This paper focuses on seeking a new heuristic scheme for an influence maximization problem in social networks: how to economically select a subset of individuals (so-called seeds) to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions of a new behavior based on a contagion process. Most existing works on selection of seeds assumed that the constant number k seeds could be selected, irrespective of the intrinsic property of each individual's different susceptibility of being influenced (e.g., it may be costly to persuade some seeds to adopt a new behavior). In this paper, a price-performance-ratio inspired heuristic scheme, PPRank, is proposed, which investigates how to economically select seeds within a given budget and meanwhile try to maximize the diffusion process. Our paper's contributions are threefold. First, we explicitly characterize each user with two distinct factors: the susceptibility of being influenced (SI) and influential power (IP) representing the ability to actively influence others and formulate users' SIs and IPs according to their social relations, and then, a convex price-demand curve-based model is utilized to properly convert each user's SI into persuasion cost (PC) representing the cost used to successfully make the individual adopt a new behavior. Furthermore, a novel cost-effective selection scheme is proposed, which adopts both the price performance ratio (PC-IP ratio) and user's IP as an integrated selection criterion and meanwhile explicitly takes into account the overlapping effect; finally, simulations using both artificially generated and real-trace network data illustrate that, under the same budgets, PPRank can achieve larger diffusion range than other heuristic and brute-force greedy schemes without taking users' persuasion costs into account.

With the popularity of social networking services (SNSs) and the increase of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in terms of the recommendation of personalized services and the collective decision-making process. Usually, in an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among the whole users, and most of the users' opinions may be multifarious. In this paper, we focus on analyzing and identifying users' dynamical social roles to facilitate the collective decision-making process. After introducing the social choice theory and an improved collective decision-making model, we present a three-layer model to analyze users' social roles in a hierarchical way and develop an integrated mechanism to utilize the identification of social roles to support the collective decision making. Based on a developed NetLogo-based tool, a case study for the course-offering determination with an application scenario is demonstrated to show the process of using users' social roles to support the collective decision making. The comparison experiment conducted between our method and the Delphi method shows the usefulness of our proposed method to help users achieve the decision consensus in a more efficient way.

The social Internet of Things and social cloud have the potential to move forward hand in hand, changing our social patterns and providing new ways to communicate and collaborate.

With the high development of social networks, collaborations in a socialized web-based learning environment has become increasing important, which means people can learn through interactions and collaborations in communities across social networks. In this study, in order to support the enhanced collaborative learning, two important factors, user behavior patterns and user correlations, are taken into account to facilitate the information and knowledge sharing in a task-oriented learning process. Following a hierarchical graph model for enhanced collaborative learning within a task-oriented learning process, which describes relations of learning actions, activities, sub-tasks and tasks in communities, the learning action pattern and Goal-driven Learning Group, as well as their formal definitions and related algorithms, are introduced to extract and analyze users' learning behaviors in both personal and cooperative ways. In addition, a User Networking Model, which is used to represent the dynamical user relationships, is proposed to calculate user correlations in accordance with their interactions in a social community. Based on these, an integrated mechanism is developed to utilize both user behavior patterns and user correlations for the recommendation of individualized learning actions. The system architecture is described finally, and the experiment results are presented and discussed to demonstrate the practicability and usefulness of our methods.

Services are expected to be a promising way for people to use information and computing resources in our emerging ubiquitous network society and cloud computing environments. In this study, we propose a metaphoric concept called a flowable service. It is defined as a logical stream that organizes and provides circumjacent services in such a way that they are perceived by individuals to be naturally embedded in their surrounding environments. We present our view on how some of these problems, such as the flexibility, portability and interoperability of services, can be solved using flowable services in order to provide a seamless integration of diverse services in the most intuitive "flowable" way possible, thus achieving maximum satisfaction for both service providers and consumers while decreasing the delivery cost of the services. Recognizing the importance of the awareness of each individual's context for a smooth and accurate provision of services, we further propose a human-centric framework for context-aware flowable services, which harnesses the users' contexts to enable a pro-active support of human activities in a flexible and natural way. Owing to context-awareness, this framework can find and integrate circumjacent services that are considered needed by each individual and can create an ambient service environment that is tailored to his/her specific needs, proclivities and characteristics. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sharing resources and information on the Internet has become an important activity for education. In distance learning, instructors can benefit from resources, also known as Learning Objects (LOs), to create plenteous materials for specific learning purposes. Our repository (called the MINE Registry) has been developed for storing and sharing learning objects, around 22,000 in total, in the past few years. To enhance reusability, one significant concept named Reusability Tree was implemented to trace the process of changes. Also, weighting and ranking metrics have been proposed to enhance the searchability in the repository. Following the successful implementation, this study goes further to investigate the relationships between LOs from a perspective of social networks. The LONET (Learning Object Network), as an extension of Reusability Tree, is newly proposed and constructed to clarify the vague reuse scenario in the past, and to summarize collaborative intelligence through past interactive usage experiences. We define a social structure in our repository based on past usage experiences from instructors, by proposing a set of metrics to evaluate the interdependency such as prerequisites and references. The structure identifies usage experiences and can be graphed in terms of implicit and explicit relations among learning objects. As a practical contribution, an adaptive algorithm is proposed to mine the social structure in our repository. The algorithm generates adaptive routes, based on past usage experiences, by computing possible interactive input, such as search criteria and feedback from instructors, and assists them in generating specific lectures.

In line with the popularity of the Internet and the development of search engine, users request information through web-based services. Although general-purpose searching such as one provided by Google is powerful, searching mechanism for specific purposes could rely on metadata. In distance learning (or e-learning), SCORM provides an efficient metadata definition for learning objects to be searched and shared. To facilitate searching in a federated repository, CORDRA provides a common architecture for discovering and sharing Learning Objects. We followed SCORM and CORDRA specifications to develop a registry system, called the MINE Registry, for storing and sharing 20,738 Learning Objects created in the past five years. As a contribution, we propose the concept of "Reusability Tree" to represent the relationships among relevant Learning Objects and enhance CORDRA. We further collect relevant information, while users are utilizing Learning Objects, such as citations and time period persisted. The feedbacks from the user community are also considered as critical elements for evaluating significance degree of Learning Objects. Through theses factors, we propose a mechanism to weight and rank Learning Objects in the MINE Registry, in addition to other external learning objects repositories. As a practical contribution, we provide a tool called "Search Guider" to assist users in finding relevant information in Learning Objects based on individual requirements.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for every-citizen learning communities based on a recently widespread Internet tool known as Multi-user dimension Object-Oriented (MOO). We discuss the design and development of a prototype system of the virtual community based interactive learning environment, which supports human-human communication in addition to human-computer communication. with emphasis on social interaction. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Owing to the aging of the rural population in the hilly and mountainous areas of Japan, mowing on narrow ridges and steep slopes is done manually by the elderly—individuals over 65 years of age. Studies have shown that many accidents that occurred during mowing were caused by workers’ unstable posture, especially when mowing on steep surfaces where there is a high risk of falling. It is necessary to analyze the body movements of mowing workers to elucidate the elements related to the risk of falls. Therefore, in this study, based on a high-precision motion-capture device and a series of experiments with elderly, skilled mowing workers, we focused on the movements of mowing. We sought to identify effective and safe mowing patterns and the factors that lead to the risk of falls. In various mowing styles, compared to the stride (S) and downward (D) mowing patterns, the basic (B) and moving (M) patterns were the most efficient; however, the risk of falls was also the highest among these patterns. While mowing, workers need to pay more attention to their arm strength and take appropriate measures to reduce the risk of falls according to their age and physique. The results can be used as data for the development of fall-detection systems and offer useful insights for the training of new mowing workers.

<title>Abstract</title>A color is a powerful tool used to attract people’s attention and to entice them to purchase a product. However, the way in which a specific color influences people’s color selection and the role of their eye movements and cultural factors in this process remain unknown. In this study, to delve into this problem, we designed an experiment to determine the influence of specific colors on people’s product preferences by using an eye-tracking device, intending to identify the role of their eye movements and cultural factors. Based on the experimental data, a detailed influence path model was built to describe the effect of specific colors on product evaluations by an integrated moderation and mediation analysis. Our findings show that in the influence process, the effects of specific colors on product evaluations are mediated by eye movements. Additionally, cultural factors partly moderate the process as an influencing factor. The research findings from this study have important implications for user-centered product design and visual marketing management.

(accepted)

© 2019 Elsevier GmbH Introduction: The utilization of information and communications technology (ICT) devices is a new way to record and analyze health data of the elderly. This time-series study aimed to analyze health changes, and the correlation between pulse manifestation and health indicators, in the elderly. Methods: We conducted continuous 93-day monitoring of health data and pulse records in 8 elderly participants. A time series method was used to analyze health changes in participants. The correlation between pulse manifestation and health indicators was analyzed using a structural equation model. Results: During the use of ICT devices, the number of steps taken by the elderly showed a significant increase (p < 0.05). According to the time series prediction formula, the number of steps predicted on day 94 was 8869.8. In practice, steps on day 94 were 8267.3; the difference between these values was within 10%. Personal health information, health habits, and physiological indicators had a direct impact on pulse manifestation; influence coefficients were 0.14, 0.18, and 0.05 respectively. Conclusion: Through the use of ICT devices, we can understand the health status of the elderly and make behavior predictions. Pulse manifestation data can indicate the health status of the elderly. Thus, ICT devices can be used as health management tools and assist doctors in making simple diagnoses.

© 2018 IEEE. This study used wearable devices and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) diagnosis, which verifies the promotion of wearable devices on the health habits of the elderly, and the correlation between pulse diagnosis and health. We used wearable devices and TCM diagnosis (including TCM doctor diagnosis and Pulse diagnosis instrument) to record health information for the elderly. One-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine health changes. Correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between pulse and health indicators. There was significant change in the number of steps for the elderly before and after using the wearable device. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) was negatively correlated with pulse wave time. Diastolic blood pressure (DBP) was negatively correlated with pulse duration. Pulse diagnosis can be used as an indicator to report the health of the elderly. And used wearable devices can quantify health indicators and improve the health awareness.

The promise of cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration has recently been proven by both technological innovation and scientific research. Much effort has been spent on research collaboration recommendation. A remaining challenge is to make valuable recommendation to specific researchers in specific fields in order to obtain more fruitful cross-disciplinary collaboration. Cross-disciplinary information hides in big data and the relationships between different fields are complicated, complex, and subtle. This paper proposes a method for cross-disciplinary collaboration recommendation (CDCR) to analyze cross-disciplinary collaboration patterns in scholarly big data, and recommend valuable research fields for possible cross-disciplinary collaboration. A cross-disciplinary discovery algorithm based on topic modeling is designed to extract potential research fields. Collaboration patterns are examined by analyzing the research field correlations. A recommendation algorithm is developed to provide a specific recommendation list of potential research fields according to the discovered cross-disciplinary collaboration patterns with researchers’ profiles. Evaluations conducted based on a real scholarly dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in recommending potentially valuable collaborations.

With smartphones increasingly becoming ubiquitous and being equipped with various sensors, nowadays, there is a trend towards implementing HAR (Human Activity Recognition) algorithms and applications on smartphones, including health monitoring, self-managing system and fitness tracking. However, one of the main issues of the existing HAR schemes is that the classification accuracy is relatively low, and in order to improve the accuracy, high computation overhead is needed. In this paper, an efficient Group-based Context-aware classification method for human activity recognition on smartphones, GCHAR is proposed, which exploits hierarchical group-based scheme to improve the classification efficiency, and reduces the classification error through context awareness rather than the intensive computation. Specifically, GCHAR designs the two-level hierarchical classification structure, i.e., inter-group and inner-group, and utilizes the previous state and transition logic (so-called context awareness) to detect the transitions among activity groups. In comparison with other popular classifiers such as RandomTree, Bagging, J48, BayesNet, KNN and Decision Table, thorough experiments on the realistic dataset (UCI HAR repository) demonstrate that GCHAR achieves the best classification accuracy, reaching 94.1636%, and time consumption in training stage of GCHAR is four times shorter than the simple Decision Table and is decreased by 72.21% in classification stage in comparison with BayesNet.

The growth of cyberspace brings more information to service recommendation. The scores of item are used in most of the recommendation algorithms, but the attributes of users and items are rarely involved in trust recommendation in cyberspace. Both the rating features and attribute information are important for trust recommendation results. In this paper, we combine the heterogeneous information in cyberspace and propose a novel trust recommendation model based on the latent factor model and trusty neighborhood fitting model. We utilize the feature based Latent Factor Model and study the linear features integrated model To solve the failure problem of the latent factor model in the integrated model under the cold-start situations, we propose two optimized methods, which contain the filling method based on feature similarity and the filling method based on feature regression through mapping attributes to features. Experimental results show that the improved method outperforms traditional collaborative recommendation in terms of recommendation accuracy. Meanwhile, our proposed method has been verified to free from the impact of the cold-start problem.

Twitter is one of the most popular social network services (SNS) applications, in which users can casually post their messages. Given that users can easily post what they feel, Twitter is widely used as a platform to express emotions. These emotional expressions are considered to possibly influence user relationships on Twitter. In our previous study, we analyzed this influence using emotional word dictionaries. However, we could not measure the emotion scores for the words not included in the dictionaries. To solve this problem, in this study, we use the Naive Bayes and consider dependency parsing, i.e., the structure of tweets and the relationships of words. Furthermore, we introduce a set of new measures, namely total positive emotion score (TPES), total negative emotion score (TNES), and total neutral emotion score (TNtES). Based on these measures, we define a new composite index (CI) for emotion scores, which is a normalized value in the range of 0 to 1. We categorize users into positive and negative groups based on the composite index and test the difference of user relationships between these two groups with a statistical method. The result demonstrates that the relationships of positive users not only get better (i.e., the number increases) with time, but also tends to be mutual, which is consistent with the result of our previous study.

In trustworthy service discovery for Mobile Social Networking in Proximity (MSNP), conventional trust computation faces a big challenging issue—relatively high latency. To cope with it, trustworthiness determination strategies were proposed in our previous study, aiming at avoiding trust computation under certain conditions, so as to reduce the latency. These strategies are conceived based on the assumption that data of a user’s past experience and current profile could be used, and they are incorporated with a set of thresholds from the analysis result of these data. The settings of these thresholds directly affect service quality and user satisfaction on the MSNP service, which in turn becomes an optimization problem. In this paper, we focus on formulating this optimization problem and demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed solution by designing a simulation experiment. In detail, we establish mathematical models and adjust parameters. We conduct simulations on MATLAB and analyze the results obtained under several different settings. We further compare our work with related works. The results show that our proposed solution is practically feasible and effective in reducing latency under certain conditions.

Nowadays, the cyber, social and physical worlds are increasingly integrating and merging. Especially, combining the strengths of humans and machines helps tackle increasing hard tasks that neither can be done alone. Following this trend, this paper designs a Quality aware Truthful Incentive mechanism for cyber–physical enabled Geographic crowdsensing called Geo-QTI. Different from existing work, Geo-QTI appropriately accommodates the utilities of various stakeholders: requesters, participants and the crowdsourcing platform, and explicitly takes the requesters’ quality requirements, and participants’ quality provision into account. Geo-QTI explicitly includes four components: requester selection, participant selection, pricing and allocation. Requester selection with feasible analysis removes the requesters whose job cannot be completed by all participants or suffers from the monopoly participant (without the participant's contribution, others cannot cover requesters’ requirement), obtains winning requesters set and determines actual payments. In participant selection phase, the platform aggregates the requested tasks (submitted by all winning requesters) in the sensed geographic area, and chooses the appropriate participants satisfying the winning requesters’ quality requirements with total cost as low as possible. Pricing phase determines the payments to winning participants. The phase of allocation assigns the specific participants to minimally cover the quality requirements of those winning requesters. Rigid theoretical analysis demonstrates Geo-QTI can achieve both requesters’ and participants’ individual rationality and truthfulness, computational efficiency and budget balance for the platform. Furthermore, the extensive simulations confirm our theoretical analysis, and illustrate that Geo-QTI can reduce requesters’ expenses greatly and ensure the fairness of allocation.

