16644843
Alleviating Consumers' Privacy Concerns in Location-Based Services: A Psychological Control Perspective
Location-based services (LBS), enabled by advances in mobile and positioning technologies, have afforded users with a pervasive flexibility to be uniquely addressable and to access network and services on-the-move. However, because LBS could also associate the lifestyle habits, behaviors, and movements with a consumer’s personal identity, privacy concerns are particularly salient for LBS. Drawing on psychological control and privacy literature, we designed an experiment study to test the basic proposition that the assurance of consumers’ perceived control over their personal information has a considerable influence on alleviating their privacy concerns. Three different mechanisms of assurance of control—technology, industry self-regulation, and legislation—were manipulated in the experiment, and their effects on consumers’ privacy concerns were examined. The results indicated that the technological assurance mechanism (i.e., mobile device in this study) played the most important role in assuring consumers’ perceived control over personal information. The marriage of the privacy and psychological control literature streams provides a rich understanding of consumers’ privacy reaction to LBS usage and, therefore, benefits the privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) research in the Information Systems discipline.
15979413
Consumers' Privacy Concerns toward Using Location-Based Services: An Exploratory Framework and Research Proposal
Privacy concerns associated with the use of Location-Based Services (LBS) may ultimately prevent consumers from gaining the ‘anytime anywhere’ convenience. Through a psychological control lens, we examine whether individual difference variables such as locus of control (LOC) could have moderating effects on the relationship between privacy concern and three privacy assurance mechanisms in the LBS context. The paper develops a preliminary research model which conceptualizes the moderating effects of LOC by extending Xu and Teo (2004)’s research model. With an explicit focus on LOC, this study will not only add an important piece of information to our understanding of consumers’ reactions to LBS but also can help frame the ongoing policy and scholarly debate surrounding the relative effectiveness of technology, industry self-regulation and government legislation in ensuring consumers’ privacy. We believe that our findings will be able to offer practical implications for the various players in the LBS landscape: merchants, wireless service providers, wireless device manufacturer, privacy advocates and legislators.
5913002
Formal modeling of synchronization methods for concurrent objects in Ada 95
One important role for Ada programming is to aid engineering of concurrent and distributed software. In a concurrent and distributed environment, objects may execute concurrently and need to be synchronized to serve a common goal. Three basic methods by which objects in a concurrent environment can be constructed and synchronized have been identified [1]. To formalize the semantics of these methods and to provide a formal model of their core behavior, we provide some graphic models based on the Petri net formalism. The purpose of this formal modeling is to illustrate the possibility of automatic program analysis for object-oriented features in Ada-95. Models for the three distributed- object synchronization methods are discussed, and a potential deadlock situation for one of the methods/models is illustrated. We conclude with some comparison of the three methods in terms of the model abstractions.
18614429
A petri net based XML firewall security model for web services invocation
An XML firewall differs from a conventional firewall because its major task is to control access to web services rather than to filter untrusted addresses. An XML firewall can effectively protect web services from being attacked by inspecting a complete XML message including its head and data segments, and rejecting unauthorized web services invocation. In this paper, we propose a formal XML firewall security model using role-based access control (RBAC). Our proposed model supports user authentication and user authorization according to information stored in a user database and a policy database associated with an XML firewall. The formal model is designed compositionally using Petri nets, which can serve as a high-level design for XML firewall implementation. The key components of our compositional security model are the application model and the XML firewall model. To illustrate the advantages of our formal approach, we use an existing Petri net tool to verify some key properties of our model, such as boundedness and liveness.
7143460
A system of high-dimensional, efficient, long-cycle and portable uniform random number generators
We propose a system of multiple recursive generators of modulus <i>p</i> and order <i>k</i> where all nonzero coefficients of the recurrence are equal. The advantage of this property is that a single multiplication is needed to compute the recurrence, so the generator would run faster than the general case. For <i>p</i> = 2<sup>31</sup> − 1, the most popular modulus used, we provide tables of specific parameter values yielding maximum period for recurrence of order <i>k</i> = 102 and 120. For <i>p</i> = 2<sup>31</sup> − 55719 and <i>k</i> = 1511, we have found generators with a period length approximately 10<sup>14100.5</sup>.
28938007
A novel carrier frequency tracking scheme for time domain differential OFDM
We develop a novel scheme to track carrier frequency offset in time domain differential modulation and demodulation OFDM systems. Compared with existing methods, this scheme is more bandwidth efficient and easier to implement. Simulation results in the Rayleigh fading channel show that this frequency tracking scheme can work robustly under relatively low SNR conditions.
7136406
Towards Automated Development of Multi-Agent Systems Using RADE
To facilitate the development of multi-agent systems and improve the reusability, robustness and feasibility of these systems, we proposed a role-based agent development framework (RADE). In this paper, we present more details on the design of agents and motivations within such framework. We introduce a practical approach to modeling agent’s motivation and specifying agent’s goals, where a role-mapping mechanism is developed based on this design. We also introduce the RTAEMS language based on the extension of TAEMS to model the plan tree for each goal. This representation is used to support the development of general planning/scheduling and collaboration/cooperation mechanisms.