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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the publicity around the implementation of the Zora robot in elderly-care services in Lahti, Finland. The aim is to discover opinions concerning the use of robots in elderly care as well as the arguments and justifications behind those opinions. Zora is a humanoid robot intended to promote mobility and rehabilitation. The Lahti pilot was the first Zora pilot in Finland in public elderly-care services. It received much publicity, both regionally and nationally.Design/methodology/approach This study is based on an empirical case study on the implementation of the Zora robot in elderly-care services. The data consist of interviews with personnel who operated Zora and comments from the general public about the "Zora" robot. Two data sources were used: 107 comments were collected from online and print media, and the personnel (n=39) who worked with Zora were interviewed. The data were analysed by means of interpretative content analysis.Findings The results show that public opinion is mainly negative, but that the commentators apparently have little information about the robot and its tasks. The personnel had more positive views; they saw it as a recreational tool, not as a replacement for their own roles.Originality/value There is clearly a need for more information, for a better informed discussion on how robots can be used in elderly care and how to involve the general public in this discussion in a constructive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication designers have historically been accused of neglecting end-user perspectives, believing designers are experts at creating inspired designs. Codesign has been applied to many design fields, however developing methods for engaging end-users have had little traction in communication design practice. In an era of end-user engagement, communication designers are left wondering how and when to include end-users in the design process and if codesign offers any benefits to project outcomes. This study trialled codesign workshops across two communication design case studies. Both studies involved non-profit contexts where designers and staff co-created communication design strategies, one for sustainable cleaning in childcare centres and the other for asthma management and awareness. The findings reveal that structured, hands-on generative toolkits conducted in small groups, sparked conversation and prompted innovative ideas whereas evaluating ideas with ranking toolkits blocked dialogue and hindered idea progression. Evaluation tooolkits based on ranking ideas created unexpected barriers to engagement, as end-users disengaged from the codesign process. I argue codesign can benefit communication design when structured hands-on generative toolkits simulate a perceived familiar environment, creating a conversational forum for ideas to flow while participants enjoy creating things with their hands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IoT devices are diverse in their characteristics and made by many vendors, hence the inter-operation among them is difficult. Especially, end users can't make their own programs by do-it-yourselves. IFTTT and Zapier platforms are designed to help end users to make them inter-operable easily and prevail in these days. Their approach is categorized into a Trigger-Action-Programming, in which trigger conditions and actions are already made by professional programmers of several IoT vendors and end users composite them into their own applications easily. But, their drawback is that the composition can be made at once in the first level, hence end users can't make more complicated applications. Our approach is based on a dataflow programming paradigm which resembles the TAP in that the internal actions are triggered when all the inputs of a node are prepared. In our approach, a composition of some atomic nodes becomes another atomic node, so the composition would continue iteratively. This feature is so generous that several visual programming languages like LabView are relied on the approach for various fields. We propose the overall architecture of our system and explain them. We also present Internet of Things examples of our approach, which shows that atomic dataflow objects can be associated to produce composite dataflow objects. And they are also composited to make more complex applications iteratively. We compare IFTTT, Zapier, and our approach qualitatively and show that end users can make more diverse and flexible applications in our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • This paper describes a model-driven approach that allows the automatic production of end user documentations that explain and illustrate the different concepts of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL). • The approach produces end user documentation from artifacts of the implementation phase of DSLs: the metamodel, the grammar, and models that cover all the concepts of a DSL. • Our implementation, called Docywood , targets two platforms: Markdown documentations for static web sites and Xtext code fragments for live documentation while modeling. • The evaluation exhibits that the proposed approach improves the correctness of ThingML models created by novice end users. Abstract Domain-specific languages (DSL) are developed for answering specific problems by leveraging the expertise of domain stakeholders. The development of DSLs requires a significant software engineering effort: editors, code generators, etc, must be developed to make a DSL usable. Documenting a DSL is also a major and time-consuming task required to promote it and