Community structure is a typical feature of complex networks in cyberspace, and community detection is considered to be crucial to understanding the topology structure, network function and social dynamics of cyberspace. However, some particular nodes may simultaneously belong to several communities in cyberspace. Though there are many algorithms to detect the overlapping communities, most of them are based on the network structure without considering the attributes of the nodes. In this paper, we focus on the convergence characteristic of network and propose an overlap community detection algorithm based on the node convergence degree, which is defined as a combination of attribute convergence degree and structure convergence degree. It combines the network topology with the attributes of the nodes and considers both local and global information of a node. An improved PageRank algorithm is used to get the importance of each node in the global network, while the information of local network is used to measure the structure convergence degree. The overlap communities are thus identified by spectral cluster based on the node convergence degree. Finally, experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and better performance of our proposed method.

One of the main purposes for which people use Twitter is to share emotions with others. Users can easily post a message as a short text when they experience emotions such as pleasure or sadness. Such tweet serves to acquire empathy from followers, and can possibly influence others' emotions. In this study, we analyze the influence of emotional behaviors to user relationships based on Twitter data using two dictionaries of emotional words. Emotion scores are calculated via keyword matching. Moreover, we design three experiments with different settings: calculate the average emotion score of a user with random sampling, calculate the average emotion score using all emotional tweets, and calculate the average emotion score using emotional tweets, excluding users of few emotional tweets. We evaluate the influence of emotional behaviors to user relationships through the Brunner-Munzel test. The result shows that a positive user is more active than a negative user in constructing user relationships in a specific condition.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to revolutionize higher education with their wide outreach and accessibility. One of key challenges in MOOCs is the student evaluation: The large number of students makes it infeasible for instructors or teaching assistants (TAs) to grade all assignments. Peer grading-having students assess each other-is a promising approach to tackling the problem of evaluation at scale. The user evaluations are then used directly, or aggregated into a consensus value. However, lacking an incentive scheme, users have no motive in making effort in completing the evaluations, providing inaccurate answers instead. To address the above issues, we propose and implement a peer grading scheme, RankwithTA. Specifically, considering that the quality of a student determines both her performance in the assignment and her grading ability, RankwithTA makes the grade each student received depend on both the quality of the solution they submitted, and on the quality of their review and grading work to incentivize students' correct grading, Furthermore, the ground truth is incorporated, which utilizes external calibration by having some students graded by instructors or TAs to provide a basis for accuracy. The simulation results illustrate that RankwithTA performs better than the existing schemes.

In this study, we use wearable devices to monitor the health and physiological indicators of the elderly, and analyze the effects of the elderly's walking steps and sleep as the measurable health and physiological indexes. Eighteen cases of the elderly who received health management services are selected. We establish the generalized linear mixed model, and Pearson correlation analysis result shows statistically significant for the number of walking steps and systolic blood pressure/diastolic blood pressure. The number of walking steps is positively correlated with the systolic/diastolic pressure. The more walking steps and the better the sleep quality, the more stable the daily blood pressure is. Therefore, it is possible to effectively control the elderly's blood pressure by exercising and managing sleeping. It can be better for the elderly to have self-esteem health managed by using wearable devices, and encourage the elderly to exercise at a certain extent.

In recent years, recommender systems are widely applied in e-commerce system to help users locating their interested information. However, the 'all good reputation' problem brings down the accuracy of recommender systems. In addition, users' social network can benefit the recommendation especially when dealing with cold-start scenarios. In this paper, a novel trust-aware recommendation approach for e-commerce is proposed, which unearths the hint from ordinary rating and trust network by users' instant interactions in e-commerce system. More precisely, a rating revamping algorithm is designed to extract semantic ratings from feedback comments, and further construct fine grained rating score for the next process. Then, the recommendation scheme is studied through analyzing the users' trust network and their own behavior in e-commerce system. Finally, evaluations conducted based on a real dataset 'Douban' to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

As an SNS, Twitter is popular because users can post their emotions as a short message easily. Emotional tweets may influence user relationships. In our previous study, we found that positive users construct mutual relationships in Twitter. Keyword matching with emotional word dictionaries was used to detect positive users. The problem of keyword matching is the limitation of word number. To solve this problem, we use machine learning, specifically Naive Bayes Classification, to classify emotions of tweets. We analyze whether there is a difference in user relationships between the positive and negative groups by the Brunner-Munzel test. The result shows that the relationships of positive users increase more than that of negative users in the followee fluctuation, follower fluctuation and mutual follow fluctuation, which means that a positive user is more active to construct user relationships than a negative user.

Data intensive computing (DIC) provides a high performance computing approach to process large volume of data. In this study, a new formalization is introduced to present the two-stage DIC task execution in a stream manner. A novel heuristic algorithm is proposed for the scheduling problem due to the NP complexity. The theoretical approximation ratio bounds for the heuristic are analyzed and confirmed by the experimental evaluation. Overall, we observe that the proposed method conducts average 1.2 times makespan than the theoretic bound of the optimal solution. Besides, the proposed method outperforms the GA and FIFO scheduling schemes with overall improvements. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In recent years, cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration has been proved to be promising for both research practice and innovation. Lots of efforts have been spent in collaboration recommendation. However, the cross-disciplinary information is hidden in tons of publications, and the relationships between different fields are complicated, which make it challengeable recommending cross-disciplinary collaboration for a specific researcher. In this paper, a novel cross-disciplinary collaboration recommendation method (CDCR) that unearths the common cross-disciplinary collaboration patterns and historical scientific field preferences of authors is proposed to recommend potential cross-disciplinary research collaboration. In CDCR, a research field discovery algorithm is designed to classify scientific topics obtained from the publications into the correct field automatically. Then, the collaborative patterns are studied through analyzing the composition fields and the corresponding percentage of all publications. Furthermore, we investigate the common correlation of different research fields. Based on the common correlation and the researcher's specific pattern, the most valuable fields will be listed by CDCR. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated based on a real academic dataset.

Crowdsourcing systems which rely on a great deal of crowdworkers to perform large quantities of microtasks, have been leveraged in a variety of applications. There are two factors affecting the productive output of each crowdworker. One is skill level, which is private information to each crowdworker, and another is her variable expended effort. In this paper, we construct and analyze a total-Ability-balanced team based incentive mechanism ABT, which can stimulate the strategic crowdworkers to truthfully report their ability levels, and according to crowdworkers' ability levels, form the competing teams. Specifically, a crowdworker with a certain skill level, is askedto choose a specificskill level (i.e., denoted as an ability threshold), and a basic payment scheme is designed to incentivize the crowdworker to truthfully report her ability level. Then, according to the chosen ability thresholds, crowdworkers are organized into total ability balanced teams to earn extra team bonus, which can further motivate crowdworkers to exert more efforts. Compared to team formation process where workers are randomly assigned to the same-scale teams and the pay per task model, our scheme ABT can improve the work efficiency.

Recently, Device to Device (D2D) based mobile social networking in proximity (MSNP) has witnessed great development on smartphones. Unlike traditional OTT (Over-The-Top) based proximal social services (like Foursquare, etc.), in which the centralized server (usually located in the cloud) receives periodic location updates from users' mobile devices (e.g., using GPS, etc.), and then determines proximity based on gathered locations and interests, D2D based proximity services (MSNPs) support infrastructure-free and self-organized social networking, allowing users to share experiences in real time and in a specific place, which are more fun, and can significantly increase users' engagement. However, the glaring absence of the practical MSNP solutions on the market is alarming, due to the lack of comprehensive understanding of architecture, technologies and development frameworks available (advantages/disadvantage, applicability, etc.), as well as special requirements of MSNPs. This paper thoroughly investigates D2D based MSNP architecture, key challenges and their potential solutions on smartphones, organized as layers from bottom to up, presents how to utilize commercial off-the-shelf existing technologies and development frameworks to quickly and easily build MSNP applications, and summarizes the unsolved issues in popular development frameworks (e.g., AllJoyn, etc.). Our primary goal is, for commercially available smartphones, to identify key challenges in various layers of MSNP architecture, potential development frameworks and solutions, provide quick how-to-do for developers of MSNP applications, and greatly facilitate to develop and deploy interesting and commercially potential MSNP applications. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In the DNA microarray research field, the increasing sample size and feature dimension of the gene expression data prompt the development of an efficient and robust feature selection algorithm for gene expression data classification. In this study, we propose a hybrid feature selection algorithm that combines the mutual information maximization (MIM) and the adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA). Experimental results show that the proposing MIMAGA-Selection method significantly reduces the dimension of gene expression data and removes the redundancies for classification. The reduced gene expression dataset provides highest classification accuracy compared to conventional feature selection algorithms. We also apply four different classifiers to the reduced dataset to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed MIMAGA-Selection algorithm. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

With the rapid development of mobile networks, people are no longer limited to seeking information offline. The Internet provides a good choice for them. As the previous research work shows, more and more people get used to using the Internet to search for health information. Online health information has attracted much attention ever before. It is well known that health related information generated on the Internet contains a large amount of practical data, which can be utilized for health related study. In this paper, firstly we review related research work on self-disclosure and online behavior related to health information. We analyze and summarize factors relevant to health concerns, and discuss measuring dimensions for health concerns. Finally, we present a basic health concern model and future direction for health concern analysis based on online health information behaviors and social data.

The development of social media provides convenience to people's lives. People's social relationship and influence on each other is an important factor in a variety of social activities. It is obviously important for the recommendation, while social relationship and user influence are rarely taken into account in traditional recommendation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new approach to personalized recommendation on social media in order to make use of such a kind of information, and introduce and define a set of new measures to evaluate trust and influence based on users' social relationship and rating information. We develop a social recommendation algorithm based on modeling of users' social trust and influence combined with collaborative filtering. The optimal linear relation between them will be reached by the proposed method, because the importance of users' social trust and influence varies with the data. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional recommendation in terms of recommendation accuracy and stability.

Recently, with the widespread popularity of SNS (Social Network Service), such as Twitter, Facebook, people are increasingly accustomed to sharing feeling, experience and knowledge with each other on Internet. The high accessibility of these web sites has allowed the information to be spread across the social media more quickly and widely, which leads to more and more populations being engaged into this so-called social stream environment. All these make the organization of user relationships become increasingly important and necessary. In this study, we try to discover the potential and dynamical user correlations using those organized social streams in accordance with users' current interests and needs, in order to assist the collaborative information seeking process. We develop a heuristic approach to build a Dynamically Socialized User Networking (DSUN) model, and define a set of measures (such as interest degree, and popularity degree) and concepts (such as complementary tie, weak tie, and strong tie), to discover and represent users' current profiling and dynamical correlations. The corresponding algorithms are developed respectively. Finally, the architecture of the functional modules is presented, and the experiment results are demonstrated and discussed based on an application of the proposed model.

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have recently attracted millions of mobile users to share their locations and location-related contents. With the increasing use of LBSNs, an efficient personalized recommendation service is required to recommend appropriate point of interests (POIs) to users. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommendation algorithms need go through all users in LBSN to recommend locations to the target user. Due to the fact that many users are irrelevant to the target user, these approaches perform poorly in accuracy and scalability. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Location Recommendation scheme based on Discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) and Collaborative filtering, called ELR-DC. This scheme efficiently detects communities with close internal ties and then conducts location recommendation in each community. Specifically, a similarity network among users is firstly constructed based on their check-in activities, which explicitly takes into account users' similarities of interest and active regions. Then, an improved merging DPSO algorithm (IMDPSO) is proposed to detect communities through utilizing the formed similarity network. Then, in each community, CF algorithm is applied to recommend Top-N locations to each user. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on a large-scale datasets collected from Gowalla. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme have the superiority of the precision and efficiency over the existed CF algorithms.

Falling accidents cause severe damage to human health, especially to the elderly. Nowadays, smartphones are ubiquitous and widely used around the world, in which rich sensors are embedded. Thus, a smartphone based falling detection system, SmartFDS is proposed in this paper, which can recognize the associated individual's falling behavior and send out an emergent message containing the location for immediate help. Generally, SmartFDS includes offline training phase and online activity recognition phase. Specifically, in training phase, utilizing the embedded accelerometer sensor, falling data for various situations are collected to extract the desired features that can appropriately characterize the falling behavior. Considering that the raw data are intrinsically prone to noise and error, those data are preprocessed by weighted smoothing. Then, 6 time-domain features are elaborated to determine the discriminative features for characterizing falling, and two features, maximum and vertical velocity are selected. Then, 4 different classification algorithms are investigated, and SVM is selected. The prototype of SmartFDS is implemented on Android phones, and can detect falling in real time accurately.

Crowdsourcing is the generalized act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of Internet population through an open call. With the great development of smartphones with rich built-in sensors and multiple ratio interfaces, mixing smartphone-based mobile technologies and crowdsourcing offers significant flexibilities and leads to a new paradigm called mobile crowdsourcing (MCS), which can be fully explored for real-time and location-sensitive crowdsourced tasks. In this paper, we present a taxonomy for the MCS applications, which are explicitly divided as using human as sensors, and exploiting the wisdom of crowd (i.e., human intelligence). Moreover, two paradigms for mobilizing users in MCS are outlined: direct mode and word of mouth mode. A comprehensive MCS framework and typical workflow of MCS applications are proposed, which consist of nine functional modules, pertaining to three stakeholders in MCS: crowdsourcer, crowdworkers, and crowdsourcing platform. Then, we elaborate the MCS challenges including task management, incentives, security and privacy, and quality control, and summarize the corresponding solutions. Especially, from the viewpoints of various stakeholders, we propose the desired properties that an ideal MCS system should satisfy. The primary goal of this paper is to comprehensively classify and provide a summary on MCS framework, challenges, and possible solutions to highlight the MCS related research topics and facilitate to develop and deploy interesting MCS applications. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Scientific research works conducted by researchers spread all over the world in every research field, which are hard to be tracked and quantified. Although there are many research works focused on scientific community discovery and researcher profiling, it is still a big challenge to track the research patterns and assess the research development for an individual researcher or a research group over time. In this study, we seek to model researchers' scientific activities and quantify their outcome during their research career. A temporal tracking and assessing model is introduced to represent the research development and quantify the scientific outcome for both an individual and a group along the time. Based on our model, a research topic analyzing approach is developed to extract the topics covered by a research group for the research pattern analysis. Furthermore, a latent research pattern discovering approach is proposed to depict how a research group's research works contributed by its members are discovered and visualized. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated based on a real academic dataset.

Today's smartphones with a rich set of cheap powerful embedded sensors can offer a variety of novel and efficient ways to opportunistically collect data, and enable numerous mobile crowdsourced sensing (MCS) applications. Basically, incentive is one of fundamental issues in MCS. Through appropriately integrating three popular incentive methods: reverse auction, reputation and gamification, this paper proposes a quality-aware incentive framework for MCS, QuaCentive, which, pertaining to all components in MCS, can motivate crowd to provide high-quality sensed contents, stimulate crowdsourcers to give truthful feedback about quality of sensed contents, and make platform profitable. Specifically, first, we utilize the reverse auction and reputation mechanisms to incentivize crowd to truthfully bid for sensing tasks, and then provide high-quality sensed contents. Second, in to encourage crowdsourcers to provide truthful feedbacks about quality of sensed data, in QuaCentive, the verification of those feedbacks are crowdsourced in gamification way. Finally, we theoretically illustrate that QuaCentive satisfies the following properties: individual rationality, cost-truthfulness for crowd, feedback-truthfulness for crowdsourcers, platform profitability.

