Cognitive engineering

Near Field Communication (NFC) as a promising short range wireless communication technology facilitates mobile phone usage of billions of people throughout the world that offers diverse services ranging from payment and loyalty applications to access keys for offices and houses. Eventually NFC technology integrates all such services into one single mobile phone. NFC technology has emerged lately, and consequently not much academic source is available yet. On the contrary, due to its promising business case options, there will be an increasing amount of work to be studied in the very close future. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach with different perspectives, including communication essentials with standards, ecosystem and business issues, applications, and security issues. Open research areas and further recommended studies in terms of academic and business point of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each major subject's subsection. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians as well as for business world interested in NFC technology.

A Survey on Near Field Communication (NFC) Technology

An approach is provided for managing one or more services corresponding to a bearer tag (e.g., near field communication (NFC) tag, radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, contactless card, or barcode). A request to manage a service is initiated by reading service information from a bearer tag corresponding to the one or more services. A services platform initiates management of the one or more services based on the service information according to a predetermined or recurring billing arrangement.

Method and apparatus for managing services using bearer tags

Ubiquitous learning: A systematic review

Inviting children to adopt a Protagonist role regarding technology has recently become advocated. Such a role embraces the original political participatory design (PD) agenda and aims at empowerment of children through design and making. However, so far the literature is limited in exploring the adoption of this role by children. While studies have reported experiences of engaging children in design and making activities, in-depth inquiries on children's experiences and challenges involved are lacking. We also maintain that the PD community has so far neglected education of children - in participation, design and technology - as our task and duty. This study reports findings from a design and making project aiming at empowerment of children, carried out in school context. We show that adopting the Protagonist role is not easy and there is a lot of variety between children. We present children's experiences and reflect on the challenges involved in progressing towards Protagonist role adoption.

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Empowering children through design and making: towards protagonist role adoption

Modern connected cities are more and more leveraging advances in ICT to improve their services and the quality of life of their inhabitants. The data generated from different sources, such as environmental sensors, social networking platforms, traffic counters, are harnessed to achieve these end goals. However, collecting, integrating, and analyzing all the heterogeneous data sources available from the cities is a challenge. This article suggests a data lake approach built on Big Data technologies, to gather all the data together for further analysis. The platform, described here, enables data collection, storage, integration, and further analysis and visualization of the results. This solution is the first attempt to integrate a diverse set of data sources from four pilot cities as part of the CUTLER project (Coastal urban development through the lenses of resiliency). The design and implementation details, as well as usage scenarios are presented in this paper.

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Implementing Big Data Lake for Heterogeneous Data Sources

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology enables interactive, participatory learning applications that integrate digital learning material seamlessly to our everyday environment. NFC permits tagging objects in the environment and interacting with applications by touching the tagged objects with mobile devices. Touching a tag triggers an application in the mobile device to perform an operation that is related to the touched object. In this paper, we report how NFC can be used to create interactive applications that help children in their learning process and persuade them to do physical exercise. We report fully working applications we have developed to support children in learning to read, in learning a foreign language, in studying biology, and one application developed to persuade children to run outdoors.

NFC-based interactive learning environments for children

New technologies enable novel types of learning activities that differ radically from traditional approach of visiting lectures and doing homework assignments. Namely, these technologies support transforming our everyday environments into learning environments. This concept is referred to in the literature as ubiquitous learning. Enriching ubiquitous learning systems with adaptive functionality facilitates personalization of learning activities by adapting them to learners’ progress and situation. In this article, we identify needs of four user roles in ubiquitous learning systems, i.e., learner, instructor, developer, and researcher. We analyze the state of the art in ubiquitous learning and find that roles other than learners have not received much attention in the literature. Finally, we propose supporting different needs identified for four user roles by adding meta-level functionality to ubiquitous learning systems. This proposal adds self-introspective capabilities to such systems to serve their users better.

Towards User Support in Ubiquitous Learning Systems

Real-world data streams pose a unique challenge to the implementation of machine learning (ML) models and data analysis. A notable problem that has been introduced by the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments across the smart city ecosystem is that the statistical properties of data streams can change over time, resulting in poor prediction performance and ineffective decisions. While concept drift detection methods aim to patch this problem, emerging communication and sensing technologies are generating a massive amount of data, requiring distributed environments to perform computation tasks across smart city administrative domains. In this article, we implement and test a number of state-of-the-art active concept drift detection algorithms for time series analysis within a distributed environment. We use real-world data streams and provide critical analysis of results retrieved. The challenges of implementing concept drift adaptation algorithms, along with their applications in smart cities, are also discussed.

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Concept drift adaptation techniques in distributed environment for real-world data streams

Multimedia content is commonly manipulated using a keyboard and a mouse. We propose an innovative way of controlling multimedia services using mobile phones equipped with NFC (Near Field Communication) compliant RFID readers. A user activates multimedia content by touching an RFID tag. This action configures the mobile phone as a remote control for the multimedia content. The user sends commands such as play, pause and stop, using the phone's UI. The multimedia content is shown on a wall display. This approach has several benefits: a common and easy-to-use user interface, off-the-self components, and lightweight implementation. We have not created any new technology, but our system makes use of widely used ones. The innovation of our system comes up on how all these technologies are glued together to get a light and flexible system. We present three prototypes: an interactive advertising catalogue, a video player and a slideshow viewer.

Marta Cortes

Papers

Implementing Big Data Lake for Heterogeneous Data Sources

NFC-based interactive learning environments for children

Towards User Support in Ubiquitous Learning Systems

Concept drift adaptation techniques in distributed environment for real-world data streams

Controlling multimedia players using NFC enabled mobile phones