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Social Computing

Internet of Things Search Engine: Concepts, Classification, and Open Issues

Internet of Things (IoT) enabled infrastructures, products, and services are revolutionising the way businesses and societies engage and operate. Billions of devices, small and large, are predicted to be connected via Internet over the coming years. These devices and the systems built upon them will be generating huge amount of data and information that would be leveraged for providing different products and services. One of the core components of such systems will be Internet of Things Search Engines (IoTSE) because without customised search engines, it is not possible to detect and use devices, sensors and  actuators, that form the IoT systems. Hence, it is important to understand various concepts, technologies, and aspects of IoTSE, which is a complicated and relatively immature research topic. The diversity of IoT systems and the content they generate poses a significant challenge to advance the R&D for IoTSE. To fill this gap, we have produced an article to help easily understand the concepts, classification, and open issues for IoTSE. We are glad to share that this article has been accepted in the ACM Communication magazine, which is one of the top venue for ICT publications. This is the pre-print copy of the article, whose abstract below can provide a brief about the content of the article. Read More »Internet of Things Search Engine: Concepts, Classification, and Open Issues

Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

I’m very glad to share that Australian Quarterly has included my article on Smart Cities in the special edition of the best articles published in 2016. Apart from an endorsement of the  potential value of the article on an important topic like Smart Cities, the best part of this news is that the special edition is completely free for distribution that is why I have attached it here for download . This article provides a vision and strategies for conceiving and implementing projects that can contribute to building and evolving Smart Cities, which is an umbrella term used for socio-technical innovation for improving the liveability of cities, regions, and suburbs. In this article, I have particularly emphasise the importance of building and sustaining strong collaborative ties among governments, councils, private sectors, and universities for co-conceiving and materialising Smart Cities initiatives and projects. I have particularly highlighted the role and importance of Smart Campus as an experimental testbed for supporting the collaborations for Smart Cities projects.Read More »Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Energy monitoring and management systems play a vital role in helping achieve the strategic as well as operational goals for Smart Cities/Smart Buildings. Whilst sustainability friendly mans of generating energy can go a long way of making a country/city/region carbon neutral, which is an agenda of any smart city initiative, energy monitoring and management systems can contribute significantly by brining innovation in energy distribution and utilisation. Having noticed our Smart Cities initiative‘s increasing activities and widespread engagements in not only South Australia but other parts of the country, the German-Australian Chamber invited us to be a partner in the organisation of a seminar on “energy efficiency in buildings” on November 22, 2016. The draft of the program can be download here. According to the program, I’ll be giving an opening talk, Smart Cities Initiatives and Supporting Energy Management Systems, for which I’ll be relying on our research and development activities on Smart Cities related initiatives and projects over the last 18 months. The seminar’s goal is to initiative and groom productive and fruitful dialogue between German companies and Australian  academic institutions in order to Read More »German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Smart Cities initiatives can mean different things to different people and solutions providers. However, there is no doubt that a smart city solution should not only focus on providing the core service but should also contribute to the safety of the users of a service. That is why quite a lot of smart cities solutions are being presented from safety perspective as well – smart cities ought to be safer cities. I was honoured to be invited to present our initiative on Smart Cities R&D and innovation at an event co-organised by NEC and IDC – the event was titled, “Smarter and Safer Society – How ICT makes Government and Enterprise work smarter ”. It was a great get together where different speakers and panelists were enthusiastically presenting their visions, understanding, and observations about smart cities initiatives and solutions. I really enjoyed the talks, dialogues between panelist and audience. I spoke about our initiative on setting up an interdisciplinary centre for research, development, and innovation that can lead to citizen-inspired socio-technical solutions for making a city smarter. Here are the presentation that I used for supporting the talk and following is the abstract of my talk.
Read More »Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Ecoversity Funds Smart Waste Management Project

We have been awarded a small amount of funding to carry out a project aimed at developing and evaluating a game based application for raising the awareness about the waste management system introduced by Ecoversity initiative at the University of Adelaide. This project will be built upon the summer project on a similiar topic, Waste Management Education, carried out by Yue Zhuo, who was awarded a summer scholarship by Data61 (formally NICTA). This project will contribute to Ecoversity’s goal of improving the on campus waste management for sustainability and financial benefits. We are very excited to work on this project as it would enhance our collaboration with Ecoversity team as we share several common goals. This project will also contribute to our Smart Campus research agenda under our Smart Cities initiative. Read More »Ecoversity Funds Smart Waste Management Project

Smart Cities: Cyber Security and Privacy

Whilst the “Smart City” phenomenon is increasingly becoming a popular term among almost all circles of everyday life, the real progress on conceiving, devising, deploying and evolving services for “Smart City” remains slow. Governments, councils, and private sectors appear to be finding different ways of capitalising on the popularity and potential of “Smart City” phenomenon to address the challenges of increasing urbanisation. However, citizens and civil rights groups remain skeptical about the potential privacy violations of the data that need to be captured and analysed for providing the “Smart City” services and the security aspects those services in the face of persistent cyber attacks. And these two concerns are some of the biggest issues in the success of a “Smart City” initiative. Recently, our “Smart City” initiative was covered by the Guardian news paper and the ABC News and both of the media venues focused on the privacy issues involved in the “Smart City” projects.

