Street computing : towards an integrated open data Application Programming Interface (API) for cities

This special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology brings together five articles that are based on presentations given at the Street Computing workshop held on 24 November 2009 in Melbourne in conjunction with the Australian Computer-Human Interaction conference (OZCHI 2009). Our own article introduces the Street Computing vision and explores the potential, challenges and foundations of this research vision. In order to do so, we first look at the currently available sources of information and discuss their link to existing research efforts. Section 2 then introduces the notion of Street Computing and our research approach in more detail. Section 3 looks beyond the core concept itself and summarises related work in this field of interest.

From bust to boom : towards a strategic cognition perspective on Australian mining firms’ adaption

While the role of executives’ cognition in organisations’ responses to change is a central topic in strategic cognition research, changes in firms’ environment are typically not measured directly but described either as an event (for example, new industry legislation) or represented by a time period (e.g. when a new technology impacted an industry). The Australian mining sector has witnessed a historically significant change in demand for its products and we begin by developing measures of changes in supply and demand for key commodities during the period 1992-2008. We identify sub-groups of firms based on their activities and commodity sector and examine the relation of these variables to executives’ cognition and to firms’ CapEx. We find industry, firm and cognitive variables are related to both strategic cognition and firms’ CapEx.

Behavioural evidence for social preferences

A central topic in economics is the existence of social preferences. Behavioural economics in general has approached the issue from several angles. Controlled experimental settings, surveys, and field experiments are able to show that in a number of economic environments, people usually care about immaterial things such as fairness or equity of allocations. Findings from experimental economics specifically have lead to large increase in theories addressing social preferences. Most (pro)social phenomena are well understood in the experimental settings but very difficult to observe 'in the wild'. One criticism in this regard is that many findings are bound by the artificial environment of the computer lab or survey method used. A further criticism is that the traditional methods also fail to directly attribute the observed behaviour to the mental constructs that are expected to stand behind them. This thesis will first examine the usefulness of sports data to test social preference models in a field environment, thus overcoming limitations of the lab with regards to applicability to other - non-artificial - environments. The second major contribution of this research establishes a new neuroscientific tool - the measurement of the heart rate variability - to observe participants' emotional reactions in a traditional experimental setup.

Diversified service provisioning in global business networks

Companies and their services are being increasingly exposed to global business networks and Internet-based ondemand services. Much of the focus is on flexible orchestration and consumption of services, beyond ownership and operational boundaries of services. However, ways in which third-parties in the “global village” can seamlessly self-create new offers out of existing services remains open. This paper proposes a framework for service provisioning in global business networks that allows an open-ended set of techniques for extending services through a rich, multi-tooling environment. The Service Provisioning Management Framework, as such, supports different modeling techniques, through supportive tools, allowing different parts of services to be integrated into new contexts. Integration of service user interfaces, business processes, operational interfaces and business object are supported. The integration specifications that arise from service extensions are uniformly reflected through a kernel technique, the Service Integration Technique. Thus, the framework preserves coherence of service provisioning tasks without constraining the modeling techniques needed for extending different aspects of services.

Program your city : designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected?

Deliberation and empowerment in Rio de Janeiro's favelas

In modern day Brazil, new media initiatives centred in local communities are attempting to change the face of mainstream ideas about favelas and their inhabitants. One of these initiatives is Viva Favela which is ideologically and physically supported by the NGO Viva Rio that is based in Rio de Janeiro. This non-government organisation runs projects that provide favela residents with skills to take, edit and print their own(photo)journalism contents that enable a community-based framing and documentation of favela life, personalities and issues. The NGO furthermore has developed a range of public venues for displaying these works of (photo)journalism, thus minimising the invisibility that favela dwellers feel in Brazilian political life. This paper takes a discursive and ethnographic approach to investigating how community media might contribute with the aims of empowering people and supporting deliberation within Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

Enabling USDL by tools

Fundamental tooling is required in order to apply USDL in practical settings. This chapter discusses three fundamental types of tools for USDL. First, USDL editors have been developed for expert and casual users, respectively. Second, several USDL repositories have been built to allow editors accessing and storing USDL descriptions. Third, our generic USDL marketplace allows providers to describe their services once and potentially trade them anywhere. In addition, the iosyncrasies of service trading as opposed to the simpler case of product trading. The chapter also presents several deployment scenarios of such tools to foster individual value chains and support new business models across organizational boundaries. We close the chapter with an application of USDL in the context of service engineering.