address its learning curve. Recent research work in software language engineering focus on easing the development of DSLs. This work focuses on easing the production of documentation of textual DSLs. The API documentation domain identified challenges we adapted to DSL documentation. Based on these challenges we propose a model-driven approach that relies on DSL artifacts to extract information required to build documentation. Our implementation, called Docywood , targets two platforms: Markdown documentation for static web sites and Xtext code fragments for live documentation while modeling. We used Docywood on two DSLs, namely ThingML and Target Platform Definition. Feedback from end users and language designers exhibits qualitative benefits of the proposal with regard to the DSL documentation challenges. End user experiments conducted on ThingML and Target Platform Definition show benefits on the correctness of the created models when using Docywood on ThingML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forty-two communities in rural Alaska are considered unserved or underserved with water and sewer infrastructure. Many challenges exist to provide centralized piped water and sewer infrastructure to the homes, and they are exacerbated by decreasing capital funding. Unserved communities in rural Alaska experience higher rates of disease, supporting the recommendation that sanitation infrastructure should be provided. Organizations are pursuing alternative solutions to conventional piped water and sewer in order to maximize water use and reuse for public health. This paper reviews initiatives led by the State of Alaska, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation to identify and develop potential long-term solutions appropriate and acceptable to rural communities. Future developments will likely evolve based on the lessons learned from the initiatives. Recommendations include Alaska-specific research needs, increased end-user participation in the design process, and integrated monitoring, evaluation, and information dissemination in future efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The Space Rider Programme, previously named Pride, is an ESA programme whose objective is to define and develop an affordable reusable European space transportation system to be launched by VEGA-C, to be used as a platform for several types of payload applications. Payloads and related applications strongly drive the definition of Space Rider mission and system, then an analysis of end user's needs has been necessary to adequately feed the design process. This paper reports a survey and an analysis with respect to the following payloads classes: 1- Free-Flyer (Micro-gravity experimentation and Radiation exposure); 2- In-Orbit Demonstrations and Validation for several technologies (Exploration, Orbital infrastructures servicing, Earth observation, Earth science, Telecommunication, Reentry); 3- In-Orbit applications (Earth monitoring and Satellites inspection). In particular, the analysis has been carried out with investigation of the current microgravity platforms and payloads needs, In-Orbit Demonstrations (IOD) flight opportunities status and demand from different stakeholders both on scientific and industrial side. Key assets of the Space Rider platform with respect to payload have been defined and the results of the work has been flow down into the identification of a set of requirements for the Space Rider mission and system focusing on main aspects as operations, mass, power, volume and interfaces. Highlights • The Space Rider Programme objective is to define and develop an affordable reusable European space transportation system. • Payloads and related applications strongly drive the definition of Space Rider mission and system. • An analysis of end user's needs has been necessary to adequately feed the design process. • This paper reports a survey and an analysis with respect to several payloads classes. • The results of the work have been translated in a set of mission and system requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the paramount research questions in the scientific community today is how to remotely assess user quality of experience (QoE) for a specific service. To this end, various user QoE assessment models have been developed; however, they are mostly based on the data gathered from controlled environment experimentation. The aim of this research was to model user QoE for the User Datagram Protocol-based video streaming service from the results of uncontrolled subjective tests. Specifically, using fuzzy logic, we have correlated the values of three objective network parameters (the packet loss rate and the number and duration of packet loss occurrences in one streaming session) with test subjects’ subjective perception about perceived quality distortions. The dependencies between different values of the parameters and the subjects’ perception of video quality were used to develop a no reference objective video quality assessment model for assessing user QoE. The key distinguishing feature of the developed model lays in the process of subjective evaluation, which was conducted with a panel of 602 test subjects who evaluated the quality of 1-h video in home environments. For this purpose, 72 different test sequences were prepared for rating. We showed that a strong positive linear relationship exists between the assessed QoE of the model and the Mean Opinion Scores of the subjects (a Pearson correlation coefficient equal to 0.8841). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of physics-based wave propagation predictions requires a considerable time commitment, a high level of expertise and extensive climate and reef data that are not always available when undertaking planning for management of coasts and coral reef ecosystems. Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) have at least three attributes that make them an excellent choice to communicate physics-based wave model predictions. First, BBNs subsume thousands of predictions to provide probabilistic outcomes. Second, by using prior probabilities, a practitioner can still obtain predictions of wave outcomes even when their knowledge of input parameters is incomplete. Third, BBNs can propagate evidence from outputs to inputs, which can be used to identify input conditions that are most likely to deliver a chosen outcome. These three attributes are tested and found to hold for a BBN developed for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the negative impact the invasive nature of social media technologies (SMTs) can have on a user’s continued intention to use it.Design/methodology/approach In order to understand the impact technology invasiveness (TI) has on people’s continued SMT behavior, a research model and corresponding survey were developed based on a comprehensive literature review and data collected from actual SMT users.Findings The authors found perceived usefulness has a large impact on user’s attitudes. Additionally, social networking (SN) has a significant and direct impact on both attitude toward the use of the SMT and its continued use. Another interesting finding is how strongly SN increases a user’s TI. The negative impact technology has on users’ lives comes from the need users feel to continue to update and manage their online persona.Practical implications Social media tools are becoming part of the workplace environment. If not careful, companies may introduce increased pressures on their workers to constantly be “connected” to SMTs. In order to obtain the advantages of SMT usage, companies would be wise to set expectation standards that alleviate some of this pressure.Social implications This growth in social media would lead one to assume that all is well with SMTs and their usage is similar to other web-based technologies. However, there are some negative effects of SMT that warrant society and companies pausing to rethink the focus on these technologies.Originality/value Previous research has looked at IT from system success and acceptance. In this paper, we investigate the negative impact the invasive nature of SMTs can have on a user’s continued intention to use it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between end-user computing satisfaction (EUCS) and radical innovation, using organizational learning as an explanatory variable.Design/methodology/approach An empirical study was conducted in a population of 402 Spanish companies. A sample of 251 valid questionnaires was obtained. Structural equations were used to validate the proposed hypotheses.Findings Organizational learning capability fully mediates the relationship between EUCS and radical innovation.Research limitations/implications The sample of companies is heterogeneous in terms of size, sector, age and market share. The study uses single informants.Practical implications Results highlight the need to implement adequate information systems to promote radical innovation. In addition, it is necessary to facilitate organizational contexts that encourage dialogue, experimentation, risk-taking, participative decision-making and openness to the external environment.Originality/value This research contributes to the study of alternative antecedents of radical innovation by highlighting the importance of EUCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis is put forward that, after three decades of stability, there is now the prospect of significant change in the vertical and horizontal structure of the mobile market place. On the supply side, significant factors are, first, the availability of a new and very powerful form of mobile connectivity in the shape of 5G, and second, software defined networking, which allows a single network to provide a variety of heterogeneous services or ‘slices’. On the demand side, the digital transformation of the whole economy (and not just the communications sector) creates the need for diverse communications functions operating in a universe with a much wider set of digitally transformed services. Mobile operators will find themselves contesting customer relationship with firms or other organisations providing these services in an integrated fashion, and thus risk replacing their direct link with end users with becoming the wholesale supplier of an expanded but ‘commoditised’ communications product. We may also observe fewer radio access networks; more competitive backhaul; and the (partial) vertical disintegration of mobile network operators. The regulatory changes implied may include heavier regulation of fewer RANs, and the need for market analyses to confront situations in which network operators sell more and more of their services to a variety of heterogeneous content and application providers – some of them exercising substantial levels of market power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, the adoption of open API standards offers new services meaningful in the domain of health informatics and behavior change. We present our privacy-oriented solution to support personal data collection, distribution, and usage. Given the new General Data Protection Regulations in Europe, the proposed platform is designed with requirements in mind to position citizens as the controllers of their data. The proposed result uses NodeJS servers, OAuth protocol for Authentication and Authorization, a publish-subscribe