Virtual reality applications for higher education: Design elements, lessons learned, and research agenda

The Diffusion of Crisis-Related Communication on Social Media: An Empirical Analysis of Facebook Reactions

During a crisis, authorities need to effectively disseminate information. We address the problem of deciding how crisis-related information should be published on Facebook to reach as many people as possible. We examine three recent terrorist attacks in Berlin, London and Stockholm. Our specific focus lies with official Facebook pages by municipalities and emergency service agencies. We collected posts about the events, along with the number of shares, likes and emotional reactions to them. In a regression analysis, several variables were examined that capture decisions on which information to publish and how. Posts containing condolences were found to result in three times as many emotiona…

Weighted Evaluation Framework for Cross-Platform App Development Approaches

Cross-platform app development is very challenging, although only two platforms with significant market share (iOS and Android) remain. While device fragmentation – multiple, only partly compatible versions of a platform – has been complicating matters already, the need to target different device classes is a new emergence. Smartphones and tablets are relatively similar but app-enabled devices such as TVs and even cars typically have differing capabilities. To facilitate usage of cross-platform app development approaches, we present work on an evaluation framework. Our framework provides a set of up-to-date evaluation criteria. Unlike prior work on this topic, it offers weighted assessment …

Understanding Decision Support in Large-Scale Disasters: Challenges in Humanitarian Logistics Distribution

Disasters are characterized by conflicting, uncertain, or lacking data. Nevertheless, humanitarian responders need to make rapid decisions. This is particularly true for the immediate response to a sudden onset disaster. Since most humanitarian decision support systems (DSS) make important assumptions on data availability and quality that are often not fulfilled in practice, decision-makers are largely left to their experience. In this paper, we identify three major challenges for an operational DSS to support distribution planning: (i) deep uncertainty; (ii) reflecting field conditions and constraints; and (iii) rapid humanitarian logistics modeling. We review the relevant theories and pro…

Discovering web services in social web service repositories using deep variational autoencoders

Abstract Web Service registries have progressively evolved to social networks-like software repositories. Users cooperate to produce an ever-growing, rich source of Web APIs upon which new value-added Web applications can be built. Such users often interact in order to follow, comment on, consume and compose services published by other users. In this context, Web Service discovery is a core functionality of modern registries as needed Web Services must be discovered before being consumed or composed. Many efforts to provide effective keyword-based service discovery mechanisms are based on Information Retrieval techniques as services are described using structured or unstructured textdocumen…

Design Principles for the Use of Social Network Services to Promote Citizen Engagement, Public Deliverable, SMR Project (H2020-DRS-2014 653569)

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On Constructing Persistent Identifiers with Persistent Resolution Targets

Persistent Identifiers (PID) are the foundation referencing digital assets in scientific publications, books, and digital repositories. In its realization, PIDs contain metadata and resolving targets in form of URLs that point to data sets located on the network. In contrast to PIDs, the target URLs are typically changing over time; thus, PIDs need continuous maintenance -- an effort that is increasing tremendously with the advancement of e-Science and the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Nowadays, billions of sensors and data sets are subject of PID assignment. This paper presents a new approach of embedding location independent targets into PIDs that allows the creation of maintena…

A systematic review of immersive virtual reality applications for higher education: Design elements, lessons learned, and research agenda

Abstract Researchers have explored the benefits and applications of virtual reality (VR) in different scenarios. VR possesses much potential and its application in education has seen much research interest lately. However, little systematic work currently exists on how researchers have applied immersive VR for higher education purposes that considers the usage of both high-end and budget head-mounted displays (HMDs). Hence, we propose using systematic mapping to identify design elements of existing research dedicated to the application of VR in higher education. The reviewed articles were acquired by extracting key information from documents indexed in four scientific digital libraries, whi…

Making decisions for effective humanitarian actions: a conceptual framework for relief distribution

AbstractResponding to a disaster encompasses a myriad of humanitarian actions; the ultimate and crucial is immediate relief distribution. Making effective decisions in chaotic disaster environment is always complex and challenging. Decisions made here are heavily influenced by the decisions made in several related problem areas such as facility locations, relief supply chain, transportation, scheduling, and inventory management. While each of these problem areas has its own set of decision factors, several of these factors are also common in multiple problem areas. These common decision factors offer both an opportunity and a challenge. The challenge is to balance the relative importance of…

Towards a resilience management guideline — Cities as a starting point for societal resilience

Unexpected crises and risks affect the urban population. Critical infrastructure dependency, climate change and social dynamics have captured the attention of city decision makers across different disciplines, sectors, and scales. Addressing these challenges mandates an increase in resilience. This article presents the development of the novel European Resilience Management Guideline (ERMG) developed by the European H2020 Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project. It encompasses five supporting tools for city resilience. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it describes the extensive co-creation methods used to establish, validate and test the five ERMG tools as collaborations among…