Research trends keep evolving along the time with certain trackable patterns. Mining academic literature and discovering the latent research trends evolution is an interesting and important problem. Few of previous studies focusing on academic topic evolution modeling have addressed the temporal topic evolution patterns. In addition, researchers' profile and their social networks are valuable complementary to the research trends tracking. In this study, to analyze the underlying research trends evolution along with the scientific collaborations of researchers, a novel temporal research trends evolution model associated with researchers' social networks is proposed and built. Specifically, the detected research topics are classified into different clusters in each timeslot, and the evolution patterns are deduced among these topic clusters. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated based on a real academic dataset. The experimental results can help users to discover the major research trends for specific fields. Besides, the tracked statuses of the corresponding scientific groups are helpful for searching research trends or finding collaboration opportunities according to researchers' different requirements.

In recent years, various location based services (LBS) have witnessed great development and are being prevalently used in our life. However, as the foundation of various LBS applications, localization consumes large energy of resource-constraint mobile terminals, especially on smartphones. This paper explicitly proposes three technical principles, substitution, adaption and collaboration to guide energy-efficient localization and tracking schemes on smartphones. Then several typical schemes in indoor or outdoor environments are respectively summarized and compared under the umbrella of those three principles. Moreover, the context-Assisting techniques are also discussed to design energy-efficient LBS applications. Finally, the quantitative metrics to measure the tradeoff between energy and localization performance are summarized. The primary goal of this paper is to comprehensively classify and provide a summary on the sporadic localization schemes (with energy-efficiency as main concern), possible solutions and tradeoffs, and facilitate to develop and deploy the energy-efficient LBS applications.

Currently, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) are equipped with multiple wireless interfaces and rich built-in functional sensors that possess powerful computation and communication capabilities, and enable numerous Mobile Crowdsourced Sensing (MCS) applications. Generally, an MCS system is composed of three components: a publisher of sensing tasks, crowd participants who complete the crowdsourced tasks for some kinds of rewards, and the crowdsourcing platform that facilitates the interaction between publishers and crowd participants. Incentives are a fundamental issue in MCS. This paper proposes an integrated incentive framework for MCS, which appropriately utilizes three widely used incentive methods: reverse auction, gamification, and reputation updating. Firstly, a reverse-auction-based two-round participant selection mechanism is proposed to incentivize crowds to actively participate and provide high-quality sensing data. Secondly, in order to avoid untruthful publisher feedback about sensing-data quality, a gamification-based verification mechanism is designed to evaluate the truthfulness of the publisher's feedback. Finally, the platform updates the reputation of both participants and publishers based on their corresponding behaviors. This integrated incentive mechanism can motivate participants to provide high-quality sensed contents, stimulate publishers to give truthful feedback, and make the platform profitable.

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a gradually adaptive recommendation model based on the combination of both users' commonalities and individualities that depend on the semantic mapping of users' interest correlations. We analyze users' information access behaviors and histories to extract users' interests and trace their transitions. In details, according to a set of bookmark tags classified by a semantic means, the pages accessed by users are assigned into several tag classes, which will finally be clustered into different groups in accordance with the types of interests that belong to two categories: personal and common interests, respectively. Based on the detection of users' interest focus transitions through interactions between users, we provide a series of information seeking actions in sequence to the target users. Besides, according to the reference groups which are defined to describe different relations with the target users, the successful experience is extracted and recommended. After the description of the definitions and measures, the mechanism to infer the interest focus, the system architecture and experimental evaluation results are described and demonstrated.

In this paper, we propose a gradually adaptive recommendation model based on the combination of both users' commonalities and individualities that depend on the semantic mapping of users' interest correlations. We analyze users' information access behaviors and histories to extract users' interests and trace their transitions. In details, according to a set of bookmark tags classified by a semantic means, the pages accessed by users are assigned into several tag classes, which will finally be clustered into different groups in accordance with the types of interests that belong to two categories: personal and common interests, respectively. Based on the detection of users' interest focus transitions through interactions between users, we provide a series of information seeking actions in sequence to the target users. Besides, according to the reference groups which are defined to describe different relations with the target users, the successful experience is extracted and recommended. After the description of the definitions and measures, the mechanism to infer the interest focus, the system architecture and experimental evaluation results are described and demonstrated. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Nowadays, we are living in a well-suited social environment with a variety of lifestyles and values. Life support has become important in such a diversified society. Along with continuously collecting the tremendous amount of personal big data generated in the social environment, it is possible for us to provide the life support based on personal data analytics. Moreover, analyzing such a kind of data can facilitate deep understanding of individual life. In this study, we focus on personal data analytics to support well-being oriented life. Three categories of personal data are classified from the collection of individuals' daily life data, and a framework of well-being oriented personal data analysis is proposed, which can provide people with suggestions and advices to improve their living life.

Cyberization, as a new big trend following computerization and informatization, is the process of forming a new cyberworld and transforming our current physical, social and mental worlds into novel cyber-combined worlds. Cyber science, responding to the cyberization trend, aims to create a new collection of knowledge about these cyber-enabled worlds, and provide a way of discovering what is in the cyber-enabled worlds and how they work. Cyber science is concerned with the study of phenomena caused or generated by the cyberworld and cyberphysical, cyber-social and cyber-mental worlds, as well as the complex intertwined integration of cyber physical, social and mental worlds. It fuels advances in cyber technology, beyond the existing cyber related technologies. In this paper, after discussing the cyberization background and process, and explaining cyber science and technology, we present our visions and perspectives on new opportunities, essential issues and major challenges for cyber science and technology. We further describe cyber related technologies and closely related existing research areas, and envision future research directions, in terms of cyber physical, cyber social, cyber life, cyber intelligence and cyber security, which are five basic dimensions of cyber science and technology.

The high development of emerging computing paradigms, such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing, and Social Computing, has brought us a big change from all walks of our work, life, learning and entertainment. Especially, with the high accessibility of social networking services along with the increasingly pervasive use of portable wireless mobile computing devices, more and more populations have been engaged into this kind of integration of real physical world and cyber digital space, which can be called the hyper world. To help people live better in the highly developed information society, the so-called cyber-individual (Cyber-I), which is far beyond a user model or a software agent to assist a user, has been proposed to provide the most comprehensive digital entities for its corresponding Real-I in terms of the individual's experience, behavior, and thinking as well as his or her birth, growth, and death. In this study, we concentrate on the personal data analytics to facilitate the cyber individual modeling. Organic Stream is introduced to systematically organize and refine the personal stream data, which can help improve the data processing and management in the CI-Spine tier and CI-Pivot tier of Cyber-I. The DSUN (Dynamically Socialized User Networking) model is employed to better utilize the collective intelligence from a group of users, which can help improve the CI-Mind tier to make Cyber-I to become more robust. Based on these, we discuss the functional modules for the facilitation of cyber individual modeling. Finally, a scenario is given, and the experimental results are presented to demonstrate that the valuable outcomes from the personal analysis can be utilized to enrich the Cyber-I, and provide users with more suitable services.

Device to Device (D2D) based mobile social networking in proximity (MSNP) has witnessed great development on smartphones. Message forwarding/data routing in MSNP relies on the movement of individuals and their encounter opportunities to relay data to the destination, so-called store-carry-forward (SCF) mode. Due to lacking continuous network connectivity and must handle dynamic topology, message forwarding mechanism in MSNP is challenging. In recent years, exploiting MSNP users' social behaviours to forward message, have drawn tremendous interests. In this paper, we provide the taxonomy of social behaviour-based forwarding strategies, comprehensively summarize and compare various schemes, including location-based and encounter-based (further divided into social property based and community-based) strategies. Location-based strategies forward data to the individuals geographically closer to the destination, while encounter-based strategies forward data to the users more socially active through considering human interactions. Then, we present open issues in MSNP forwarding strategies and their potential solutions. The goal of this work is to provide deep understanding on SCF based message forwarding in MSNP which properly incorporate the individual's social characteristics, and bring new visions to MSNP research and applications.

Community structure is a common feature in real-world network. Overlap community detection is an important method to analyze topology structure and function of the network. Most algorithms are based on the network structure, without considering the node attributes. In this paper, we propose an overlapping community detection algorithm based on node convergence degree which combines the network topology with the node attributes. In our method, PageRank algorithm is used to get the importance of each node in the global network and utilize the local network (local neighbors) to measure the structure convergence degree. Then, node convergence degree combining node attributes and structure convergence degree is designed. Finally, the overlap communities can be identified by the Spectral Cluster based on node convergence degree. Experiments results demonstrate effectiveness and better performance of our method.

In this study, we concentrate on a feasibility study on personal data analysis for well-being oriented life support. We introduce our basic concept and model to describe the personal data collected from people's daily life, and discuss how to utilize the personal analysis to provide users with the individualized services in their daily lives. Finally, we present the experimental analysis based on people's daily activity data, to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach.

The world has become an aging society with exponentially increasing social security benefit expenditure and nursing care costs. To help solve these issues and challenges, utilization of advanced ICT is highly expected to allow more elderly people to remain independent for their proactive social participation irrespective of age. In this study, we propose a human-centric safe and secure framework of ubiquitous living environments (Ubi-Liven) for the elderly people towards seamless integration of the cyber-enabled ubiquitous holistic living support system with a physical living environment. We further address and discuss the design and technical issues for the implementation of a smart living environment on the fly under the proposed framework, empowered by ubiquitous assistive technologies such as cloud, IoT and big data analytics based on life logs to provide holistic support for the elderly's activities of daily living and healthcare.

Recent years has witnessed a great progress in Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs), which is a particular class of vehicular ad hoc networks, characterized by social aspects and features, including human mobility and rational behaviors. Among various VSN applications, one of the most promising applications is the dissemination of commercial advertisement via car-to-RSU (rode side unit) and car-to-car communication. However, due to non-cooperative behavior of selfish nodes or malicious ones in the real-world scenario, such vehicular advertisement system can't be realized unless proper security and incentive mechanisms are taken into account. In this paper, the privacy concern is addressed by leveraging a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to provide secure incentives for cooperative nodes. The selfishness issue is solved through adopting Topology dependent Reward Mechanisms (TDRM). Preliminary theoretical and simulation results show that, besides incentivizing individuals' participation, the proposed scheme can increase participants' reward through their active contribution and solicitation, and moreover, is robust against users' misbehaviors, especially Sybil-attack.

Nowadays, the analysis of social networks, as well as the community evolution has become a hotly discussed topic in social computing field. In this paper, we focus on mining and tracking the dynamic communities based on social networking analysis. Based on a generic framework for the dynamic community discovery, a computational approach is developed to extract users' static and dynamic features for the temporal trend detection. A dynamically socialized user networking model is then presented to describe users' various social relationships. A mechanism is proposed and developed to detect the dynamic user communities, and track their evolving changes. Experiments using Twitter data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in tracking how communities dynamically create, split, and merge from a group of connected people in social media environments.

Considering that modern mobile terminals possess the capability to detect users' proximity, and offer means to directly communicate and share content with the people in close area, Device-to-Device (D2D) based Proximity Services (Pro Se) have recently witnessed great development, which enable users to seek for and utilize relevant value in their physical proximity, and are capable to create numerous new mobile service opportunities. However, without a breakthrough in battery technology, the energy will be the biggest limitation for ProSe. Through incorporating the features of ProSe (D2D communication technologies, abundant built-in sensors, localization-dependent, and context-aware, etc.), this paper thoroughly investigates the energy-efficient architecture and technologies for ProSe from the following four aspects: underlying networking technology, localization, application and architecture features, context-aware and user interactions. Besides exploring specific energy-efficient schemes pertaining to each aspect, this paper offers a perspective for research and applications. In brief, through classifying, summarizing and optimizing the multiple efforts on studying, modeling and reducing energy consumption for ProSe on mobile devices, the paper would provide guide for developers to build energy-efficient ProSe.

This article focused on seeking a new heuristic algorithm for the influence maximization problem in complex social networks, in which a small subset of individuals are intentionally selected as seeds to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions of a new behavior under certain influence cascade models. In literature, degree and other centrality-based heuristics are commonly used to estimate the influential power of individuals in social networks. The major issues with degree-based heuristics are twofold. First, those results are only derived for the uniform IC model, in which propagation probabilities on all social links are set as same, which is rarely the case in reality; Second, intuitively, an individual's influence power depends not only on the number of direct friends, but also relates to kinds of those friends, that is, the neighbors' influence should also be taken into account when measuring one's influential power. Based on the general weighted cascade model (WC), this article proposes Pagerank-inspired heuristic scheme, PRDiscount, which explicitly discounts the influence power of those individuals who have social relationships with chosen seeds, to alleviate the "overlapping effect" occurred in behavior diffusion. Then, the authors use both the artificially constructed social network graphs (with the features of power-law degree distribution and small-world characteristics) and the real-data traces of social networks to verify the performance of their proposal. Simulations illustrate that PRDiscount can advantage over the existing degree-based discount algorithm, Degree Discount, and achieve the comparable performance as greedy algorithm.

With the development of social network services, the user relation spectrum of the social network has exceeded our imagination. Hence, personalized recommendation algorithms are adopted in many social networking sites to help users find their potential friends and related information more quickly and conveniently. In this paper, we discuss the weaknesses of current algorithms, and propose a user profile integrated dynamic social recommendation algorithm in order to overcome those limitations. Finally, through the experiment on Weibo dataset, it can conclude that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional approaches in terms of accuracy and stability.

In this study, we concentrate on analyzing and building the dynamical user profiling to describe users' multi-dimensional features and properties, in order to assist the individualized information seeking and recommendation process in social networking environments. A set of user attributes are introduced and defined to describe the basic user profiling in accordance with the analysis of information behaviors, and several centrality based measures are proposed and developed to describe the users' importance and contributions with regards to a group of users based on their social connections in the DSUN (Dynamically Socialized User Networking) model. The experimental results are discussed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed methods.

With the increasing popularity of social network services, a tremendous amount of information has been produced. And with more and more users involving in the SNS environment, their network relationships have become as complex as in the real world. In order to find out the useful information more efficiently, in this study, we propose a participatory search and recommendation system based on users' social roles and their relationships in the SNS environment. The proposed system is used to filter users and their messages in a participatory way by analyzing their social roles and connection networks between each user, which can further contribute to personalized information search and recommendation. We describe the design and implementation issues of a prototype system, and discuss how to use the social roles and connection networks to support and empower information search and recommendation.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a popular method for the personalized recommendation. Almost all of the existing CF methods rely only on the rating data while ignoring some important implicit information in non-rating properties for users and items, which has a significant impact on the preference. In this study, considering that the average rating of users and items has a certain stability, we firstly propose a personalized fitting pattern to predict missing ratings based on the similarity score set, which combines both the user-based and item-based CF. In order to further reduce the prediction error, we use the non-rating attributes, such as a user's age, gender and occupation, and an item's release date and price. Moreover, we present the deviation adjustment method based on the support vector regression. Experimental results on MovieLens dataset show that our proposed algorithms can increase the accuracy of recommendation versus the traditional CF.

Recent advances in information technology have turned out World Wide Web to be the main platform for interactions where participants-users and corresponding events-are triggered. Although the participants vary in accordance with scenarios, a considerable size of data will be generated. This phenomenon indeed causes the complexity in information retrieval, management, and resuse, and meanwhile, turns down the value of this data. In this research, we attempt to achieve efficient management of user-generated data and its derivative contexts (i.e., social ad hoc data) for human supports. The correlations among data, contexts, and their hybridization are specifically concentrated. An intelligent state machine is proposed to outline the relations of data and contexts, and applied to further identify their usage scenarios. The performance and feasibility can be revealed by the experiments that were conducted on the data collected from open social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the past few years with size around 500 users and 8,000,000 shared contents from them.