semantic for real-time data notification and Cron for APIs without a notification strategy. It uses Distributed Data Protocol to control and securely provision data to distributed frameworks utilizing the data and those distributed applications are exemplified. The platform design is transparent and modularized for research projects and small businesses to set-up and manage, and to allow them to focus on the application layer utilizing personal information. This solution can easily be configured to support custom or new data sources with open API and can scale. In our use cases, maintaining the separate ecosystem services was trivial. The adopted distributed protocol was the most challenging to manage due to its high RAM usage. And implementing a fine-grained privacy control by end-users was challenging in an existing clinical enterprise system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Heuristic evaluation (HE) is an inspection method that can be used for identifying usability problems of health information systems. There is insufficient evidence to what extent these problems are experienced by users in their working environment. The objective of this study was to investigate the agreement of real end users of a health information system with the problems identified by HE.Methods: First, the emergency information system of educational hospitals in Kerman, Iran was evaluated by a heuristic evaluation. Then, a valid and reliable (Cronbach's alpha = 0.95) electronic questionnaire was designed based on the results of the first phase.Results: Among 127 identified problems, the highest number of problems was related to the "consistency and standards" heuristic (18.9%). The user agreement coefficient with heuristic results was 0.5. The highest agreement of the participants was on the problems related to the "help user recognize, diagnose and recover from errors" heuristic (78%). There was a significant relationship between participants age and work experience with a computer (p < 0.05).Conclusion: The agreement rate of real end users with the results of HE was at a medium level. Therefore, in some areas, the perception of evaluators in using this method is not consistent with the users experience with a system. This can result in identifying minor issues and ignoring important system-critical usability issues. The HE is appropriate for identifying specific problems, such as problems related to identifying and correcting errors, but in some areas, such as consistency and standards in the design of a system, it identifies minor or ineffective problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Encounters in Theory & History of Education / Rencontres en Theorie et Histoire de l'Educacion is the property of Queen's University, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As groupwork gains recognition, emerging group support technologies raise questions about the merits of these systems relative to group performance and return on investment. Business case variables of efficiency, quality, effectiveness, customer satisfaction and decision making are useful in measuring the potential contribution that group support technologies offer. This paper presents findings from a recent field study that used business case concepts as its design approach. The paper explores the infrastructure development requirements for building a business case study. Such a framework is useful to business decision makers and researchers interested in the deployment of these technologies in complex business environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the treatment of uncertainty in expert system shells. A review of the modeling of uncertainty by expert system shells is presented. An experiment to replicate earlier work investigating the manner in which individuals manipulate certainty factors in comparison to commercial shells is discussed. Comparisons are made between seven commercial shells, both personal computer (PC) and mainframe based, and individuals. A significant difference between individuals and shells as well as among shells themselves is indicated. Some implications for both expert system and decision support system (DSS) methodologies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on results from a longitudinal case study on use of a spreadsheet program (SP). The work reported here focuses on spreadsheet program users' perceptions of the SP and their information environment (including SP models), and changes in users' perceptions of their information environment and the SP. The approach has its roots in Kelly's personal construct theory [31] and in cognitive complexity theories [43, 54, 55]. A version of Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Interview (RCRI) was used to collect data at different points of time over a period of thirteen months. The data were transformed into a measure of integrative complexity and analyzed. The study provides insight into the impact of end-user-developed computer-based models (decision support systems). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often think of decision support systems (DSS) simply as expanding managerial information-processing capabilities. When a manager relies on the functional capabilities of a particular DSS in solving a problem, however, he or she is actually restricted to some subset of the full range of possible decision-making processes. DSS builders may wish to use this "restrictiveness" characteristic as a design variable, deliberately choosing the ways in which a DSS restricts its users. To do so effectively, builders need to know whether restrictiveness should be treated as an absolute or a relative; attribute. A key research question, therefore, is whether all users will be restricted identically by a given DSS. This paper reports on an experiment exploring if and how different users of the same DSS differ in their perceptions of system restrictiveness. Subjects used three DSS and ranked them from most to least restrictive. The results indicated that, while there was a significant similarity among rankings, there were also substantial differences. Several factors contributing to the perceptual differences were identified; these can serve as the basis for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the psychometric properties of the short-form measure of user information satisfaction (UIS) proposed by Ives, Olson, and Baroudi [7]. Based on extensive testing, the questionnaire appears to be a reasonably valid and reliable measure. A framework for how this measure can be used to detect and diagnose problems with user satisfaction is presented and illustrated via two case studies. Finally, recommendations and suggestions are made regarding the future use of this and other measures of user information satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End-user computing (EUC) has risen rapidly to prominence in many organizations. As EUC continues to mature, it is becoming clear that there is much more to managing end-user computing than just managing microcomputers. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding the overall expansion and control of EUC. The framework is thoroughly illustrated using data drawn from two field studies. Implications that flow from the studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanophotonic devices, such as metasurfaces and silicon photonic components, have been progressively demonstrated to be efficient and versatile alternatives to their bulky counterparts, enabling compact and light-weight systems for the application of imaging, sensing, communication and computing. The tremendous advances in machine learning provide new design methods, metrology and functionalities for nanophotonic devices and systems. Specifically, machine learning has fundamentally changed automatic design, measurement and result processing of highly application-specific nanophotonic systems without the need of extensive expert experience. This trend can be well described by the popular concept of "software-defined" infrastructure in information technology, which can decouple specific hardware from end users by virtualizing physical components using software interfaces, making the entire system faster, more flexible and more scalable. In this review, we introduce the concept of software-defined nanophotonics and summarize the interdisciplinary research that bridges nanophotonics and intelligence algorithms, especially machine learning algorithms, in the device design, measurement and system setup. The review is organized in an application-oriented manner, showing how the software-defined scheme is utilized in solving both forward and inverse problems for various nanophotonic devices and systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our prior work, we presented a novel approach to the evaluation of quality in use of corporate web sites based on an original quality model (QM-U) and a related methodology (EQ-EVAL). This article focuses on two research questions. The first one aims at investigating whether expected quality obtained through the application of EQ-EVAL methodology by employing a small panel of evaluators is a good approximation of actual quality obtained through experimentation with real users. To answer this research question, a comparative study has been carried out involving 5 evaluators and 50 real users. The second research question aims at demonstrating that the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology can provide useful information for web site improvement. Three original indicators, namely coherence, coverage and ranking have been defined to answer this question, and an additional study comparing the assessments of two panels of 5 and 10 evaluators, respectively, has been carried out. The results obtained in both studies are largely positive and provide a rational support for the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-Based Billing and Collection System for a Municipal Water and Services Unit is a system that sought to address the problem of a municipal water unit. Using the technology, meter reading will be paperless. It can be accessible through the Internet; end-users and water consumers/customers could connect and perform transactions enabling them to become efficient on their daily tasks whether in the office or at home. The head of the unit can make overall viewing of the status of daily transactions and can be viewed using desktop, laptop computers and android mobile devices connected to the internet. The water consumers/customers may receive email and short messaging system showing their current water consumption and water bill. Added/unique features such as graphical chart showing regular water consumptions on the end-users and consumers/customers dashboard as well as on their billing statements are provided. On the level of satisfaction of the respondents on the features of the proposed billing and collection system; result show that efficiency earned the highest weighted mean (4.43) interpreted as "satisfied". Functionality posed weighted arithmetic mean (4.33) verbally interpreted as "satisfied". Portability and reliability followed next. On the level of acceptance of the proposed billing and collection system; respondents' acceptance according to consumer accounts updating gauged at 4.35 weighted arithmetic mean with verbal interpretation of "acceptable". Auto-reminding the consumers for bills due for payment posed a 4.37 weighted arithmetic mean and was also "acceptable". According to billing statement printing and free format report generation, respondents recorded 4.45 weighted arithmetic mean and interpreted as "acceptable". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given recent demands for more co-creational university technology commercialisation processes involving industry and end users, this paper adopts a micro-level approach to explore the challenges faced by universities when managing Quadruple Helix stakeholders within technology commercialisation processes. To explore this research question, a qualitative research methodology which relies upon comparative case analysis was adopted to explore the technology commercialisation process in two universities within a UK region. The findings revealed that university type impacts Quadruple Helix stakeholder salience and engagement and consequently university technology commercialisation activities and processes. This is important as recent European regional policy fails to account for contextual influences when promoting Quadruple Helix stakeholder relationships in co-creational university technology commercialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data drives significant benefits in understanding end user needs and proliferating new innovative businesses building new products and services to meet customers' expectations. The security and privacy challenges escalate because these devices tend to collect and retain so much data. Data mining can create far more attack patterns than most people can anticipate. The data-centric approach discussed here ensures the right people get access to the right information, shared at the right time in the right channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promising emergence of cloud systems can bring significant benefits to cloud-centric IoT applications in terms of both their platform management and improvements to quality of service. Edge or fog computing, where edge nodes mainly contribute their computing resources voluntarily, has been attracting great attention for their ability to overcome scalability problems and to alleviate the load of cloud computing servers in the traditional cloud-centric IoT architecture. However, since high-data-rate devices have become ubiquitous in IoT and huge amounts of data need to be transmitted to end users, providing such a platform by renting a service from commercial clouds is costly and inefficient. Thus, this article describes a novel approach for edge-node-assisted data transmission in the cloud-centric IoT architecture (ETC-IoT) to overcome the problem of overwhelming bandwidth consumption in the cloud. It explores the bandwidth resources of edge nodes by extending the existing paradigm of edge computing in the cloud-centric IoT architecture. Specifically, the central cloud sends the replicas of IoT data to edge nodes according to designed replica distribution strategies. Then an edge node owning the replicas can respond to multiple requests from its associated local end users by using its bandwidth resources, while the central cloud supplements any shortfall to satisfy end-user demands if edge nodes cannot accommodate requests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VCC leverages the underutilized storage and computing resources of vehicles to collaboratively provide traffic management, road safety, and infotainment services to end users, such as drivers and passengers. It is a hybrid technology that improves the resource utilization on vehicles and is able to perform complex computing tasks that cannot be handled by a single vehicle. Despite the appealing advantages, security and privacy threats are severe in VCC due to the sharing of resources among unfamiliar vehicles. In this article, we identify security goals for the interoperability with VCC and provide an AKA framework for VCC. Specifically, we first present the research challenges and open problems for designing a reliable AKA with strong security guarantees for VCC. Then we propose an integrated AKA framework that integrates the single-server 3-factor AKA protocol and the non-interactive identity-based key establishment protocol, and evaluate its performance based on a simulated experimental platform. Finally, several interesting issues are discussed to light up the further research directions on AKA for VCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Container, as a light-weight virtualization solution, provides secure and effective approaches to control and limit access to resources for multimedia data and applications. However, due to the complexity of the containerized computing environment, setting up runtime configuration presents a great challenge for non-computational domain specialists without much knowledge of service-oriented computing and virtualization. In this paper, fuzzy-logic-based approaches are proposed to simplify the user preferences representation and automate the processes of container environment setup. By using fuzzy inference techniques, the approach allows users to define non-quantifiable factors and policies to represent their preferences, and automatically converts the vague requirements to numeric parameters and runtime deployment. Compared to classical methods, the proposed approach presents only the information relevant to user’s requirements and preferences. The validation results show that with appropriate customization steps and natural interfaces, user preferences can be reflected effectively in the final configurations of containers. Furthermore, a fuzzy-logic-based schedule algorithm for global container resource