Search results

This study aims to improve disaster management. Social media, particularly microblog, has become a new platform for public opinion dissemination. However, few studies have been conducted to explore the structure of public opinions, the approaches for facilitating the spread of public opinions and the results of public opinion dissemination in the context of mobile internet for the purpose of improving disaster management.

This paper chooses Ebola as the research topic and extracts 14,735 Ebola-related data items from Sina Microblogs to examine the information nodes of public opinion and the characteristics of propagation paths on mobile internet. Particularly, nodes of public opinion between mobile terminals and non-mobile terminals are compared.

The results of this paper reveal the characteristics of public opinion propagation on mobile internet and verify the effectiveness of public opinion propagation on mobile internet. This study shows that public opinions propagate quickly, widely and efficiently and further generate great impacts on mobile internet.

The methods used in this study can be useful for the government agencies and other relevant organizations to monitor public opinions, identify issues and problems proactively and develop strategies in a more efficient manner to improve disaster management.

The results of this paper are helpful for related departments to monitor public opinions and to further improve disaster management.

This paper explores the mechanism of public opinion dissemination on mobile internet and further investigates how to improve disaster management through a case study related to Ebola.

The purpose of this paper is to present the integration of logistic management with information and communication technologies to largely improve the effectiveness of logistic fleet operations. The work presented here shows a real‐world fleet management system that integrates mobile communication and supports real‐time logistic information flow management.

First, the application of information and mobile communication technologies in providing effective logistic distribution service is introduced. Then, the proposed real‐time fleet management system (RTFMS) architecture is depicted, the technology profiles for mobile data terminal (MDT) and logistic information system are described, and the considerations of various wireless mobile communication technologies for logistic distribution process are also addressed. Finally, the implications of this paper are discussed and plans for further work are outlined.

The proposed architecture for a real‐world logistic fleet management system, the RTFMS, can be served as reference architecture for real‐time logistic fleet management design. The major components of the RTFMS have been described in UML use cases to facilitate reuse of this design. This paper presents the RTFMS architecture with associated information flows and timing considerations could be used for the architecture adaptation in similar applications. Wireless technologies provide the logistics feet management with bi‐directional real‐time information flows as shown in this paper, and this would stimulate new ideas in logistics management and services models.

This paper provides a reference model with implementation in adopting wireless technologies in logistics distribution process. However, the services provided by each specific system would depend on all stakeholders in specific chain of logistics service provider and consumer.

The work presented here shows a real‐world fleet management system that integrates mobile communication and supports real‐time logistic information flow management.

Vehicle crashes and being struck by vehicles are the leading causes of death among police. The purpose of this paper is to identify risk factors for injury in police officer vehicle crashes in order to help determine the most effective approaches to improve officer vehicle safety.

The study entailed a cross-sectional survey of officer drivers involved in vehicle crashes from 16 local, county, and state law enforcement agencies across the USA over one year. The relative risk of injury for officers in crashes with a given characteristic relative comparison crashes without that characteristic was computed to determine which characteristics are more likely to be associated with injuries.

The survey yielded 854 crashes, 90 of which involved injuries to the officer driver. Crash characteristics associated with a statistically significant increase in the risk of injury include multiple vehicle collisions, collision direction, officer vehicle type, officer vehicle being stopped, driving under emergency conditions, conducting traffic control or assisting motorists, not wearing a seat belt, and others. Most findings hold for all crashes and when minor crashes are excluded from the analysis.

This study presents the first quantitative estimates of the risk factors for injury to law enforcement officers in vehicle crashes. Our findings indicate that seat belt use remains a critical safety intervention; driving under emergency conditions is high risk, though the reasons for this are unclear; better practices are needed to protect officers in stationary vehicles; agencies should carefully weigh the benefit of motorcycles against the vastly increased risk of injury they present; and that mobile data terminals are both a major distraction hazard and important source of injuries in crashes.

With the yearly increase of mileage and passenger volume in China's high-speed railway, the problems of traditional paper railway tickets have become increasingly prominent, including complexity of business handling process, low efficiency of ticket inspection and high cost of usage and management. This paper aims to make extensive references to successful experiences of electronic ticket applications both domestically and internationally. The research on key technologies and system implementation of railway electronic ticket with Chinese characteristics has been carried out.