Read More »Smart Cities: Cyber Security and Privacy

NEC Announces Collaboration with University of Adelaide on Smart Cities

We are very glad that NEC Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with us on smart city related projects. This is a really exciting update as the MoU will enable researchers from our centre, Australian Centre for Smart Cities, to work closely with NEC team in Adelaide and elsewhere on challenging research and development projects for innovation in the area of Smart Cities. Australian Centre for Smart Cities has been forming close ties with several industrial, governmental, councils, and businesses for exploring the possibilities of joint efforts for developing knowledge, capacity, and services that can help accelerate the smart cities initiatives at the state and national levels. I’m copying one particular quote of the NEC Executive Director here as its indicates their confidence in our Centre’s ability to carry out excellent research and development in smart cities domain.

“We look forward to working closely with the University of Adelaide to find innovative answers to the challenges that demand a Smart Cities approach to urban living. The combination of the University of Adelaide’s research excellence and NEC’s global and local expertise in technologies that are essential for Smart Cities will open up new opportunities in the field,” said Mike Barber, Executive Director at NEC Australia.”Read More »NEC Announces Collaboration with University of Adelaide on Smart Cities

Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City

Smart City initiatives in different parts of the world are gaining momentum and such initiatives are inspiring governments, councils, private sectors, and citizens everywhere – As the Lord Mayor of Amsterdam once said that Smart Cities are just like “Football teams” that every city wants to have one its own. Since starting our Smart Cities initiative at the University of Adelaide and joining the steering committee of the Adelaide city initiative, I have been observing more and more initiatives and activities about smart cities at different  levels. Last week, I was approached to make a presentation about Smart City during a workshop of It services team of Charles Sturt City council. The purpose of the workshop was to have the staff envisage Bowden, a relatively new development in Adelaide, as a smart area of quality living for people in different demographic categories. Despite being extremely snowed under with several tasks with hard deadlines, I accepted the invitation of making a short presentation on smart city and ICT driven innovation to inspire the participant before their brainstorming session on coming up with smart city services.Read More »Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City

Smart Campus: Understanding Privacy Concerns of End Users

Like Smart Cities initiatives, smart campus initiatives have also been gaining a significant attention of Universities aimed at bringing optimisation and efficiencies in the operations of Universities and contributing to the sustainability drives. Smart campuses basically utilises the similar (or same in many respects) infrastructures to provide innovative solutions to address socio-techincal challenges and improve students and staff quality of experience. Smart campuses actually can be more readily designed and built as most of the required  Information and communication technologies are usually already present in Universities. Smart campus services are also designed and provisioned using the data gathered from end users through their usage of on campus wifi and other data collection devices. The automatic data collection from the usage and movements of students and staff – however, there has been concerns with regards to the privacy of the students and staff and a term Dataveillance has been used for automatic data collection.Read More »Smart Campus: Understanding Privacy Concerns of End Users

Extended Team Model in GSD and Structures

We have been researching the theoretical concepts and practical implementation of Extended Team Model in Global Software Development (GSD) arrangements. This research has been motivated by the increasing popularity of developing software involving cross-organizational teams that are characterised by all sorts of distances (e.g., geographical, cultural, temporal, and knowledge). While there is plenty of literature on different models of GSD (e.g., outsourcing and distributed development centres), there is little known about the structures (work, social, and communication) that may exist in ETM and what affordances those structures provide to support collaboration and coordination. Our research in this area has produced some initial findings that have revealed that whilst the current structures in the studied team help deal with different GSD challenges, these structures appear to have certain challenges inherent in them and the affordances they provide. Based on these findings, our extensive observations from GSD projects in different settings, and structured review of the published literature, we have made a few recommendations for improving the current structures to deal with the observed challenges. The findings from the first phase of data analysis  have been reported in a paper that was presented in the 8th International Conference on Global Software Engineering by Mansooreh Zahedi. The slides from her presentation provide some glimpses of different aspects of our study. Read More »Extended Team Model in GSD and Structures