Towards the definitive evaluation framework for cross-platform app development approaches

Abstract Mobile app development is hindered by device fragmentation and vendor-specific modifications. Boundaries between devices blur with PC-tablet hybrids on the one side and wearables on the other. Future apps need to support a host of app-enabled devices with differing capabilities, along with their software ecosystems. Prior work on cross-platform app development concerned concepts and prototypes, and compared approaches that target smartphones. To aid choosing an appropriate framework and to support the scientific assessment of approaches, an up-to-date comparison framework is needed. Extending work on a holistic, weighted set of assessment criteria, we propose what could become the …

A Task Execution Scheme for Dew Computing with State-of-the-Art Smartphones

The computing resources of today’s smartphones are underutilized most of the time. Using these resources could be highly beneficial in edge computing and fog computing contexts, for example, to support urban services for citizens. However, new challenges, especially regarding job scheduling, arise. Smartphones may form ad hoc networks, but individual devices highly differ in computational capabilities and (tolerable) energy usage. We take into account these particularities to validate a task execution scheme that relies on the computing power that clusters of mobile devices could provide. In this paper, we expand the study of several practical heuristics for job scheduling including executi…

Experimental realization of a Persistent Identifier Infrastructure stack for Named Data Networking

The continuation of Persistent Identifier Infrastructures is crucial when next-generation Internet architectures based on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) arise. When moving to ICN, we must ensure the resolution of Persistent Identifiers (PID), such as the billions of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) used today, to provide continued access to scientific literature and research data. It provides the base for the necessary transformations in the Handle System architecture and protocol for running a PID system on the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, which is a recent incarnation of ICN. Furthermore, it examines the PID-specific resolution access patterns, investigates the expected…

Towards a Reference Architecture for Model-Driven Business Apps

Model-driven development techniques have been proposed for cross-platform app development. Typically, an individual domain-specific language (DSL) is used. The MD² framework consists of a DSL for business apps and generators, which transform a domain model to native platform code. Prior research on it focused on language and general generator design, this paper accentuates the code generation stage. A reference architecture for the generated apps is proposed to accelerate the development of new generators for which architectural decisions had been made on ad-hoc basis up to now. Moreover, generators are going to expose similar structures that facilitate maintenance. Our proposal takes MD²'s…

A Perspective Review on Integrating VR/AR with Haptics into STEM Education for Multi-Sensory Learning

As a result of several governments closing educational facilities in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, almost 80% of the world’s students were not in school for several weeks. Schools and universities are thus increasing their efforts to leverage educational resources and provide possibilities for remote learning. A variety of educational programs, platforms, and technologies are now accessible to support student learning; while these tools are important for society, they are primarily concerned with the dissemination of theoretical material. There is a lack of support for hands-on laboratory work and practical experience. This is particularly important for all disciplines related …

Requirements for Relief Distribution Decision-Making in Humanitarian Logistics

Making efficient and effective decisions in the chaotic environment of humanitarian relief distribution (HRD) is challenging. Decision-makers need to concentrate on numerous decision factors categorized into decision objectives, variables, and constraints. Recent HRD literature focuses on optimizing procedures while neglecting the quantification of essential requirements (decision factors) for information systems to provide decision-making support. In this article, we address this gap by accumulating affecting decision factors from both literature and practice. We investigated the practical implications of these factors in HRD decision-making by measuring the preferences of a Delphi panel c…

Session details: Distributed systems: WT - web technologies track

The Web is relentlessly evolving. Once a single interconnection of static, physically distributed content passively accessed by human users through personal computers, during the explosion of Web-based social networks the Web evolved into an environment allowing users worldwide to interact and collaborate to create user-generated content within many virtual communities. In this line, Web 2.0 is the umbrella term used to encompass several developments which followed, namely social networking sites and social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies (e.g. Flickr), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), Web applications ("apps"), collaborative platforms, and mashup applications. …

Refining a Reference Architecture for Model-Driven Business Apps

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A Taxonomy for App-Enabled Devices: Mastering the Mobile Device Jungle

While the term application is known for a long time, what we now refer to as mobile apps has facilitated task-oriented, interoperable software. The term was initially only used for smartphones and tablets, but desktop software now is also referred to as apps. More important than the wording, however, is the trend towards app-enablement of many further kinds of devices such as smart TVs and wearables. App-enabled devices usually share some characteristics and developing apps is often similar. However, many complexities must be mastered: Device fragmentation and cross-platform app development already are challenging when only considering smartphones. When trying to grasp the field as a whole,…