Research in key technologies is conducted including synchronization technique in distributed heterogeneous database system, the grid-oriented passenger service record (PSR) data storage model, efficient access to massive PSR data under high concurrency condition, the linkage between face recognition service platforms and various terminals in large scenarios, and two-factor authentication of the e-ticket identification code based on the key and the user identity information. Focusing on the key technologies and architecture the of existing ticketing system, multiple service resources are expanded and developed such as electronic ticket clusters, PSR clusters, face recognition clusters and electronic ticket identification code clusters.

The proportion of paper ticket printed has dropped to 20%, saving more than 2 billion tickets annually since the launch of the application of E-ticketing nationwide. The average time for passengers to pass through the automatic ticket gates has decreased from 3 seconds to 1.3 seconds, significantly improving the efficiency of passenger transport organization. Meanwhile, problems of paper ticket counterfeiting, reselling and loss have been generally eliminated.

E-ticketing has laid a technical foundation for the further development of railway passenger transport services in the direction of digitalization and intelligence.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a participatory library service based on artificial intelligence (AI).

AI technologies and various technologies for facilitating the use of the currently existing libraries and the third-party resources are combined in the new mobile and social networking environments to provide an innovative real-time virtual reference service. Special aesthetic design and library marketing measures are adopted to expand the gains of the service. Questionnaire survey, in-depth interview, and statistical analysis are conducted to evaluate the effects of the service.

A smart talking robot called Xiaotu (female) is developed. This robot is regarded as a promising new online reference service modus operandi. Four factors contribute to the success of the robot, namely, AI, self-learning, vivid logo and language, and modular architecture.

Xiaotu presents a participatory library service, in which users participate in the resources collection and become content co-creators. Her presence at anytime and anywhere on any kind of terminal maximizes her potential for the delivery of virtual reference services. Xiaotu has the potential to be a general reference robot or a costumed institute robot.

AI is adopted in libraries to form an innovative online reference service. The participatory library service is practiced through a high-featured interactive communication. The aesthetic design of Xiaotu and the related promotions are new in libraries as well.

This paper aims to propose an extensible, service-oriented framework for context-aware data acquisition, description, interpretation and reasoning, which facilitates the development of mobile applications that provide a context-awareness service.

First, the authors propose the context data reasoning framework (CDRFM) for generating service-oriented contextual information. Then they used this framework to composite mobile sensor data into low-level contextual information. Finally, the authors exploited some high-level contextual information that can be inferred from the formatted low-level contextual information using particular inference rules.

The authors take “user behavior patterns” as an exemplary context information generation schema in their experimental study. The results reveal that the optimization of service can be guided by the implicit, high-level context information inside user behavior logs. They also prove the validity of the authors’ framework.

Further research will add more variety of sensor data. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness of our framework, more reasoning rules need to be performed. Therefore, the authors may implement more algorithms in the framework to acquire more comprehensive context information.

CDRFM expands the context-awareness framework of previous research and unifies the procedures of acquiring, describing, modeling, reasoning and discovering implicit context information for mobile service providers.

Support the service-oriented context-awareness function in application design and related development in commercial mobile software industry.

Extant researches on context awareness rarely considered the generation contextual information for service providers. The CDRFM can be used to generate valuable contextual information by implementing more reasoning rules.

In light of a growing trend towards mobile information management and a UK governmental drive for police forces to implement mobile technologies and realise significant benefits, it is important to examine the factors affecting officer acceptance. There appears to be little understanding of the key factors, yet this is critical to the success of the initiative. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the main factors that influence the usage of mobile technologies amongst police officers.

A qualitative, partially ethnographic design was followed to allow an in‐depth exploration of this issue. The study was based on a mixed‐methods longitudinal evaluation study of the implementation of mobile technologies within a UK police force over a nine‐month period. The technology acceptance model (TAM) and the subsequent TAM2 and TAM3, were then reengineered to provide a suitable theoretical model for a mobile policing context.

In total, four main categories of officer acceptance factors were identified: officer performance, security/reliability, management style and cognitive acceptance. Evidence from the study showed a key shortfall in all three versions of the TAM in that they focus on the user perspective and did not confirm the broader organisational factors within the implementation and social contexts of mobile policing.

Consequently, an adapted mobile‐TAM (m‐TAM) was produced that incorporated these factors into the existing TAM elements. The high‐level nature of the adapted model for mobile policing means it could be applied by other police forces and potentially other organisations, regardless of the type of mobile device implemented, to address the barriers to acceptance. The m‐TAM addresses the need for a more relevant and robust model to the mobile policing paradigm, which goes beyond the static technology environment in which the TAM2 and TAM3 were built.