In recent years, mainly driven by the availability of modern mobile devices with cheap integrated position sensors, location based services (LBS) have become more and more popular. Prominent examples are nearest friends finding in mobile social networks and the points of interest finders such as the nearest gas stations, hospitals, or places of interests etc. However, the users' privacy information such as location is threatened, when users enjoy the convenience and effectiveness provided by such location services. Therefore, how to secure users' privacy information must be taken into consideration. Many different approaches have been proposed to protect users' identity, location and so on. This paper reviews and analyzes existing privacy protection research works from an integrated perspective, gives the LBS category from two views, and discusses the challenges of securing privacy information. Lastly, our suggestions for future research works are presented.

Recently, Device to Device (D2D) based mobile social networking in proximity (MSNP) has witnessed great development on smartphones, which enable actively/passively and continuously seek for relevant value in one's physical proximity, through direct communicating with other individuals within the communication range, without the support of centralized networking infrastructure. Specially, a user would like to find out and interact with some strangers with similar interest in vicinity through profile matching. However, in matching process, individuals always have to reveal their personal and private profiles to strangers, which conflicts with users' growing privacy concerns. To achieve privacy preserving profile matching (i.e., friend discovery), many schemes are proposed based on homomorphic and commutative encryption, which bring tremendous computation and communication overheads, and are not practical for the resource limited mobile devices in MSNP. In this paper we adapt Confusion Matrix Transformation (CMT) method to design a Lightweighted fIne-grained Privacy-Preserving Profile matching mechanism, LIP3, which can not only efficiently realize privacy-preserving profile matching, but obtain the strict measurement of cosine similarity between individuals, while other existing CMT-based schemes can only roughly estimate the matching value.

Micro-Learning is a new leaning paradigm based on microblogging, e-mail or SMS, in which an integral learning resource consists of a series of micro learning units that are dispersed via the services of Internet, and can be used to help users learn at anywhere with a short-term. But the problem is that most of the micro learning units are disorganized. Therefore, it is a critical issue how to organize these micro learning units, in order to make them easier to be used and learned. In this study, we propose an approach based on process mining to organize the learning units according to the situation of users. Firstly, the successful micro-learning processes are extracted from the access logs. And then, the learning process map named navigation map is created based on the domain knowledge and the access sequence of users. Secondly, according to the similarity of access behavior, a reference user group is extracted dynamically for a target user. Based on the dynamic Bayesian network, the navigation map is then used to calculate the posterior probabilities of learning units. Finally, on the basis of posterior probabilities, a learning unit can be recommended for the target user to learn as the next step. The results are provided to the target user gradually, until the target user finish the whole course by the guide of learning process at his/her fragmented time.

With the popularity of mobile Internet, smart phones and location-based services, Mobile Social Network in Proximity (MSNP) has attracted more and more attentions, for which trustworthy service discovery and its associated latency are two important issues. In this paper, after overviewing MSNP and trustworthiness for service discovery in MSNP, we discuss the major issues and potential solutions of trustworthy service discovery. We present trustworthiness determination strategies based on service provider candidates' past experience and current profile analysis to reduce the latency caused by trustworthiness computation for trustworthy service discovery in MSNP.

Recently, mobile social networks in proximity (MSNP) has gained tremendous attentions, which explicitly explores the physical proximity of individuals, and greatly facilitates their face-to-face interactions through direct communications. Generally, Proximity awareness can be enabled with two methodologies: Over-The-Top (OTT), in which the centralized server determines the proximity based on users' location updates and interests, and intermediate the interactions between proximal users; Device-to-Device (D2D), which allows two devices in radio range to discovery and communicate directly. This paper designs and implements a novel hybrid interactive chatting system, HYChat, which integrates the merits of both methodologies: simultaneously support direct interaction through WiFi Direct when individuals are within each other's radio range; when detecting two devices are out of range of WiFi Direct (e.g., due to individual's movement), it will switch to online OTT mode automatically to continue the interactive chat. Specifically, two key challenges in HYChat are preliminarily solved in this paper: profile matching prior to establishing connection among devices (i.e., layer 2 profile matching), and the smooth switching between D2D and OTT modes. The prototype of HYChat on Android phones illustrates its effectiveness. In brief, the hybrid system HYChat could greatly facilitate individuals' social interaction in physical proximity.

Although there are many research works focused on scientific community discovery and researcher profiling, it is still a challenge to track and assess the research development for an individual researcher or a research group over time. In this study, we seek to model and quantify an individual's research work outcome during his/her research career. A temporal tracking model is introduced to represent research development for both an individual and a group along the time. Furthermore, assessing measures are proposed to depict how to quantify a research group's outcomes by its members' contribution. Based on our model, a research topic analyzing approach is proposed to extract the topics covered by a group and discover the group's research pattern. The analyzed output is helpful for a researcher to pursue his/her scientific life or find collaboration opportunities.

With the help of several emerging computing paradigms, such as Ubiquitous Computing, Social Computing, and Mobile Computing, OLP (Open Learning Process) has become an important research issue in the online learning environment. It becomes possible to share the learning process related information in and cross systems to meet the needs of all stakeholders, such as teachers, learners and managers. In this study, we focus on the OLP in the social learning environment based on the personal and social analytics, which can provide users with the process-oriented learning support. We present a data processing framework to collect, analyze, and organize the learning-related data in a user-centric way. Three important issues regarding to the unified data management, socialized learning analytics, and sharable open learning process are discussed towards the process-oriented learning innovation. Based on these, an open learning platform is proposed and designed to provide users with the individualized support in the collaborative learning process.

Understanding research topic evolution in a specific field is important to learn the temporal structure and latent research trends. Although research works in terms of topic analysis have been developed for many years, it is still difficult to well understand the topic evolution due to the limitation of the bibliographical data which does not consider the researchers' profiles and their social networks. In this study, to analyze the underlying research topic evolution and facilitate the scientific collaborations for researchers, a novel topic evolution model based on the analysis of researchers' social networks is built. Specifically, the researchers' co-authorships associated with their latent social networks are analyzed. A research topic tracking method is then developed to track the topic evolutions and analyze the research lifecycle for the latent scientific teams. The derived results can help users to discover the major research trends for specific fields. And the tracked statuses of the corresponding scientific groups are illustrated in different lifecycle stages, which is useful for the search of research trends or finding of collaboration opportunity according to researchers' different requirements.

Considering the inherent properties of privacy protection and battery efficiency, Device-to-Device (D2D) based proximity service (ProSe) has recently witnessed great development, which enable user to continuously and passively search for and utilize relevant value in one's physical proximity, and is capable to create numerous new mobile service opportunities. However, most of existing ProSe enabled frameworks and applications only provide single-hop Peer-to-Peer connection, lack of easily supporting simultaneous and multi-hop connection on commercially available smartphones to broaden ProSe coverage in static scenario. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a multi-hop connectivity framework BWMesh, through combining Bluetooth and WiFi Direct technologies. BWMesh possesses two special features: exploit users' heterogeneous network and enable smooth interaction among devices with different wireless technologies; provide an easy-to-deploy multi-hop networking framework on currently commercial available smartphones. Specifically, we identify several key issues in multi-hop connectivity framework, design and implement corresponding components to deal with those issues. Then, a prototype MultiChat, is developed based on BWMesh framework, which enables real-time chat among users in proximity, in multi-hop way, without accessing to Internet.

Crowdsourcing is the generalized act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by employees or contractors, to a large group of Internet population (the wise crowd) by means of an open call. With the great development of smartphones with rich built-in sensors and ratio interfaces, mixing smartphone-based mobile technologies and crowdsourcing offers vast computing resources, and leads to a new paradigm called Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS). In this paper, we presents a taxonomy for the MCS applications, which are explicitly divided as using human as sensors, and exploiting the wisdom of crowd, and typical applications are summarized and compared. Then, a generic MCS framework is proposed, which consists of multiple functional modules. Finally, we elaborate the challenges in MCS applications (i.e., quality control, task management, incentives, as well as security and privacy), and summarize potential solutions. Our main contribution is to classify and provide a summary MCS framework, challenges and possible solutions to facilitate to develop and deploy various MCS applications.

In this paper, an approach to presenting the learning resources, especially those existing user-generated contents associated with learners' activities, as the recommendation to satisfy their current requirements in a social media enhanced learning system, is proposed. Users' attentions are caught and analyzed from the browsing behaviors of learners on a webpage through an eye-tracking device.

Data intensive computing (DIC) offers an attractive option for business to remotely execute applications and load the computing resources from cloud in a streaming way. A key challenge in such environment is to increase the utilization of cloud cluster for the high throughput processing. One way of achieving this goal is to optimize the execution of computing jobs on the cluster. We observe that the order in which these jobs are executed can have a significant impact on their overall completion time (makespan). Our goal is to design a job scheduler that minimizes the makespan. In this study, a new formalization is introduced to present each job as a pair of disk processing and network transmitting two-stage durations. Due to the streaming processing feature, the two-stage operations are executed in an overlap manner and may lead to both one-stage and two-stage scheduling situations. A novel heuristic scheduling strategy is proposed for this hybrid scheduling problem, and the performance of the method is confirmed by the experimental evaluation.

Comparing to the ordinary text analysis and recommendation, the contents on Social Network Services (SNS) are observably more distinct and less redundant. Content-based recommendation has become the main method on SNSs. Because the limited contents are occurred in SNSs, a considerable effect can’t be reached by using ordinary cluster algorithms. In this paper, we propose a two-phase hybrid clustering algorithm based on Suffix Tree Clustering (STC), which not only uses the words themselves, but relations between them as well. Evaluation experiment and analysis confirm that our techniques have better recommendation results and effects on cold-start scenarios.

In contrast to the huge popularity of Mobile Social Network (MSN) services, not sufficient attention has been reserved to the dynamics of revenue streams and business models in MSN. In this paper, we investigate how a two-sided market (TSM) formulation can be used to provide insight for the problem above from the perspective of MSN platform. Intuitively, MSN service platform could be described as a two-sided market, in which the critical feature is indirect value flow (indirect network externality): one/both sides of the market benefit from increasing adoption and/or consumption of the other side. For instance, participants, like consumers and the third service providers (or advertisers), are the "two sides" of MSN platform. In this paper, our contributions are threefold. First, we thoroughly characterize the economic features of MSN as TSM, including mobility, network externalities and herd effect, as well as long tail property. Second, we provide the various revenue streams within the framework of TSM, including advertising, subscription, and transactions, and characterize the basic components of general business model in MSN. Finally, the free plus premium (Freemium) business model in MSN is formally analyzed. Specifically, we quantitatively characterize the relationship of participation levels among free and premium users as well as service providers, and illustrate the mutual enhancement among those participants. And moreover, Freemium is theoretically compared with the traditional business model with no free users (NF model). The numerical results show that, in Freemium, the participation levels of premium users and service providers, as well as the profit of MSN platform always exceed the corresponding terms in NF model.

As more and more users use the mobile terminals of high computing power, the location-based services (LBS) recommendations for mobile users have become an important and interesting topic. Mobile users are eager to get their interested and reliable services quickly. A considerable number of research works have been dedicated to service recommendation based on users' preferences and locations. In this paper, we study the credibility of recommended services, and propose a set of composite measures on how to provide more reliable services. We further propose the trustworthy Skyline of LBS recommendation in terms of the trust degree based on the newly introduced composite measures to achieve more credibility to provide recommendation services. Experimental results show that our method can recommend desired and trusted services to users.

Recently, mobile social networks (MSN) have gained tremendous attention, which free users from face-to-monitor life, while still can share information and stay in touch with their friends on the go. However most MSN applications regard mobile terminals just as entry points to existing social networks, in which centralized servers (for storage and processing of all application/context data) and continual Internet connectivity are prerequisites for mobile users to exploit MSN services, even though they are within proximity area (like campus, event spot, and community, etc.), and can directly exchange data through various wireless technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, etc.). In this paper, we focus on mobile social networking in proximity (MSNP), which is explicitly defined in our paper as: MSNP is wireless peer-to-peer (P2P) network of spontaneously and opportunistically connected nodes, and uses geo-proximity as the primary filter in determining who is discoverable on the social network. In this paper, first, primary support approaches related to MSNP available in literature, are summarized and compared, including MSN, mobile P2P and opportunistic networks. And then, we offer the special characteristics of MSNP, open issues and potential solutions. A networking technologies and platform independent architecture is proposed for developing MSNP applications, and proof-of-concept implementation of WiFi direct based MSNP application is also provided. Our primary goal is to identify the characteristics, technical challenges and potential solutions for future MSNP applications, capable to flexibly adapt to different application domains and deployment requirements.

In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, real-time servers run with many uncertain factors. The modeling and validation for the dynamic service composition of location based services (LBS) in the IoT environment are essential, but it is difficult to consider these uncertain factors. In this paper, after analyzing the advantage and shortage of traditional modeling methods, with the introduction of probability, we propose a Color Probability-TCPN (CP-TCPN) by using the tokens with specific colors. The analysis and functional validation methods based on CP-TCPN are proposed and described. After using it to model and analyze the LBS based in the IoT environment, we demonstrate the result which indicates the CP-TCPN based approach can satisfy the modeling and analysis of the IoT based real-time system with uncertain factors.

Cyber-Individual (Cyber-I) is the digital counterpart of an individual in the real world, which aims at systematically studying and developing comprehensive individual human modeling and its associated applications. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a digital clone for each individual and to provide active desirable services. We present a part of our research work focusing on examining the basic system architecture and the birth process of Cyber-I from a security perspective. In this study, a customized honeypot is used to record multidimensional data Cyber-I is constructed for a corresponding invader. Further, assembling a Cyber-I with associated CI-Applications enables aninvader having more behaviors in the honeypot and provides a possible chance to prolong activities of the invader, which complements a loop mechanism to feed Cyber-I for its growth. The preliminary result in this paper reveals that appropriate authorization and controls are extremely necessary to prevent Cyber-I from being maliciously used and to ensure privacy of its real individual in building an open Cyber-I platform.

Almost all of the existing Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods rely only on the rating data while ignoring some important implicit information in non-rating properties for users and items, which have a significant impact on the preference. In this study, considering that the average rating of users and items have a certain stability, we firstly propose a personalized fitting pattern to predict missing ratings based on the trusty score set, which combines both the user-based CF and item-based CF. In order to further reduce the prediction error, we use the non-rating attributes, such as a user's age, gender and occupation, and an item's release date and price. Moreover, we present the deviation adjustment method based on the Support Vector Regression (SVR). Experiment results show that our proposed algorithms can increase the accuracy of recommendation versus the traditional CF.

With the popularity of Social Network Service (SNS) and the increasing of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in recommendation of the personalized services, and in a collective decision-making process as well. In an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among the whole users, and most of the users' opinions may be multifarious. In this study, we consider users' social roles as an important element to support the collective decision-making process. After introducing the social choice theories and collective decision-making model, we present a three-layer model to analyze users' social roles in a hierarchical way, and utilize it to support the collective decision-making process. A case study for COD (Course-Offering Determination) with an application scenario is demonstrated to show the process of how users' social roles are utilized to support the collective decision-making.

Nowadays, most popular social networking services adopt centralized architecture, in which continual Internet connectivity is prerequisite for each user to exploit those services, and centralized servers are used for storage and processing of all application/context data, even though mobile users are within proximity area (like campus, event spot, and community), and can directly exchange media through various wireless technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, etc.). On one hand, the omniscient centralized server may cause serious privacy concern, due to the fact that it collects and stores all users' data (messages, profiles, location, relations, etc.); On the other hand, transmitting a large amount of media generated by users in proximity through Internet, would not only bring a lot of pressure to the network infrastructure and service provider, but incur heavy data traffic cost to users. In this paper, our contributions are twofold. First, we propose a Wi-Fi Direct based P2P social networking framework, which enables direct data exchange among users without using infrastructure network when users are located in proximity, and provide solutions to two core problems in this framework, i.e., discoverability and privacy. Second, the prototype of this framework is preliminarily implemented in Android, which is composed of the following functions: localization based on Google Geocoding, Chat, and file-sharing component supporting intermittent transmission.