allocation is also proposed, and the effectiveness of the provisioning policies are validated by sample use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In technology acceptance literature, few have studied end users' post-adoption attitude of technologies within organizational contexts before end-users start using the technology- the pre-implementation stage. This research proposes that perceived usefulness, appropriateness, and perceived behavioral control have influences on post-adoption attitudes toward web based content management systems. The proposed model was empirically tested using the Partial Least Squares technique with the 148 web based content management system end-users' data collected from a large organization in a field setting. As theorized, all three variables were found to be significant determinants of system users' post-adoption attitude in the pre-implementation stage. Furthermore, appropriateness was found to be the strongest determinant of systems users' postadoption attitude. The study findings provide important insights on enhancing system users' post-adoption attitude in the pre-implementation stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systematic analysis of a game controlled by a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) based on Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEP). The objective is to understand BCI systems from the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) point of view, by observing how the users interact with the game and evaluating how the interface elements influence the system performance. The interactions of 30 volunteers with our computer game, named “Get Coins,” through a BCI based on SSVEP, have generated a database of brain signals and the corresponding responses to a questionnaire about various perceptual parameters, such as visual stimulation, acoustic feedback, background music, visual contrast, and visual fatigue. Each one of the volunteers played one match using the keyboard and four matches using the BCI, for comparison. In all matches using the BCI, the volunteers achieved the goals of the game. Eight of them achieved a perfect score in at least one of the four matches, showing the feasibility of the direct communication between the brain and the computer. Despite this successful experiment, adaptations and improvements should be implemented to make this innovative technology accessible to the end user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A huge array of personalized healthcare and wellness systems are introduced into the portfolio of digital health and quantified-self movement in recent years. These systems share common capabilities including self-tracking/monitoring and self-quantifications, based on the raw sensory data. These capabilities provide solid ground for the users to be more aware of their health; however, such measures are inefficient for changing the unhealthy habits of the users. In order to induce healthy habits in the users, a system must be capable of generating context-aware personalized recommendations. The main obstacle in this regard is the contextual interpretation of recommendations based on user's current context and contextual preferences. To resolve these issues, we propose a methodology of cross-context interpretation of recommendations (CCIR) for personalized health and wellness services. The CCIR method adds additional capabilities to the traditional reasoning methods and builds advanced form of the reasoning with the incorporation of contextual factors in the process of interpretations of the recommendations. With CCIR, the self-quantification systems can be enhanced to generate personalized recommendations in addition to tracking, quantifying, and monitoring user activities. In order to validate the proposed CCIR methodology, a set of 40 contextual scenarios and corresponding recommendations are presented for the evaluation collected from 40 different end users and 10 domain experts. Using chi-square test evaluation, the results demonstrated acceptable “goodness of fit” indices for the system developed on proposed CCIR methodology with respect to the end users’ opinion. Also from the statistical observation, it is found that there exists a higher level agreement towards the system between the participants of both end users and experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates whether the response of electricity prices to changes in CO2 prices is asymmetric in the case of the New Zealand economy. It makes use of data spanning the period January 2001 to March 2014 and a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model to test the relevant hypothesis. The empirical findings indicate that carbon prices have long-run asymmetric effects on electricity prices, with only positive changes in carbon prices signaling a complete pass-through. The results are expected to be of substantial importance for end-user prices and, thus, to enhance the information on the impact of CO2 prices on end-user electricity prices. After all, it is this piece of information that determines how the electricity cost is actually linked to electricity prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS) applications permit to freely navigate within 3D scenes. This endows end-users the immersive and virtual reality experiences. Any additional viewpoint of interest can be virtually synthesized by received texture views with associated depth maps. In this paper, we consider the setup where both the encoded texture and depth bitstreams experience packet losses during network streaming. We investigate two packetization strategies and develop a novel strategy to improve error-resilience capabilities