In this paper, we develop and evaluate an approach to assessing the content quality in a location‐based service (LBS). The proposed approach, instead of assessing the quality in absolute terms such as completeness or accuracy, measures the effect that the imperfection of the content is having on the reliability of that specific LBS. We apply the basic ideas from Software Reliability Engineering (SRE), but develop a modification of SRE, 2‐Branch, in order to separate content quality from other factors, such as positioning imprecision, and to reduce the measurement error. In our experimental study, we first compare 2‐Branch to the standard SRE, after which we experimentally analyze some properties of SRE methodology as such in the context of an LBS. The experiments indicate that 2‐Branch has in most cases a lower measurement error than the standard SRE. A corollary to that is that 2‐Branch can achieve, therefore, as low an error level as the standard SRE, using a worse and thus cheaper oracle. Getting a good oracle is probably the main cost factor in evaluating the quality of an information service, thus being able to use a cheaper one may result in significant savings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way technology affects the provision of prehospital emergency care, upgrading the quality of services offered and significantly reducing the risk of premature termination of the patients.

The paper presents the development of the eEKAB, a pilot emergency medical information system that simulates the main services offered by the Greek National Instant Aid Centre (EKAB). The eEKAB was developed on an agile system methodology. From a technical perspective, the features and the technology were mainly chosen to provide reliable and user-friendly interfaces that will attract many users. eEKAB is based on three important pillars for offering health care to the patients: the “On-time Incident Reporting”, the “On-time Arrival at the Incident” and “Transfer to the Health Center”. According to the literature review, the emergency medical services (EMS) systems that combine all the features are very few.

It reduces the total time of the EMS procedures and it allows for an easier management of EMS, by providing a better allocation of human resources and a better geographical distribution of ambulances. The evaluation displayed that it is a very helpful application for the ambulance drivers as it reduces the ambulance response time to arrive in the patient's location and contributes significantly to the general performance of the prehospital medical care system. Also, the survey verified the importance of implementing eEKAB on a larger scale beyond the pilot usage. It is worth mentioning that the younger ambulance drivers had a more positive view for the purpose of the application.

The paper clearly identifies implications for further research. Regarding interoperability, the mobile app cooperates with the Operational Center of EKAB, while further collaboration could be achieved with other operational ambulance handling center, mainly, of the private sector. The system can evolve to include better communications among the EKAB departments. Particularly, the ambulance crew as well as the doctors should be informed with more incident features such as the emergency signal so that they know whether to open the siren, the patient's name, etc. The authors are currently working on implementing some features to provide effective medical health services to the patient in the ambulance.

eEKAB will have very significant implications in case of its enforcement, such as the reduction of the total time of EMS procedures with a corresponding reduction of the operating costs of an accident management system and an ambulance fleet handling system while in parallel informing in time the doctors/clinics. It will provide better distribution of ambulances as well as of total human resources. It will greatly assist ambulance drivers, while reducing ambulance response time to reach the patient's location. In other words, the authors will have a better performance of the whole prehospital care system.

Providing emergency care before the hospital is of great importance for upgrading the quality of health services provided at the accident site, thus significantly reducing the risk of premature death of patients. This in itself has a significant social implication.

The paper demonstrates a solid understanding in the field of the EMS systems and the corresponding medical services offered. It proposes the development of an effective, feasible and innovative EMS information system that will improve the existing emergency health care system in Greece (EKAB). An in depth literature review and presentation of the adopted new technologies and the respective architecture take place. An evaluation and statistical validation were conducted for proving the high applicability of eEKAB in case of real-life running.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that agency culture, training, and supervision play in the rates of on-the-job seatbelt use among peace officers, as well as other officer safety-related driving concerns such as cell phone use, Mobile Data Terminal use, and other sources of distraction.

Based on semi-structured interviews with California peace officers.

This study found an array of agency culture issues related to on-duty collisions, including distraction, failure to follow policy or procedure, fatigue, self-selection processes among officers and agencies, supervision and field training processes, morale issues, and family/lifestyle issues.

To explain these agency culture findings, this paper introduces the concept of the “banality of risk” to understand why many officers choose not to use risk-attenuating equipment. The findings are suggestive of a set of best practices that agencies could consider regarding in-vehicle officer safety.