The progressive development of information and communication technologies has led us to a new world called hyper world that is composed by the cyber world and the physical world, which, at the same time, brings us the digital explosions of data and connectivity as well as all kinds of smart services. Based on these, Cyber-I was proposed, which aims at creating a unique, digital, comprehensive description for every real person so that the possibility for the person being in the cyber world to get lost in the digital explosions will be reduced. However, the ultimate goal of realizing such Cyber-I needs an endless research process, which will cover multiple areas and disciplines. In order to merge efforts on the study of Cyber-I together as well as provide people with better services utilizing Cyber-I, this paper presents our research and development on a Cyber-I oriented management system where (1) the life cycle of Cyber-I including its birth, growth and death is simulated, (2) with the NO-SQL properties supported by Mongo DB, heterogeneous personal data coming from disparate sources with different formats through varied media can be managed in a scalable way, and (3) apps connected with the Cyber-I can not only fetch personal data but also provide personalized services, while the collected personal data can be used to generate user models from different aspects.

Proximity awareness, the ability to actively (or passively) and continuously search for relevant value in one's physical proximity, is at the core of mobile revolution that is changing the way we interact with people and things around us. Especially, Device-to-Device (D2D) (peer-to-peer (P2P)) solutions support infrastructure-free and self-organized proximity services, and have great commercial potential from application viewpoint. However, astonishingly, the glaring absence of the practical and easy-to-use proximity service development framework is alarming. This paper aims at investigating the Qualcomm AllJoyn middleware, an open source peer-to-peer software development framework for ad-hoc proximity based D2D communication, and exploring how this middleware can enable the development of distributed application in mobile social networks in proximity (MSNP). Specifically, we thoroughly overview the core concepts and basic components in AllJoyn framework, and summarize the typical workflow of developing AllJoyn based proximity application. Furthermore, an AllJoyn based MSNP prototype, AllChat, is designed and implemented, in which users can enjoy text chat and photo sharing with both group and peer interaction modes in real time.

In this study, we propose an integrated approach to organize and refine the social streams in accordance with the analysis of both social data and social roles within a social group. The social stream data will be first collected and organized based on users' individual needs. After the calculation and analysis of users' importance based on the identification and classification of users' dynamical social roles within a user group, a mechanism is developed to organize and refine social streams and further provide users with more suitable and useful information that best fits their needs from more related users, in order to better assist the participatory information search and recommendation process in the social networking environment.

Location Based Services (LBS) is a kind of real-time service with uncertain factors, and its modeling and validation is essential. In this paper, with the introduction of probability, we propose a Color Probability-TCPN (CP-TCPN) by using the tokens with specific colors as the research objects and redefining several relative parameters. We use CP-TCPN to realize modeling and functional verification of the dynamic services composition for LBS. Simulation result is presented to illustrate the application of CP-TCPN in the modeling and analyzing of the real-time system with uncertain factors. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.

In real human society, influence on each other is an important factor in a variety of social activities. It is obviously important for recommendation. However, the influence factor is rarely taken into account in traditional recommendation algorithms. In this study, we propose an integrated approach for recommendation by analyzing and mining social data and introducing a set of new measures for user influence and social trust. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms traditional recommendation in terms of accuracy and stability. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

In recent years, eye tracking has been widely applied in a variety of fields, such as web usability studies and psychological experiments. To develop a personalized system or network service, it is important to recognize and capture users' needs, situations and contexts in order to create an effective user model. In this paper, we present an integrated approach on how to capture users' unselfconscious information seeking behavior by analyzing their gaze patterns using an eye tracker. We describe the design of an eye tracking experiment, and analyze the eye tracking data to extract gaze patterns, which can be used for use modeling. We further discuss the experiment result and highlight our future work. © 2013 IEEE.

In this study, learning support in a blended learning environment integrated with social media is concentrated on. A method is proposed to integrate the S-UPS (Socialized Ubiquitous Personal Study), which is utilized to collect and manage social stream data, into a blended learning system so as to combine the best aspects of both face-to-face and online instructions for the improvement of learning efficiency and enrichment of learning experience. Based on these, an empirical study is conducted to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed method. Experimental evaluation analysis of the system reveals the enhancement of learning process in the blended learning environment. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.

In this study, we focus on the deep analysis of the learning behavior patterns in the task-oriented learning process, which aims to extract and describe the sharable learning processes for adaptive learning support. The LA-Patterns are extracted to represent an individual's learning behavior patterns. Three categories, named Regular Patterns, Successive Patterns, and Frequent Patterns, are classified to describe users' learning patterns with different features, which can be utilized to recommend users with the adaptive learning process as the learning guidance. The experiment and analysis results in a learning management system are discussed finally. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

Differing from many studies of recommendation that provided the final results directly, our study focuses on providing an optimized process of information seeking to users. Based on process mining, we propose an integrated adaptive framework to support and facilitate individualized recommendation based on the gradual adaptation model that gradually adapts to a target user's transition of needs and behaviors of information access, including various search-related activities, over different time spans. In detail, successful information seeking processes are extracted from the information seeking histories of users. Furthermore, these successful information seeking processes are optimized as a series of action units to support the target users whose information access behavior patterns are similar to the reference users. Based on these, the optimized information seeking processes are navigated to the target users according to their transitions of interest focus. In addition to describing some definitions and measures introduced, we go further to present an optimized process recommendation model and show the system architecture. Finally, we discuss the simulation and scenario for the proposed system.

Researchers tend to agree that an increasing quantity of data has caused the complexity and difficulty for information discovery, management, and reuse. An essential factor relates to the increasing channels (i.e., Internet, social media, etc.) for information sharing. Finding information, especially those meaningful or useful one, that meets ultimate goal (or task) of user becomes harder then it is used to be. In this research, issues concerning the use of user-generated contents for individual search support are investigated. In order to make efficient use of user-generated contents, an intelligent state machine, as a hybridization of graph model (Document Graph) and petri-net model (Document Sensitive Petri-Net), is proposed. It is utilized to clarify the vague usage scenario between user-generated contents, such as discussions, posts, etc., and to identify correlations and experiences within them. As a practical contribution, an interactive search algorithm that generates potential solutions for individual is implemented. The feasibility of this research is demonstrated by a series of experiments and empirical studies with around 350,000 user-generated contents (i.e., documents) collected from the Internet and 200 users.

"U-Business" is a novel type business environment, which can provide various services via many mobile devices. In order to provide personalized service to different users, user model (UM) can play an important role in U-Business. UM reflects some characteristics of users to a certain degree, which is used widely in U-Business, like personalized recommendation, social computing, information retrieval services, and so on. Currently, there are more and more researchers who focus on the building and update of UM based on the activities of people. However, as too many UM appeared, the number of UM in cyber space is increasingly large, which takes a lot of space and cost. Furthermore, after some users disappear in the physic world, their models are still working in the cyber world. This case is not reasonable obviously, but few researches take care about it. Therefore, one of important issues, the death of UM should be taken into account in the whole life-cycle of user model. This paper proposes a specific user modeling method for the Cyber Individuals (Cyber-I) in U-Business. The essential difference between this UM and traditional ones is that it has a life, that is, birth, growth, and demise, like a life-cycle of Cyber-I. Specially, the significance of UM life ending and five states of UM death are described from an organic viewpoint. In addition, there is a framework of the whole life process of UM. Finally, the proposed idea is applied to the field of personalized service.

Sharing information and resources on the Internet has become an important activity for education. The use of ubiquitous devices makes it possible for learning participants to be engaged in an open and connected social environment, and also allows the learning activities to be performed at any time and any place. In this study, the discovery of correlation among shared resources is concentrated. A hypothetical scenario is considered that the information, such as photos and thoughts, is applicable to be shared with implicit context (i.e., geographical information) by learners through a practical implementation, PadSCORM, on a mobile device. Two major contributions are achieved. First, the correlations among resources are determined through usage experiences mining and geographical information adjustment. It then assists learners in filtering out redundant information by highlighting the significance of resources. Second, an intelligent searching algorithm is proposed to visualize adaptive routes to facilitate search process and to enrich the learning activity. The empirical experiments revealing the feasibility and performance (e.g., accuracy and effectiveness) are conducted in the universities in North Taiwan. © 2012 John Wiley &amp
Sons, Ltd.

Recently, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly popular. The high accessibility of these sites has allowed the so-called social streams being spread across the Internet more quickly and widely, as more and more of the populations are being engaged into this vortex of the social networking revolution. Information seeking never means simply typing a few keywords into a search engine in this stream world. In this study, we try to find a way to utilize these diversified social streams to assist the search process without relying solely on the inputted keywords. We propose a method to analyze and extract meaningful information in accordance with users' current needs and interests from social streams using two developed algorithms, and go further to integrate these organized stream data which are described as associative ripples into the search system, in order to improve the relevance of the results obtained from the search engine and feedback users with a new perspective of the sought issues to guide the further information seeking process, which can benefit both search experience enrichment and search process facilitation. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

In this study, in order to support and facilitate the web-based learning, we concentrate on user learning behavior pattern discovery in a task-oriented learning process. Based on a hierarchical graph model which can describe relations among learning actions, learning activities, learning sub-tasks and learning tasks, we introduce the formal definitions for Learning Action Pattern and Goal-driven Learning Group to discover and represent users' learning behavior patterns within a learning task process. Two integrated algorithms are developed to calculate and generate the Learning Action Patterns for an individual user and the Goal-driven Learning Groups for a number of users, which can benefit sharing of learning activities and improve learning efficiency in e-learning environments. Finally, the design of a prototype system with experiment results is discussed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Recently, eye-tracking has been widely applied in a wide spectrum of fields for both academic researches and Business. In this study, we concentrate on the analysis of instant (and often subconscious) information generated from interactions between an individual and devices, such as a PC, laptop, and mobile phone. We present the experiment design to capture and extract the viewing patterns in Twitter using the eye-tracking technology. We show a set of experiment results based on the analysis of eye gazing data, in order to demonstrate how the subjects look for specified keywords in the Twitter timeline, which can further contribute to categorization of viewing patterns.

With the high accessibility of the social media, more and more people have been accustomed to sharing their personal contents across the social networks, which results in an explosive increase of data scale. In this study, in order to support information and knowledge discovery in big data, we propose an approach to aggregation and integration of personal big data from life logs in accordance with individual needs, which can benefit the sustainable information utilization process. In details, the organic stream, which is designed as an extensible data carrier, is introduced and developed to formulize and organize the personal big data, in order to extract dynamical individual needs from the tremendous amount of data posted through social media, and further aggregate and integrate the related data in a meaningful way, which can also facilitate the personalized information retrieval and reuse process. The architecture of the system with the foundational modules is given, and the experiment result is presented to demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of our approach.

With the rapid growing of users in the SNS environments, their network relationships in Internet have become as complex as in the real world. On the other hand, the user's social role plays an important role in providing individualized services, such as information recommendation in the SNS environments. However, as we know, people will switch or change their social roles dynamically in the real society, which is also true in the cyber network space, such as SNS. In this paper, we present a basic model to describe social roles in both the real world and the SNS environment, in which a set of attributes and factors are considered and introduced to represent the time-changing social roles in different situations and contexts. The mechanism that we develop to identify the roles is twofold: mapping of real world situations to cyber space, and analyzing social role attributes based on the mapping and synthesizing. We further describe an application scenario in regard to how to map the different situations and analyze the role attributes, in order to dynamically identify roles in the cyber space.

Recently, mobile social networking applications have gained tremendous attention, which free users from face-to-monitor life, while they still can share information and stay in touch with their friends on the go. However most MSN applications regard mobile terminals just as entry points to existing social networks, depend on centralized servers (for storage and processing of all application/context data) and continual Internet connectivity, even though mobile users are within proximity area (like campus, event spot, and community), and can directly exchange data through various wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi Direct, etc.). In this paper, we focus on thoroughly overviewing the mobile social networking in proximity (MSNP), including existing applications, characteristics and challenges. Our primary goal is to identify the characteristics, technical challenges and potential solution for future MSNP applications, capable to flexibly adapt to different application domains and deployment requirements.

Usually, in mobile server cloud computing (MSCC) environments, there exist enormous sensors conducting various tasks. Localization of sensor nodes using the technologies in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is critical to both cloud infrastructure operations and most applications. Specifically, in WSN, Malguki (the method's name, Malguki, means 'spring') is an effective range-based algorithm which can compute the location of a node using noisy distance estimations. However, through simulation, we found that, in original Malguki algorithm that uses an iterative process to locate unknown nodes, the initial positions of unknown nodes in iteration are evenly and randomly selected, which may cause large average localization error. Considering the mentioned weak point, this paper proposes to enhance the Malguki with a simple range-free Centroid localization algorithm, which intentionally obtains initial positions of unknown nodes in iteration by Centroid algorithm. Simulation results show that the integration of range-based and range-free localization algorithm, Centroid Malguki always performs better than original Malguki algorithm. © 2013 IEEE.

Background: In the cloud computing environments, numerous ambient services may be created speedily and provided to a variety of users. In such a situation, people may be annoyed by how to make a proper and optimal selection quickly and economically. Methods: In this study, we propose an Adaptively Emerging Mechanism (AEM) to reduce this selection burden with an interdisciplinary approach. AEM is applied and integrated into the Flowable Service Model (FSM), which has been proposed and developed in our previous study. We consider the user’s feedback information is a pivotal factor for AEM, which contains the user’s satisfaction degree after using the services. At the same time, we assume that these factors, such as the service cost, matching result precision, responding time, personal and social context information, etc., are essential parts of the optimizing process for the selection of ambient services. Results and Conclusion: By analyzing the result of AEM simulation, we reveal that AEM can (1) substantially improve the selection process for LOW feedback users
(2) bring no negative effect on the selection process for MEDIUM or HIGH feedback users
and (3) enhance the rationality for services selection.

Recently, SNS (Social Network Service), blog and microblog have become very popular. Stream data, a large collection of diverse contents that are created dynamically in the form of streams, have become an important part of the Internet resources. At the same time, it has become easier to collect people's activities as their lifelogs, not only in the cyber space, but also in the physical world by means of ubiquitous and sensing technology. Either stream data or lifelogs represent different aspects of people's information behaviors and social activities, which we call Social Streams. In this study, we try to integrate and organize these social stream data, such as Twitter Tweets, into Ubiquitous Personal Study (UPS) proposed in our previous study. In this paper, we introduce and define a set of new metaphors: Drop, Stream, River and Ocean, to represent a variety of social stream data in different stages, in order to enable UPS socialized toward an individualized information portal. We further propose a Framework of Organic Streams to meaningfully organize these stream data. We discuss the design and implementation issues of a prototype system, and describe the algorithms to realize our proposed metaphors. Moreover, we show a scenario of using the socialized UPS to support learning activities, with experimental data and analysis results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the study, we propose an integrated adaptive framework to support and facilitate individualized learning through sharing the successful process of learning activities based on similar learning patterns in the ubiquitous learning environments empowered by Internet of Things (IoT). This framework is based on a dynamic Bayesian network that gradually adapts to a target student's needs and information access behaviours. By analysing the log data of learning activities and extracting students' learning patterns, our analysis results show that most of students often use their preferred learning patterns in their learning activities, and the learning achievement is affected by the learning process. Based on these findings, we try to optimise the process of learning activities using the extracted learning patterns, infer the learning goal of target students, and provide a goal-driven navigation of individualized learning process according to the similarity of the extracted learning patterns.