Domestic energy monitoring in Victorian households with PV solar installations : feasibility report for GV Community Energy

Australia requires decisive action on climate change and issues of sustainability. The Urban Informatics Research Lab has been funded by the Queensland State Government to conduct a three year study (2009 – 2011) exploring ways to support Queensland residents in making more sustainable consumer and lifestyle choices. We conduct user-centred design research that inform the development of real-time, mobile, locational, networked information interfaces, feedback mechanisms and persuasive and motivational approaches that in turn assist in-situ decision making and environmental awareness in everyday settings. The study aims to deliver usable and useful prototypes offering individual and collective visualisations of ecological impact and opportunities for engagement and collaboration in order to foster a participatory and sustainable culture of life in Australia. Raising people’s awareness with environmental data and educational information does not necessarily trigger sufficient motivation to change their habits towards a more environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle. Our research seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change. Drawing on participatory culture, ubiquitous computing, and real-time information, the study delivers research that leads to viable new design approaches and information interfaces which will strengthen Australia’s position to meet the targets of the Clean Energy Future strategy, and contribute to the sustainability of a low-carbon future in Australia. As part of this program of research, the Urban Informatics Research Lab has been invited to partner with GV Community Energy Pty Ltd on a project funded by the Victorian Government Sustainability Fund. This feasibility report specifically looks at the challenges and opportunities of energy monitoring in households in Victoria that include a PV solar installation. The report is structured into two parts: In Part 1, we first review a range of energy monitoring solutions, both stand-alone and internet-enabled. This section primarily focusses on the technical capacilities. However, in order to understand this information and make an informed decision, it is crucial to understand the basic principles and limitations of energy monitoring as well as the opportunities and challenges of a networked approach towards energy monitoring which are discussed in Section 2.

Heart beats and economic decisions : Observing mental stress in the ultimatum bargaining game

One aim of experimental economics is to try to better understand human economic decision making. Early research of the ultimatum bargaining game (Gueth et al., 1982) revealed that other motives than pure monetary reward play a role. Neuroeconomic research has introduced the recording of physiological observations as signals of emotional responses. In this study, we apply heart rate variability (HRV) measuring technology to explore the behaviour and physiological reactions of proposers and responders in the ultimatum bargaining game. Since this technology is small and non-intrusive, we are able to run the experiment in a standard experimental economic setup. We show that low o�ers by a proposer cause signs of mental stress in both the proposer and the responder, as both exhibit high ratios of low to high frequency activity in the HRV spectrum.

A customisable dashboard display for environmental performance visualisations

We conducted an exploratory study of a mobile energy monitoring tool: The Dashboard. Our point of departure from prior work was the emphasis of end-user customisation and social sharing. Applying extensive feedback, we deployed the Dashboard in real-world conditions to socially linked research participants for a period of five weeks. Participants were encouraged to devise, construct, place, and view various data feeds. The aim of our study was to test the assumption that participants, having control over their Dashboard configuration, would engage, and remain engaged, with their energy feedback throughout the trial. Our research points to a set of design issues surrounding the adoption and continued use of such tools. A novel finding of our study is the impact of social links between participants and their continued engagement with the Dashboard. Our results also illustrate the emergence of energy-voyeurism, a form of social energy monitoring by peers.

Using static analysis for automatic assessment and mitigation of unwanted and malicious activities within Android applications

In the last decade, smartphones have gained widespread usage. Since the advent of online application stores, hundreds of thousands of applications have become instantly available to millions of smart-phone users. Within the Android ecosystem, application security is governed by digital signatures and a list of coarse-grained permissions. However, this mechanism is not fine-grained enough to provide the user with a sufficient means of control of the applications' activities. Abuse of highly sensible private information such as phone numbers without users' notice is the result. We show that there is a high frequency of privacy leaks even among widely popular applications. Together with the fact that the majority of the users are not proficient in computer security, this presents a challenge to the engineers developing security solutions for the platform. Our contribution is twofold: first, we propose a service which is able to assess Android Market applications via static analysis and provide detailed, but readable reports to the user. Second, we describe a means to mitigate security and privacy threats by automated reverse-engineering and refactoring binary application packages according to the users' security preferences.

A trusted ecosystem for Android applications based on context-aware access control

Private data stored on smartphones is a precious target for malware attacks. A constantly changing environment, e.g. switching network connections, can cause unpredictable threats, and require an adaptive approach to access control. Context-based access control is using dynamic environmental information, including it into access decisions. We propose an "ecosystem-in-an-ecosystem" which acts as a secure container for trusted software aiming at enterprise scenarios where users are allowed to use private devices. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype for an access control framework that processes changes to low-level sensors and semantically enriches them, adapting access control policies to the current context. This allows the user or the administrator to maintain fine-grained control over resource usage by compliant applications. Hence, resources local to the trusted container remain under control of the enterprise policy. Our results show that context-based access control can be done on smartphones without major performance impact.