An Empirical Investigation of Performance Overhead in Cross-Platform Mobile Development Frameworks

AbstractThe heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard…

Conquering the Mobile Device Jungle: Towards a Taxonomy for App-enabled Devices

Introduction to the HICSS-54 Software Development for Mobile Devices, the Internet-of-Things, and Cyber-Physical Systems Minitrack

Context-Dependent Testing of Applications for Mobile Devices

An exploratory study of COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false cla…

How Cross-Platform Technology Can Facilitate Easier Creation of Business Apps

Applications for mobile devices – apps – have seen unprecedented growth in importance. Ever better apps keep propelling the proliferation of mobile computing. App development is rather easy, particularly if it is based on Web technology. However, implementing apps that are user friendly and useful in the long-run is cumbersome. Thereby, it typically is expensive for corporate developers. Nonetheless, business apps are embraced by enterprises. To overcome the overhead of developing separately for multiple platforms and to mitigate the problems of device fragmentation, cross-platform development approaches are employed. While many such approaches exist, few have found widespread usage. In thi…

A Bibliometric Analysis of the HICSS Software Technology Track

The HICSS Software Technology track has a long tradition and many papers have been published as part of its history. Its impact in terms of citations, paper contributions, author share and community impact does not yet seem to have been investigated, though. In particular, software technology has evolved, and as it stands, it is of primary importance for mobile computing, the Internet-of-Things and Cyber-physical Systems. Hence, the development of these topics and the related impact of this track are of particular interest. In this paper, we present a bibliographic analysis as a first step towards such an investigation. We found that the history of the track is indeed noteworthy. Our result…

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

- Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical require…

Introduction to the Mobile App Development Minitrack

The Use of Cross-Platform Frameworks for Google Play Store Apps

In this paper, we describe the harnessing and analyses of a large sample (n = 661705) of Android apps and associated metadata available on the Google Play Store. The analyses and scrutiny are in the context of cross-platform mobile development, as we report on the technologies used to develop apps for the Android ecosystem. Specifically, we quantify the use of 13 technical frameworks for cross-platform development, identify their distribution across Google Play Store categories, present an overview of framework usage from 2008 to 2019, app file size (.apk size), and lastly discuss our findings in the context of current industry trends and directions. Our findings indicate that cross-platfor…

Virtual Reality Applications for Higher Educations: A Market Analysis

Web Information Systems and Technologies

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, May 20-22, 2015, organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), and technically sponsored by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The purpose of the WEBIST series of conferences is to bring together researches, engineers and practitioners interested in technological advances and business applications of web-based information systems. The 17 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected originally 115 paper submi…

Generating App Product Lines in a Model-Driven Cross-Platform Development Approach

Within software product lines (SPL) similar software products are created based on common features. We applied this versatile approach to cross-platform app development by extending the domain-specific language (DSL) of an established model-driven development framework. The goal was to support the formulation of coherent building blocks of business use cases, referred to as workflow elements. While the former implementation already abstracted from technical details and provided the possibility to reuse low level features, it now enables to build business apps by combining coherent, self-contained workflow elements. Providing this support on the language level facilitates reusable component-…

Software Development for Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things and Wearable Devices: Inspecting the Past to Understand the Future

Progressive Web Apps: the Definite Approach to Cross-Platform Development?

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Unifier for Mobile Development

Introduction to the Minitrack on Software Development for Mobile Devices, Wearables, and the Internet-of-Things

Ecosystem of Social Media Listening Practices for Crisis Management

The benefits of using social media data as a source of information are recognized by both practice and research in crisis management. However, the existing understanding on the matter is fragmented, it oscillates between techno-determinisms and socio-determinisms, which does not provide a holistic picture. In this paper we argue that to better adapt social media data use practices, an ecosystem perspective is needed. In doing so, we conducted a systematic literature review and identified the various entities and their interrelationships that configure the practices of social media listening for crisis management. Then, we summarize our findings by proposing a conceptual ecosystem of practic…

Additional file 1 of Making decisions for effective humanitarian actions: a conceptual framework for relief distribution

Additional file 1.

Progressive Web Apps for the Unified Development of Mobile Applications

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) allow for web applications to be developed in an offline-first approach. While Web apps traditionally did not properly function without an Internet connection, PWAs enable them to be downloaded, installed and used offline on various systems, including mobile devices and personal computers. We present an introduction to the state-of-art in research and practice. Based on this, we discuss various underlying concepts and technologies. Then, we scrutinize and compare PWAs against cross-platform app development approaches on both technical and overarching aspects. A list of suggestions for future research is also presented. We urge academia to keep up with the latest …

A Simulation-based Performance Evaluation of Heuristics for Dew Computing

Turning Common Operational Picture Data into Double-loop Learning from Crises – can Vision Meet Reality?