Recently, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technology has witnessed a rapid development. Basically, one of key components in successful P2P applications is how to efficiently look up resources. Considering that structured P2P is a relatively efficient way to locate resources, this paper conducted two improvements to increase the search efficiency in Chord-based algorithms, one of the most popular structured P2P resource lookup protocols. In detail, our contributions are twofold. First, considering the fact that routing information in Chord is not abundant enough for efficient resource search, and looking up resource can only be enforced in clockwise direction, a new algorithm called AB-Chord is proposed to reconstruct the finger tables in Chord, in which counter-clockwise finger table is added to achieve resource queries in both directions, and the density of neighboring fingers is increased. Additionally, AB-Chord implements a new operation to remove the redundant fingers introduced by adding fingers in AB-Chord. Experimental results show that AB-Chord's query efficiency has been improved in terms of the average lookup hops and average lookup delay. And furthermore, considering that the proposed AB-Chord algorithm enlarged the finger table which may cause the forwarding-storm of routing maintenance messages, we further propose AB-Chord+, which appropriately extends the periodic time of updating finger tables and makes the joining and leaving nodes actively send updating messages, to reduce the number of messages forwarded in the network. Simulated results show that AB-Chord+ reduced the network bandwidth consumption.

Recommender system is a focus in the age of information explosion. In this study, with the benefit of social networking service, we propose a User-Centric Integrated Recommendation Model based on combining of users' individualities and commonalities, in which users' interests are focused and their transitions are traced by analyzing users' information access behaviors and histories, and then a sequence of information seeking actions are recommended to target users through dectecting the transitions of their interests focus by interaction of users and the system, and extracting successful experience from a reference user group, in which the reference users are similar to the target users. A set of bookmark tags are used to describe relations of Web pages. The pages accessed by users are classified by the bookmark tags, and grouped into two categories of individual and common interests and their sub-categories. The individual interests are divided into three types: strong interest, weak interest and uncertain interest. The common interests are divided into popular interest, public interest and private interest. In this paper, in addition to describing definitions and measures, we present a mechanism of inferring interest focus and show the system architecture. Finally, the conclusion and further work are introduced. © 2012 IEEE.

In open networking environments, resources, services, strategies and actions are voluntarily provided, maintained, chosen and determined by independent, rational and autonomous peers. Basically, Game theory is a basic tool for modeling choices by rational agents in those environments, which, usually assumes players choose strategies which maximize utility of game outcomes given their beliefs about what others players will do. This means that the most challenging question is often how beliefs are formed. Intuitively, beliefs depend not only on what people know to be true, but also on what they want to be true (desire). This paper introduces a model of rational choices that allows for this possibility that peers' beliefs are affected by their interests (desires), and, based on this model, analyzes the impact of psychological belief (optimistic bias and pessimistic bias) on the existing altruism-based cooperative mechanisms in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. We found that, when there exist free riders, on the contrary to the intuitive thought, pessimistic bias of belief on contribution level can facilitate the P2P systems to converge to the stable equilibrium in easier way than optimistic bias. © 2012 IEEE.

Comparing with traditional e-learning, the socialized e-learning system provides us a new paradigm to deliver knowledge through social medias. In this study, we concentrate on the organization of knowledge delivered across the social media enhanced learning environment in order to support the learning process. An integrated approach is proposed to capture users' intentions using eye-tracking technology, and further organize the related social streams into meaningful contents, in which both re-defined and newly created knowledge from interactions among users can be extracted in accordance with users' individualized requirements to assist their learning tasks and finally promote the learning efficiency for both professors and students. © 2012 IEEE.

In this study, we try to discover the potential and dynamical user correlations using those reorganized social streams in accordance with users' current interests and needs, in order to assist the information seeking process. We develop a mechanism to build a Dynamical Socialized User Networking (DSUN) model, and define a set of measures (such as interest degree, and popularity degree) and concepts (such as complementary tie, weak tie, and strong tie), which can discover and represent users' current profiling and dynamical correlations. The corresponding algorithms are developed respectively. Based on these, we finally discuss an application scenario of the DSUN model with experiment results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

In this study, we concentrate on learning activity sharing and individualized recommendation based on dynamical user correlations, in order to support and facilitate the web-based learning process integrated with social streams. A user correlation-based learning activity model is built to demonstrate the relations among user, learning task and learning activity. Based on these, an integrated method is proposed to provide a target user with the possible learning activity as the next learning step, which is expected to enhance the learning efficiency. Finally, design of a Moodle-based prototype system is discussed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

In this paper we argue a user has to be in the center of information seeking task, as in any other task where the user is involved. In addition, an essential part of user-centrism is considering a user not only in his/her individual scope, but expanding it to the user's community participation quintessence. Through our research we make an endeavor to develop a holistic approach from how to harnesses relevance feedback from users in order to estimate their interests, construct user profiles reflecting those interests to applying them for information acquisition in online collaborative information seeking context. Here we discuss a human-centric integrated approach for Web information search and sharing incorporating the important user-centric elements, namely a user's individual context and 'social' factor realized with collaborative contributions and co-evaluations, into Web information search.

There have been two open questions about Web 2.0 enhanced CoP (Community of Practice). The first one is the isolation of CoPs caused by the variety of web services, and the second one is the context loss in knowledge transference. Both of the questions arise from the discontinuity of the knowledge transference in a CoP or among CoPs. In order to tackle these questions, CAPK (Context, Actor, Pipe and Knowledge object), a new learning process model, is proposed to model learning in the Web 2.0 technology enhanced CoPs. In this model, the premise of learning is the connection to the knowledge objects by various pipes which can be used to maintain a connection with a knowledge object. Context is considered as the most important component of effective learning in this model. CAPK model can provide us a new perspective to tackle the above problems. In order to achieve effective learning in current web based CoPs, flexible connection to and management of knowledge objects are necessary to support learning in CoPs. Besides, a uniform context description is also a requirement. In this paper, after the introduction of the CAPK learning process model, we describe design and implementation of a prototype system for managing the pipes of knowledge objects to provide a solution to transfer context information through Activity Streams specification in and cross various systems. © 2011 IEEE.

Social learning is showing one of the immersive potentialities for human knowledge gathering on the Internet throughout the last decEDe. Due to rapid growth of Internet, people can communicate with each other using IM (Instant Messaging), WWW and P2P. IM Services, such as
Yahoo, Twitter, Google Talk, ICQ (I seek you), etc. which provides individual and group communications. Web search engines (Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.) collect versatile information by crawling web directories, and web public documents (html, PDF, text, etc.) throughout the world. P2P (Gnutella, Napster, Freenet, etc.) serves file sharing between and/or among users. However, IM, WEB and P2P do not support WW, which indicates WHO the right person/user is and WHAT the right topic a user is looking for. To overcome the WW issues, this research presents a hybrid search engine called P2P-SSE (P2P Social Search Engine) which can find the WW and serves users queries for the support of social learning. © 2011 IEEE.

This paper describes an integrated approach to provide an optimized learning process to students by analyzing the log data of learning activities and extracting their learning patterns. Our analysis results show that most of students almost always use their main learning patterns in their learning activities, and the learning achievement is affected by the learning process. Based on these findings, we try to optimize the process of learning actions using the extracted learning patterns, infer the learning goal of students, and then navigate them a personalized learning process according to the similarity of the extracted learning patterns. © 2011 IEEE.

Sharing learning activity in and cross various systems is a prospective approach to implement OLP (Open Learning Process), a paradigm to share the knowledge generated in the learning process. The question is that the systems supporting teaching and learning are always separated and isolated. To implement OLP, firstly a uniform description of learning activity and a protocol to share learning activity in and cross systems are necessary. Secondly, a systematic framework to support learning activity description is also important. In this research, first, we show our vision of OLP by introducing metaphors such as a drop or an ocean of learning activity. Then based on the analysis of web based learning activity through Activity Theory, we propose a learning activity model to describe learning activity. Moreover, a specification of learning activity streams based on Activity Streams specification is introduced. Finally, a prototype system supporting learning activity streams is implemented based on UPS (Ubiquitous Personal Study) platform. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Sharing resources and information on Internet has become an important activity for education. The MINE Registry, a branch of distributed repository, inherited the architecture of CORDRA has been developed for storing and sharing Learning Objects. Following the usage experiences, especially those being utilized to generate the lecture, the interaction structure is defined to clarify the relationships among Learning Objects. The methods to social network analysis are applied to quantify the implicit correlations and to evaluate the interdependency. In addition, an intelligent mining algorithm is proposed to explore the developed interaction structure and automatically generates lecture templates corresponding to the query criteria. The concentration of this study is to facilitate the complex and time-consuming process of creating lectures through a simple search mechanism. The implemented system has demonstrated the preliminary results and the feasibility are also revealed by the evaluation results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Sharing resources and information on Internet has become an important activity for education. The learning object repository has been developed to achieve efficient management of learning objects. Following usage experiences of learning objects collected in the past, this study concentrates on investigating implicit information between learning objects. We define a social structure for identifying relationship between learning objects and define a set of metrics to evaluate the interdependency. The structure identifies usage experiences and can be graphed in terms of implicit and explicit relations among learning objects. As a practical contribution, an adaptive algorithm is proposed to mine the social structure. The algorithm generates adaptive learning sequence by identifying possible interactive search input and assists them in completing self-paced learning situation. © 2011 IEEE.

Sharing information and resources on the Internet has become an important activity for education. The use of ubiquitous devices makes possible for learning participants to be engaged in an open and connected social environment, and also allows the learning activities to be performed at any time and any places. In this study, the discovery of correlation among shared resources is concentrated. A hypothetical scenario is considered that the information, such as photos and thoughts, is applicable to be shared with implicit context (i.e. geographical information) by learners through a practical implementation, PadSCORM, on a mobile device. Two major contributions are achieved. First, the correlations among resources are determined through usage experiences mining and geographical information adjustment. It then assists learners in filtering out redundant information by highlighting the significance of resources. Second, an intelligent searching algorithm is proposed to visualize adaptive routes in order to facilitate search process and to enrich the learning activity. © 2011 ACM.

Service computing aims to provide IT and computing resources to users in a way that it simply serves them. However, many issues remain in, such as portability, interoperability, and heterogeneity of diverse services, in addition to service modeling, creation, deployment, discovery, recommendation, composition, and delivery, in order to provide a service that best fits user needs and contexts at the time. In this study, we propose a new model of flowable services. Its primary purpose is to realize seamless integration and provision of diverse services in an intuitive "flowable" way maximally close to the "flow" of users' activities and thoughts, and as pertinent as possible to their needs, thus gain the most satisfaction. In this paper, we propose and discuss a human-centric framework of flowable services toward service assurance. We further describe the evaluation of the model, and an application scenario for adaptive delivery of personalized learning service under the proposed framework.

Ubiquitous Learning (U-Learning), as an emerging learning paradigm, makes it possible for learners to carry out the learning activities at any places and at anytime. With the advantages of the devices, learners can obtain a variety of supplementary materials from the Internet. In the scope of distance learning, LOR (Learning Object Repository) stands for managing and sharing of learning related materials (known as learning objects). However, some challenges may raise while performing these activities. For instance, a huge amount of learning objects may appear while learners utilize the search service provided by LOR. Learners have to spend time on collecting relevant resources for specific purposes. This situation may discourage the reusability of learning objects especially in a ubiquitous environment. In this paper, based on systematic re-examination of reuse scenarios, an adaptive mechanism, as a resource discovery and search middleware, was proposed to assist learners in obtaining possible objects under ubiquitous environment. Achievement of the proposed mechanism can produce search results adaptive to specific situations in order of similarity degree based on the mixed information. We try to filter out some irrelevant results by using the past usage history, current geographical information and input query, so as to enhance the efficiency of learning objects retrieval in a ubiquitous environment. As a pilot test, Apple iPhone was utilized to be the major client testbed. © 2011 Academy Publisher.

Recently, the vast dialog in the microblog, such as twitter, Facebook has become increasingly popular. As we post more messages in microblogs, information is spreading more quickly and widely. These widely spread and diversified contents could be viewed as data streams, which have become an important part of the Internet resources. However, these separated data streams are littery and meaningless, so we need to collect and organize them together to provide us with meaningful information. It is hard to imagine that we could find useful information by simply inputting a few keywords into a search engine in such a stream environment. In this study, we try to find a way to seek the information related to users' personal and current interests and needs among these data streams and provide users with other more relevant information. We introduce a set of metaphors to represent a variety of data streams in different levels, and define two new metaphors: heuristic stone and associative ripple to assist the seeking process and describe the results. Based on these, we further propose two algorithms for the information seeking and processing, and discuss a scenario of the information seeking process that utilizes the proposed metaphors and algorithms. Copyright 2011 ACM.

Recently, social media enhanced learning has become more and more popular. It is featured as learning through interaction and collaboration in a community or across a social network, which can be considered as a kind of social learning. In this study, we integrate SNS (such as twitter) into the web-based learning process and further delve into the discovery of potential information from the reorganized stream data. We propose a Dynamical Socialized User Networking (DSUN) model which represents users' profiling and dynamical relationship by a set of measures. Finally, we show an application scenario of the DSUN model to assist the learning process and enhance the learning efficiency in web-based environments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

In this study, we integrate social media into the blended learning environment, and further delve into utilizing the eye-tracking technology to enhance learning to be socialized and more efficient. We propose an approach to employ eye-tracking to extract those related learning stream data according to different seeking patterns in a learning process. Based on these, we go further to organize these raw stream data into meaningful learning contents in accordance with specific tasks in order to benefit both teachers and students, which can assist the learning process and promote the learning efficiency in the blended learning environment. © 2011 IEEE.

In this paper, we introduce a session key distribution mechanism for fast secure handover in wireless mobile networks. The proposed mechanism is based on the stream control transmission protocol in where a mobile node actively changes its IP address without its connection loss. When a mobile node moves between different access routers, the required session key at a new access router is distributed previously through the tunnel established between the previous access router and the new access router. Due to the reduced key distribution time, the mobile node achieves its secure seamless handover. The provided performance analysis proves that the proposed mechanism provides the reduced signaling cost compared to existing mobility protocols. In addition, the proposed mechanism reduces the handover latency so that the reduced amount of packet loss provides the stable handover performance for real-time applications.

t is a common sense that drowsiness during driving could cause traffic accidents. Related researches show that drowsiness occurs when the parasympathetic nerve system predominates over others, and the high frequency (HF) component of heart rate variability (HRV) on an electrocardiogram (ECG) is closely related with the parasympathetic nerve activity, so it is reasonable to evaluate drowsiness based on heart rate analysis. In the driving simulation study, ECG and calculated R-R intervals were put on record during the monitoring process of drowsiness degrees. Relations among different indexes, such as, temporal change of HF band, RR50, Coefficient of Variation of R-R interval (CVRR), and LF to HF ratio (LF/HF) were evaluated as well. The experimental results suggest that there exist certain correlations between drowsiness and HF, RR50, CVRR, or LF/HF, which will be compared in the future with data collected in real driving experiments.

This study aims to provide learners with appropriate learning activities navigation based on a learning process recommendation system that gradually adapts to their needs. A learning activity consists of a series of purposeful learning actions with a specific sequence. In the system, user profile is generated from various learning related activities that are collected over different time spans. A dynamic user group is generated based on the similarity of user profiles which have had successful learning experience, and can be used to create a personalized navigation of learning activities for a target learner. In this paper, after introducing how to create a dynamic design of learning activities navigation, we focus on discussing the design and implementation issues of the prototype system for personalized learning support.

In this study, we develop an innovative approach using sharable learning activity to create an open learning network. In this paper, we present our vision of open learning and a framework for sharable learning activities. We further discuss how to utilize open source software to implement a prototype system, and describe the scenarios and features of the proposed framework and system.