for multiview video plus depth transmission, where texture data and the corresponding depth go into the same packet. We examine the resulting distortion of different packetization schemes and analyze the real difference between them in diverse scenarios. In particular, we take into account: (i) various packet loss patterns, where the effect of a burst loss is identified as an important characteristic; (ii) two packet loss models that characterize different probabilities for each scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the competing approach, our proposed packetization scheme increases the visual quality by up to 2.32 dB and 1.55 dB for texture views and synthesized views, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the tradeoff between the information of high-resolution water use data and the costs of smart meters to collect data with sub-minute resolution is crucial to inform smart meter networks. To explore this tradeoff, we first present STREaM, a STochastic Residential water End-use Model that generates synthetic water end-use time series with 10-s and progressively coarser sampling resolutions. Second, we apply a comparative framework to STREaM output and assess the impact of data sampling resolution on end-use disaggregation, post meter leak detection, peak demand estimation, data storage, and meter availability. Our findings show that increased sampling resolution allows more accurate end-use disaggregation, prompt water leakage detection, and accurate and timely estimates of peak demand. Simultaneously, data storage requirements and limited product availability mean most large-scale, commercial smart metering deployments sense data with hourly, daily, or coarser sampling frequencies. Overall, this work provides insights for further research and commercial deployment of smart water meters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitalization of agricultural technology has led to the emergence of precision dairy farming, which strives for the simultaneous improvement of productivity as well as animal well-being in dairy farming through advanced use of technology such as movement sensors and milking parlors to monitor, control, and improve dairy production processes. The data warehouse serves as the appropriate technology for effective and efficient data management, which is paramount to the success of precision dairy farming. This paper presents a joint effort between industry and academia on the experimental development of an active semantic data warehouse to support business intelligence and business analytics in precision dairy farming. The research follows an action research approach, deriving lessons for theory and practice from a set of actions taken in the course of the project. Among these actions are the development of a loading stage to facilitate data integration, the definition of an analysis view as well as the introduction of semantic OLAP patterns to facilitate analysis, and analysis rules to automate periodic analyses. The large volumes of generated sensor data in precision dairy farming required careful decision-making concerning the appropriate level of detail of the data stored in the data warehouse. Semantic technologies played a key role in rendering analysis accessible to end users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explains the relationship between the end user requirement and accuracy of PMS (Project Management Software). The research aims are to analyze the PMS accuracy and measuring the probability of PMS accuracy in achieving ±1% of the end user requirement. The bias statistical method will be used to prove the PMS accuracy that based on the hypothesis testing. The result indicates the PMS is still accurate to be implemented in Aceh- Indonesia area projects that using the SNI (National Indonesia Standard as current method) with the accuracy index of ±7.5%. The achievement probability of reaching the end user requirement is still low of ±21.77%. In case of the PMS, the low achievement of the end user requirement is not only caused by the low accuracy of the PMS but also caused by the amount of variability error, which is influenced by the amount of variation of the project activity. In this study, we confirm that it is necessary to reconcile both conditions between the PMS accuracy and the end user requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Value co-creation is a specific type of collaboration that is considered to be an innovative and interactive process between end users and organizations; it aims to increase the value of a product or service. This study investigates how a network of stakeholders collaborating to manage innovation openly co-creates value over time; it contributes to the existing literature on value co-creation by taking the perspective of the network as a whole. The study follows a case in which value co-creation unfolds over time across a network of stakeholders within the business-to-business facility service context. The in-depth longitudinal investigation of a network composed of a corporate customer and its external facility service providers revealed that a network of stakeholders co-creates value over time by (i) offering an adaptable structure for the network to organize innovation activities and establish support routines, (ii) facilitating interactions to support stakeholder relation development and (iii) allowing participants to achieve self-empowerment. Therefore, stakeholder value co-creation entails the combination of single value co-creation activities and overarching network progressions that allow for learning and inter-organizational trust among stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]