkit to demonstrate certain features of agent mobility, communication and security.
Theoretical Computing
M. Sc. (Computer Science)