Recently, there have been lots of researches on how to provide personalized services to different users according to their personal characters, needs, situations, contexts and so on. Such personalized services are often based on users' profiles provided by the users in the beginning, and users' records or experiences in using corresponding systems in certain periods. However, different systems or terminals collect user information independently and cannot share the user's personal information collected by these different systems/terminals. As a result, each system can only utilize the limited information collected by the system itself to provide services or recommendations, and it thus cannot meet what users' needs in varied situations across the different systems/terminals. Therefore, it is still an open issue on how to gather, share and utilize various kinds of personal information to effective personalized services in right time, right place and right means to users. In this paper, a case study for personalized pervasive learning is discussed as one typical application of the concept of Cyber-I, an individual's counterpart on the cyberspace. The Cyber-I aims to provide a better environment for users to obtain what they may really need on the Web, and it can be considered as an innovated possibility of web usage scenario in the near future. Our case study using pervasive devices (iPad, cell phone, and laptop) for learning issues can be regarded as the best practice to support the proposed Cyber-I. © 2010 IEEE.

Recently, SNS, blog and microblog have become very popular. A different form of diversified contents, comparing to traditional static HTML web pages, are so easy to be generated dynamically, and can be provided to users by timeline. These contents are generally processed data streams, and have become an important part of the Internet resources. In this study, we try to integrate these dynamically diversified contents, such as twitter stream data, into Ubiquitous Personal Study (UPS), a personalized virtual study proposed in our previous study. In this paper, we introduce and define a set of new metaphors to represent a variety of data streams, such as Drop, Stream, River, and Ocean. We propose a Framework of Organic Streams to meaningfully organize these stream data. We describe the design and implementation issues of a prototype system, and discuss a scenario of using the enhanced UPS to support learning that utilizes twitter data streams. © 2010 IEEE.

With the development of internet and search engine, users are thought to obtain everything through corresponding web services. Although general purpose searching such as one provided by Google is powerful, searching mechanism for different purposes has to rely on specific metadata. We followed SCORM and CORDRA to develop a registry system named MINE Registry for storing and managing the learning objects. As a contribution, we propose the concept of "Reusability Tree" to represent the relationships among relevant Learning Objects and to enhance CORDRA. We further collect relevant information while users are utilizing Learning Objects, such as citations and time period persisted. The feedbacks from community users are also considered as critical elements for evaluating significance degree of Learning Objects. Through these factors, we propose a mechanism to weight and rank Learning Objects in the MINE Registry, in addition to other external learning objects repositories.

Services are expected to be a promising way for people to use information and computing resources in the emerging ubiquitous network society. In this study, we propose a metaphoric concept called flowable service. It is defined as a logical stream that organizes and provides circumjacent services in such a way that they are perceived by individuals as those naturally embedded in their surrounding environments. We present our view on how some of these problems, such as flexibility, portability and interoperability of services, can be solved using the flowable services to make seamless integration of diverse services in an intuitive "flowable" way possible, thus achieving maximum satisfaction of both service providers and consumers while decreasing the delivery cost of services. Recognizing the importance of the awareness of each individual's context for smooth and accurate provision of services, we conceive the flowable service framework that harnesses users' contexts to enable pro-active support of human activities in a flexible and natural way. Owing to context-awareness, the framework is able to find and integrate the circumjacent services that are considered to be needed by each individual, and create an ambient service environment tailored to his/her particular needs, proclivities and characteristics. © 2010 IEEE.

In line with the popularity of Internet and the development of search engine, users request information through Web-based services. Although general purpose searching such as one provided by Google is powerful, searching mechanism for specific purposes could rely on metadata. We followed SCORM and CORDRA specifications to develop a registry system, called the MINE Registry, for storing and sharing 20,738 Learning Objects created in the past five years. As a contribution, we propose the concept of "Reusability Tree" to represent the relationships among relevant Learning Objects and to enhance CORDRA. We further collect relevant information while users are utilizing Learning Objects, such as citations and time period persisted. The feedbacks from community users are also considered as critical elements for evaluating significance degree of Learning Objects. Through these factors, we propose a mechanism to weight and rank Learning Objects in the MINE Registry, in addition to other external learning objects repositories. © 2010 IEEE.

Cloud computing, which can provide ubiquitous services, is a nexus of hardware, software, data and people. Service model is an essential part of cloud computing. It is recognized that the service model should provide precise computing results with low costs. However, we think it is not adequate as a computing paradigm if no consideration is made on the human aspects, especially, the factors of end users. In this study, we propose a novel service model: Flowable Service Model (FSM),which aims to provide appropriate services (as a flow) for users in any time and any place, and let them to enjoy ambient life empowered by cloud computing. How to make the services flowing from the cyber world to the real world? Being inspired by James Williams' stream of consciousness theory, we conceive FSM to leverage a variety of personal information, such as users' behaviors and habits. The operational mechanism for FMS is described in this paper. We expect our proposed model can make every user to feel more ambient with available cloud services. © 2010 IEEE.

This paper proposes an agent based support system for promoting interactive teaching and learning. The agent based system is developed with the emphasis on learning to know students' characters, habits, and preferences so that the teacher or the system can give students appropriate hints, encouragements, confidents, and as well as influence students gradually without their noticing and feeling of be persuaded and pressured. With more active participation of students in the interactive learning process, the teaching is more effective and the learning is more efficient. ©2010 IEEE.

This study presents an integrated adaptive system to support and facilitate individual learning based on a recommendation model that gradually adapts to a learner's needs and information access behaviors, including various learning related activities, over different time spans. In this paper, we focus on describing the integrated framework and discussing the design and implementation issues of the prototype system for personalized learning support. ©2010 IEEE.

The content granularity and context information are two important factors to the efficiency and reusability of learning objects. The context information is necessary to facilitate the discovery and reuse of learning objects stored in global and/or local repositories. However, traditional learning objects are generally not conceived to incorporate with enough context information. Users have to do some extension of the description item set to fit their special use. In this paper, in order to deal with the issue mentioned above, we firstly introduce a context-rich paradigm, the related service driven tagging strategy, and a context model of learning objects. We further explain how to use the context information to realize the adaptive granularity of the content object. Finally, we show a simple concept model for online authoring systems that support the evolution from resource objects to learning objects. ©2010 IEEE.

With the improvement of internet technologies and multimedia resources, traditional learning has been replaced by distance learning, web-based learning or others' e-learning learning styles. According to distance learning, there are many research organizations and companies who make efforts in developing the relevant systems. But they lack interoperability. The only way to reuse these applications is to redevelop them for specific purposes. In order to solve this situation and norm the various learning resources, IMS proposes a new e-learning standard named "Common Cartridge". This standard not only integrates the past e-learning standards like LOM, SCORM and QTI but also proposes a technical architecture called Learning Tools Interoperability to allow applications to reuse different systems without reprogramming. In this paper, we firstly introduce the current e-learning environment. Then we pay attention on the usage of Common Cartridge standards and discuss the architecture of Learning Tools Interoperability. According to these standards, we will point out the e-learning standard that might be widely utilized in the future. Copyright © 2010, IGI Global.

The information resources on the Web are diversified, the amount of which is increasing rapidly. Demands for selecting useful information from the Internet, managing personal contents, and sharing contents under control have risen. In this study, we propose the Ubiquitous Personal Study, a framework of personalized virtual study to support accessing, managing, organizing, sharing and recommending information. In this paper, we focus on discussing the framework, and design and implementation issues on how to implement it with Web 2.0 mash-up technology and Open Source Software.

User profiling is a widely used technique to analyse and store user interests and preferences to apply this knowledge to improve user experiences with information systems. In this research paper, we present an approach for dynamically constructing user profiles, particularly from uniform relevance feedback in information-seeking activities. We propose an inference method for user interests, which we call High-Similarity Sequence Data-Driven (H2S2D) clustering and discuss its peculiarities and show its superiority for the creation of high-quality concepts, which are the elementary constituents of user profiles. To reflect the volatility of user interests and emphasise the steadiness of persistent preferences, we adopt recency, frequency and persistency as the three main criteria for multi-layered dynamic profile construction and update. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

User-centeredness has become an essential feature of information systems directly interacting with a user. In this paper we emphasize the importance of a user as an active content creator and contributor, community, and their synergy to achieve better user-centeredness in personalized Web search services. For this, we realize individual-community collaborative scheme integrating information search and sharing, and thus benefiting from both individual and community activities. Here we show the details of the scheme, including expertise-based information co-evaluation and collaborative search.

E-Learning makes it possible for learners to study at any time. With the improvement of ubiquitous technologies and corresponding devices, learners can conduct their learning activities without any limitations from the environment. Instructors can utilize various kinds of resources to create more plentiful learning materials for learners. In this situation, instructors or learners have to spend more time on collecting relevant resources for a specific purpose. In our previous works, we utilized the geographical information and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to develop an outdoor adventure game to support learning procedures. In this paper, we go further to propose and develop a resource retrieval mechanism to assist learners in collecting relevant learning resources. This mechanism can be regarded as a search procedure. We aim at providing search results in the order of relevant degree based on learners' current geographical information. It can make resource retrieval more efficient in ubiquitous learning environments.

The paper first introduces the concept of flowable service, the basic idea of which is to organize circumjacent services in such a way so that they are perceived by an individual as those naturally embedded in his/her surrounding environment. It is achieved by seamless integration and provision of diverse services in an intuitive "flowable" way. For this, the mechanism responsible for service discovery, composition and provision has to have a good understanding of a user it serves to. We design a framework with a special focus on context-awareness to find and integrate the circumjacent services thought to be needed by each individual at his/her current situation, and thus create an ambient service environment tailored to his/her particular needs and characteristics. Here introduce the framework, its components and process abstraction, and outline some major issues we have to face when implementing our approach.

In this study, we propose a Gradual Adaption Model for a Web recommender system. This model is used to track users' focus of interests and its transition by analyzing their information access behaviors, and recommend appropriate information. A set of concept classes are extracted from Wikipedia. The pages accessed by users are classified by the concept classes, and grouped into three terms of short, medium and long periods, and two categories of remarkable and exceptional for each concept class, which are used to describe users' focus of interests, and to establish reuse probability of each concept class in each term for each user by Full Bayesian Estimation as well. According to the reuse probability and period, the information that a user is likely to be interested in is recommended. In this paper, we propose a new approach by which short and medium periods are determined based on dynamic sampling of user information access behaviors. We further present experimental simulation results, and show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed system. © 2009 IEEE.

This research is aimed at a smart music playing environment in which a set of speakers are placed in different locations/rooms and one of the speakers will automatically play a music whenever a user gets close to it. Our study is focused on the design and prototype implementation of such a smart music playing system called U-LAMP (User Location-Aware Music Player). It consists of a server that stores streamed music data, and a set of clients that can receive and play the streamed music from the server. A user carries a RFID tag and can move around. When the user's tag ID is detected by a RFID reader that is connected to a nearby client, the server will switch the transmission of streamed music data from the previous client to the current one. This paper explains in details about how to get a user's location by detecting the user's tag ID, manage RTP-based music data delivery from the server to the client, play a streamed music using JMF, and achieve better audio listening effects during the transition period of handing-over the playing music stream between speakers in different rooms. © 2009 IEEE.

With the rapid advancing in electronics, VLSI, and nanotechnology, ubiquitous devices (u-objects) like mobile devices, sensing devices, RFID devices, IC cards, wireless devices, wireless wearable devices, etc. are getting more and more in number, smaller and smaller in size, and even invisible in form. In order to make them work without human involved and interaction, there is necessity of enabling them with intelligent, smart, or autonomic computing capabilities. Of course, intelligent function embedded is a straightforward approach. However, it may be difficult for the tiny devices to embed the intelligent computing capabilities due to their limited capacity and processing power. For a multiple intelligent agents system, it is not efficient to develop and maintain intelligent computing functions for each individual agent. Therefore, the idea is to design an intelligence entity sharing pool in which a requested intelligence entity can be dynamically composed from a number of atomic intelligence entities and complex intelligence entities residing in the intelligence entity pool and posted to virtual objects (v-object) in the v-object server for sharing by ubiquitous devices in the real world. This research is of three main phases: designing the intelligence entity sharing pool
mapping u-objects to virtual objects (v-objects)
and developing a framework for intelligence entity sharing. This paper is mainly focused on describing the first two phases. © 2009 IEEE.

In this study, we present a gradual adaptation model to estimate human information access behavior. A variety of users' information access data are collected in terms of short, medium, long periods, or by categories such as remarkable and exceptional. The proposed model is then established by analyzing the preprocessed data based on the Full Bayesian Estimation.

With slide-film interface discussed in this paper we propose a new mobile Web search experience. The interface abolishes fatigue-inducing scrolling while preserving "quality" summaries of Web search results to improve the efficacy and efficiency of mobile Web search. The evaluation of the approach shows that the proposed interface is superior to the conventional mobile search method in a number of aspects like easy navigation and good viewability of search results and can be its good alternative.

Relevance feedback is an important source of information about a user and often used for usage and user modeling for further personalization of user-system interactions. In this paper we present a method to infer the user's interests from his/her relevance feedback using an online incremental clustering method For inference of a new interest (concept) and concept update the method uses the similarity characteristics of uniform user relevance feedback It is fast, easy to implement and gives reasonable clustering results. We evaluate the method against two different data sets, demonstrate and discuss the outcomes.

In the situation of information overload we are experiencing today, conventional web search systems taking a one-size-fits-all approach are often not capable of effectively satisfy individual information needs. To improve the quality of web information retrieval, we propose a collaborative personalised search approach that makes an attempt to &apos;understand&apos; and better satisfy the information needs for each and every searching user. We present a web information retrieval framework called Better Search and Sharing (BESS) that Captures user-system interactions, profiles them and induces personal interests that changes over time with an interest-change-driven profiling mechanism that is also extensively used for the co-evaluation of documents found valuable inside a specific search context by users with similar interests.

The information resources on the Web are diversified, and the amount is increasing rapidly. Demands for selecting useful information from the Internet, managing personal contents, and sharing contents under control have risen. In this study, we propose the Ubiquitous Personal Study (UPS), a framework of personalized virtual study to support accessing, managing, organizing, sharing and recommending information. In this paper, we focus on discussing the issues on how to implement it with Web 2.0 mash-up technology and Open Source Software.

It is well known that alongside with search engine performance improvements and functionality enhancements one of the determinant factors of user acceptance of any search service is the interface. This factor is particularly important for mobile Web search mostly due to small screen limitations of handheld devices. In this paper we propose scrolless mobile Web search interface to decrease search efforts that are multiplied due to these limitations, and discuss its potential advantages and drawbacks over conventional one.

A smart space is a physical spatial environment such as a room that can provide automatic responses according to the contextual information occurring in an environment. The context data is usually acquired via various devices which are installed somewhere in the environment and/or embedded into some special physical objects, called u-objects, which are capable of executing computation and/or communication. However, the devices used in current researches on smart space are either fixed or residing in real. objects, which are incapable of moving by themselves. Likewise, more and more robots have been produced, but most of them are designed and developed based on the assumption that the space surrounding a robot is an ordinary one, i.e., a non-smart space. Therefore, it is necessary to study what additional services can be offered and what specific technical issues will be faced when adding robots to smart spaces. To identify the potential novel services and technology problems, this research is focused on a case study of a u-object finding service performed by a robot in a smart space. This paper presents the design and development of the system prototype robot which can communicate with other devices and can find a u-object with attached RFID tag in a smart room. Some preliminary experiments were conducted and the results verified the functionalities of the system.