Norwegian Research Council Grant #295848

Conceptualizing and Designing a Resilience Information Portal

Deep uncertainty in humanitarian logistics operations: decision-making challenges in responding to large-scale natural disasters

Humanitarian logistics operations perform challenging tasks while responding to large-scale natural disasters. Decision makers at different stages of humanitarian operations exploit numerous problem-specific decision-making models or tools. When synchronising the outputs (decisions) from models into a unified solution, the situation becomes critical because of the lack of consensus on objectives and the availability of model alternatives with uncertainty in the models' key parameters and evaluation of the models' alternative outcomes. Thus, the operational environment becomes complex to respond urgently to humanitarian needs and makes the situation deeply uncertain. In this paper, we inspec…

A Communication Platform That Facilitates Different Levels of Communication and Engagement as a Shared Resource in the Project, Public Deliverable, SMR Project (H2020-DRS-2014 653569)

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Project report: Requirements specification

The SAMRISK project “Sharing incident and threat information for common situational understanding“ (INSITU) commenced in May 2019. The INSITU project develops solutions for establishing a common situational understanding in complex operations requiring collaboration between several agencies. This involves systematic analysis of existing information sources and defining the information elements that are critical to share in different phases of a crisis situation. In addition, the project will develop procedures and related tool support for efficient collection and integration of information. As part of this work, the project contributes to harmonisation of terminology across agencies to secu…

Towards a Framework for Cross-Sector Collaboration: Implementing a Resilience Information Portal

Municipalities play an integral part in the strive for resilient societies. A resilient municipality is not only prepared for short-term shocks such as natural disasters but also more successful in mastering long-term stresses such as profound in-creases or decreases of population. Backed by a large-scale research project we have developed a Resilience Information Portal (RIP). It serves as an artefact to support cross-sector collaboration within a municipality. The core challenges in implementing such a portal reside not in the technological work, though. Rather, it needs to be implemented in the communication and IT strategy of a municipality and be tailored to the processes. In this arti…

Reengineering an Approach to Model-Driven Development of Business Apps

Despite a perceived convergence in mobile application development, platforms such as Android and iOS remain largely incompatible. Supporting multiple platforms currently requires either separate native development (for each system) or utilization of a cross-platform development framework. While many such frameworks have been developed, only few are mature and even less are used widely, let alone commercially. Moreover, they typically are limited with regard to performance and to preserving a native look & feel. Worst of all, their usefulness for business apps is limited due to their low level of abstraction. In this paper, we take a closer look at an academic prototype that employs model-dr…

Introduction to the Minitrack on Software Development for Mobile Devices, the Internet-of-Things, and Cyber-Physical Systems

Comparing the Capabilities of Mobile Platforms for Business App Development

Businesses increasingly embrace the possibilities of mobile computing. While there is broad advice for app developers in general, development of apps for enterprises is hardly covered. Business apps support internal processes and contribute to customer relationship management. The heterogeneity of platforms for mobile devices makes development difficult. At the same time, companies seek to support several platforms with their apps to maximize customer acceptance and to support the platforms best suited for their employees. Aiming at improving the knowledge on business app development, we present a framework for assessing mobile platforms. For this purpose, we have developed a distinct set o…

Design Principles for the Use of Social Networking Services to Promote Transdisciplinary Collaboration, Public Deliverable, SMR Project (H2020-DRS-2014 653569)

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Social Media Data in an Augmented Reality System for Situation Awareness Support in Emergency Control Rooms

AbstractDuring crisis situations, emergency operators require fast information access to achieve situation awareness and make the best possible decisions. Augmented reality could be used to visualize the wealth of user-generated content available on social media and enable context-adaptive functions for emergency operators. Although emergency operators agree that social media analytics will be important for their future work, it poses a challenge to filter and visualize large amounts of social media data. We conducted a goal-directed task analysis to identify the situation awareness requirements of emergency operators. By collecting tweets during two storms in Germany we evaluated the usefu…

Comprehensive Analysis of Innovative Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks

More than experience? On the unique opportunities of virtual reality to afford a holistic experiential learning cycle

Virtual reality has been proposed as a promising technology for higher education since the combination of immersive and interactive features enables experiential learning. However, previous studies did not distinguish between the different learning modes of the four-stage experiential learning cycle (i.e., concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation). With our study, we contribute a deeper understanding of how the unique opportunities of virtual reality can afford each of the four experiential learning modes. We conducted three design thinking workshops with interdisciplinary teams of students and lecturers. These workshops resulted in…

Technology-Mediated Learning for Resilience