Lifelog is a data set composed of one or more media forms that record the same individual's daily activities. One of the main challenging issues is how to extract meaningful information from the huge and complex lifelog data which is continuously captured and accumulated from multiple sensors. This study is focused on the activity models and analysis techniques to process lifelog data in order: to find what events/states are interesting or important, to summarize the useful records in some structured and semantic ways for efficient retrievals and presentations of past life experiences, and to use these experiences to further improve the individual's quality of life. We propose an integrated technique to process the lifelog data using the correlations between different kinds of captured data from multiple sensors, instead of dealing with them separately. To use and test the proposed models and the analysis techniques, several prototype systems have been implemented and applied to some domain-specific lifelog data; such as in improving a group's collaborative efforts in revising a software, in managing kid's outdoor safety care, in providing a runner's workout assistance, and in structuring lifelog image generation, respectively.

In this study, we propose a gradual adaption model for estimation of user information access behavior. A variety of users' information access data are collected by unit of a day for each user, and analyzed in terms of short, medium, long periods, and by remarkable and exceptional categories. The proposed model is then established by analyzing the pre-processed data based on Full Bayesian Estimation. We further present experimental simulation results, and show the operability and effectiveness of our proposed model. © 2008 IEEE.

We discuss an approach to enhance conventional IR with contributions (relevance judgments) done by users interacting with a document collection and personalization by profiles inside the collaborative search and sharing system. It is designed to capture user search intentions derived from explicit and implicit feedback and keep analyzed data in layered profiles for further query augmentation, document recommendation and contribution personalization in the form of "subjective index." For profile generation and document evaluation we propose an interest change driven profiling mechanism which reflects all dynamics of user search intentions. © 2007 IEEE.

In this study, we propose an information sharing support environment that integrates information media platforms such as Blog, Wiki and XOOPS, which are well-known for an individual user to share various contents with others freely, by using peer-to-peer network technology. We have implemented a prototype system that supports a user individually, in a small/large size group, or even in an open community to create, manage, exchange and share information flexibly and collaboratively anywhere and anytime.

In recent years, a variety of new computing paradigms have been proposed for various purposes. It is true that many of them intend to and really can gratify some of the people sometime, somewhere; a few of them can even gratify some of the people anytime, anywhere. However, at present, none of the computing paradigms intend to gratify all the people anytime, anywhere. With the rapid advance of information technology and the spread of information services, the IT disparity in age, social standing, and race of the people has been expanding and has become a critical social problem of the 21st century. Thus, we have a fundamental question: Can we construct, in a unified methodology, a computing environment that can gratify all the people in all situations, all places and all the time? We propose a novel and inclusive computing paradigm, named ubisafe computing, for studying and providing possible solutions to the above problem. The ultimate goal of ubisafe computing is to build a computing environment in which all people and organizations can benefit from ubiquitous services anytime anywhere with assured and desired satisfaction without worrying or thinking about safety. That is, the ubisafe computing vision emphasizes two basic aspects: ubiquitous safety and ubiquitous satisfaction to all people in all situations. This paper presents the motivations for the ubisafe computing vision but focuses on one basic aspect of ubiquitous safety that covers reliability, security, privacy, persistency, trust, risk, out of control, and other watchfulness while considering novel, essential ubicomp or percomp features of unobtrusive computers, diverse users/people and life-like systems.

We proposed a collaborative information sharing environment based on P2P net-working technology, to support communication among special groups with given tasks, ensure fast information exchange, increase the productivity Of working groups, and reduce maintenance and administration costs in our previous work.
However, for a social growing community, not only the information exchange/sharing functions are necessary, but also solutions to support users with idea and knowledge publication tools for private purpose or public use are essential. Some private message (personal idea and experience) posting tools (e.g., weblog) and group collaborative knowledge editing tools (e.g., Wikis) are used in practice; the merits of these tools have been recognized.
In this paper we propose a scalable information sharing solution, which integrates decentralized P2P networking with centralized personal/group media tools. This solution combines the effective tools, such as weblog and Wiki, into P2P-based collaborative groupware system, to facilitate infinite, growing and scalable information management and sharing for individuals and groups.

Context is the information, which is created and obtained from the surrounding environment for the interaction between humans and computational services. A generic model is a key accessor to the context in any context-aware applications for ubiquitous computing. In the past decades, a number of context modeling techniques have been proposed e.g. markup scheme based, logic-based, graphical, and ontology-based. Since ontology in its nature is a promising tool to specify concepts and interrelations, it has been widely adopted in context modeling. However, in the rapid changing environments, semantics may vary according to the time factors and dynamic group of users. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based context model with temporal vector space in order to complement this deficiency.

Nowadays, the World Wide Web offers public search services by a number of Internet search engine companies e.g. Google [16], Yahoo! [17], etc. They own their internal ranking algorithms, which may be designed for either general-purpose information and/or specific domains. In order to fight for bigger market share, they have developed advanced tools to facilitate the algorithms through the use of Relevance Feedback (RF) e.g. Google's Toolbar. Experienced by the black-box tests of the RF toolbar, all in all, they can acquire simple and individual RF contribution. As to this point, in this paper, we have proposed a collaboratively shared Information Retrieval (IR) model to complement the conventional IR approach (i.e. objective) with the collaborative user contribution (i.e. subjective). Not only with RF and group relevance judgments, our proposed architecture and mechanisms provide a unified way to handle general purpose textual information (herein, we consider e-Learning related documents) and provide advanced access control features [15] to the overall system.

Distance education, e-learning, and virtual university are similar terms for a trend of modern education. It is an integration of information technologies, computer hardware systems, and communication tools to support educational professionals in remote teaching. This chapter presents an overview of distance education from the perspective of policy, people, and technology. A number of questions frequently asked in distance learning panel discussions are presented, with the suggested answers from the authors. The survey presented in this chapter includes communication, intelligent, and educational technologies of distance education. Readers of this chapter are academic researchers and engineers who are interested in new research issues of distance education, as well as educators and general participants who are seeking for new solutions. © 2007, Idea Group Inc.

Search is not the only activity in information space users are engaged in. Most of time users rediscover things they used to find in the past, and often they just browse without any specific purpose discovering information space around them or with a particular purpose, such as learning miscellaneous information. We propose an approach for designing exploratory information space that makes use of human-centered power of bookmarking for information selection. The information space is built as a result of a search for something a user intends to discover, and serves as a place for rediscoveries of personal findings, socialization and exploration inside discovery chains of other participants of the proposed prototype system. The most important elements of the proposed information space, main elements of the prototype system to be implemented and used to explore the space, and use scenarios are discussed here. © 2006 IEEE.

In this study, we propose and develop an opensource groupware system called NetIsle. NetIsle is a general purpose groupware system for uniform open groups that integrate a number of tools for online collaboration to ensure fast information exchange and sharing, increase the productivity of working groups, and reduce maintenance and administration costs. The main technologies used for the construction of the system are peer-to-peer (P2P) and push, which are best fitted to those principles and beliefs we build our system upon. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

This paper outlines anew model of ubiquitous computing technology support learning (uLearning). In the uLearning, in order to facilitate the awareness of other helpful learners, increase the availability of the mutual and friendly support in the learning process, and enhance learners' communication skills, the authors offer a serial of services. These services arc designed as dynamic group construction service, social intercommunion facilitation service, service of navigating learner to get out of difficulty, etc.

With advanced technologies, computer devices have become smaller and powerful. As a result, many people enjoy ubiquitous learning using mobile devices such as Pocket PCs. Pocket PCs are easy to carry and use as a distance learning platform. In this paper, we focus on the issues of transferring the current PC based Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) to Pocket PC based. We will also introduce the Pocket SCORM Run-Time Environment (RTE) which has been developed in our lab. Pocket SCORM architecture is able to operate, even when the mobile device is off-line. It will keep the students' learning record. When it is on line, the records will then be sent back to Learning Management System (LMS). With memory limitation, we provides course caching algorithm to exchange the course content on the Pocket SCORM.

This paper discusses a fundamental notion and model of ubiquitous computing technology support learning (uLearning) system. In order to increase learners' social skills and support social interaction among learners, the authors design a collection of support tools; these tools serve for three processes: encounter communication and collaboration. Furthermore, prototyping implementation of the social interaction support tools is introduced.

This paper describes the computer supported ubiquitous learning system and the social interaction between learners. We define the ubiquitous learning with five prime attributes, and present a generalized social interaction support model for the ubiquitous learning. Moreover in order to support learners with increasing social skill, a solution for constructing social interaction in ubiquitous learning environment is designed, which includes three major functions: encounter communication and collaboration support functions.

In this study, we propose and develop an open-source groupware system called NetIsle. NetIsle is a general-purpose groupware system for uniform open groups that integrate a number of tools for online collaboration to ensure fast information exchange and sharing, increase the productivity of working groups, and reduce maintenance and administration costs. The main technologies used for the construction of the system are peer-to-peer (P2P) and push, which are best fitted to those principles and beliefs we build our system upon.

This paper presents a multi-agent system to assist a teacher managing his/her course contents placed on web servers. In this system there is a set of agents and every agent may work independently from or collaboratively with others. Once generated, an agent can reside in a teacher's daily working computer (called administration host) or a proxy host, and can move between the two hosts. Each agent is devoted to one piece of job and all of them, as a whole, coordinately conduct a sequence of management work during the entire process of teaching a course. A teacher may administrate agents via a specific system shell on his/her administration host, or a usual web browser on another computer/PDA/mobile phone. The system has been carefully modularized, and thus a new type of agent, if necessary, can be relatively easily developed and quickly incorporated into the system to further enhance or extend its management capability.

This paper describes small group collaboration solutions based upon push technology, which provides awareness for collaboration, reduces efforts for necessary information discovery, and makes users collaboration initiators, active information providers and new values creators. The push technology-based tools, i.e. File Pusher, Scheduler, NetIsle Mailer, etc., axe implemented in a hybrid peer-to-peer general-purpose groupware system, called NetIsle, which has been developed by using Java RMI and sockets and can be run on any platform where Java VM is available.

In this paper we introduce a framework for every-netizen online learning communities that widely open to anyone who is willing to learn and share knowledge with others across the networks. We discuss how to provide individualized collaboration support for e-learning in the community, and demonstrate a prototype of implementation in a web-based social virtual environment with two supporting tools.

As a new distributed computing paradigm, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and systems have attracted more and more attentions in recent years. This study aims at proposing and constructing a new information resource sharing system based on the P2P paradigm. In this paper, we focus on solving and improving the hit rate and search speed problems that exist in Gnutella, one of the most popular P2P file sharing systems. We discuss how to introduce XML to describe the attributes and properties of each shared file and integrate an embedded database engine to increase the search speed. Preliminary experiment results have demonstrated that the approach proposed in this study is efficient and useful.

The exploration of social networks is essential for finding capable cooperators who can help problem-solving and for augmenting cooperation between workers in an organization. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II to seek capable cooperators through a chain of personal connections (PeCo) in a networked organization. Moreover, this system helps to gather, explore, and visualize social networks in an organization. The experimental results show that the system facilitates users' encounters with cooperators and develops new helpful connections with the cooperators.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for every-citizen learning comminities based on a recently widespread Internet tool known as MOO (Multi user dimension Object-Oriented). We discuss the design and development of a prototype system of virtual community based interactive learning environments, which supports human-human communication in addition to human-computer communication, with emphsis on social interaction.

The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable cooperators who can help in problem-solving and in augmenting cooperation among workers in an organization. PeCo-Mediator-II is an agent based system that helps gathering, exploring, and visualizing social networks among users. This paper proposes a user model with history logs to support exploration, to share individual knowledge, and to reduce overload of cooperators. Experimental results show that the system facilitated users encounter cooperators and helped develop new relationships between users and cooperators.

Petri nets can be viewed as a kind of language for specifying Markov models of a system, because of their highly visual nature that can give insight into the nature of the modeled system. In this paper, an aggregate approach by extended stochastic Petri net and Markov renewal process with some non-regeneration points is proposed to conduct performance analysis of an Ethernet-based flexible manufacturing system. The proposed approach may improve efficiency of performance analysis for most practical distributed network based manufacturing systems.

In the past few years, a network-accessible, multi-user simulated environment known as MUD has becoming widespread on the Internet for purposes of entertainment and education. In this paper, we firstly discuss design issues of collaborative learning in text-based virtual reality environments. We describe our experimental MUD based virtual learning environment, its integration with outside databases and Internet resources, and a graphical user interface to use it. Finally, we introduce our experimental use of this virtual learning environment, experiences from having virtual lessons in it, and some primary evaluation results.

We develop a new class of stochastic Petri net. non-regenerative stochastic Petri net (NRSPN), which allows the firing time of its transitions with arbitrary distributions, and can automatically generate a bounded reachability graph that is equivalent to a generalization of the Markov renewal process in which some of the states may not constitute regeneration points. Thus, it can model and analyze behavior of a system whose states include some non-regeneration points. We show how to model a system by the NRSPN, and how to obtain numerical solutions For the NRSPN model. The probabilistic behavior of the modeled system can be clarified with the reliability measures such as the steady-state probability, the expected numbers of visits to each slate per unit lime, availability, unavailability and mean time between system failure. Finally, to demonstrate the modeling ability and analysis power of the NRSPN model, we present an example for a fault-tolerant system using the NRSPN and give numerical results for specific distributions.

When interacting and acting in a dynamic multiagent environment, an agent must ask itself what is presently its best course of action given what it now knows about what the environment will be like when it intends to act. It requires some ability to make decision by computing the probability that relevant propositions will hold at a specified point of time. Among the interaction and action, some of them can be characterized by an exponential time distribution, others might not. This paper presents a non-regenerative stochastic Petri net that allows arbitrary time distributions, use it to model and analyze agents' probabilistic behavior.

Knowledge Creation from flooding information is one of the most burdensome subject we face today. We have developed a supporting tool to create knowledge for effective use of information. As a basis of the tool, we propose a cooperative framework, where user and the system cooperate each other to derive knowledge from gathered information. After presented the structure of the tool, we illustrate two major functions with examples. First one is the systematic arrangement of knowledge and the second is the elaborated search referencing knowledge base.

In this paper, we describe the distributed PeCo-Mediator which support a user to find a partner by using personal connections (PeCo). We have already proposed PeCo-Mediator which allows members to share and use their PeCo. PeCo-Mediator is very available in some small groups. In an organizational use, however, there are some problems; (1) It is difficult a user to offer his/her ties because they are private information; (2) Since this system only supports to find some candidate partners and relationships with them, a user has to negotiate with them to get the cooperation, using the offered connection. Distributed PeCo-Mediator has the two sub-systems; PeCo-Collector for maintaining the individual PeCo in his/her own site, and PeCo-Agent for supporting the negotiation between him/her and a candidate. It improves the privacy of users and also facilitates to find a cooperative and capable partner.

This paper describes COMES (Collaborative Organizational Memory System) for supporting real-time collaboration in organizational problem solving. A related area of research investigates organizational memory or know-how systems such as Answer Garden and FISH. These systems are generally text-based and asynchronous. However, users must often repeat to exchange question and answer with each other to solve a problem; and only text-based information makes it difficult for them to communicate smoothly. Therefore, COMES allows organizational members to collaborate with each other in synchronous text-and-sketch based problem-solving forums connected via the Internet and makes its process retrievable and visible.

A PeCo(Personal Connection) is often a starting point for business activities. This paper describes : 1)PeCo-Mediator, which facilitates access to others who can help problem solving in business activities by sharing and using wide ranges PeCos beyond individuals, 2)its flexible database which has a flexible data-structure and key concepts &quot;flexibility and adaptability&quot;, 3)a model of PeCos. The flexible database allows users to store their diverse personal information and to easily find people who can help solve their business problems. Use of shared PeCos through PeCo-Mediator facilitates ...

Personal connections have great influences on various social activities, e.g., a business negotiation. However, data of personal connections are usually diverse, dynamic and ill-formed. In this paper, we firstly propose a model and representation for personal connections, then describe the framework to deal with ill-formed information. We discuss some key criteria on developing a common exploitation environment integrated with an adaptable data-base and user interface to support group decision. Finally, we give illustrations to show that the developed environment is effective and useful.