Andreas C. Sonnenbichler

Social Emergency Alert Service - A Location-Based Privacy-Aware Personal Safety Service

The advanced capabilities for location-based services of smart phones are mostly used for travel applications, navigation or business fleet management. We motivate a social emergency alert service that makes use of the wide availability of smart phones and activates nearby social contacts in cases of emergency. Research has shown, that especially in busy urban districts help from fellow citizens is hard to receive because of the so-called bystander-effect: Nearby people often do not recognize or take responsibility for ongoing emergency situations. A simple and fast mechanism to call for help is necessary. Additional to local authorities as the police or rescue services, assistance from family or acquaintances is a valuable and fast(er) supplement. We describe the architecture of an emergency alert service providing the functionality required for the activation of social contacts and present a prototype. The distribution of tasks between mobile devices and server infrastructure and the underlying communication protocol are designed energy-efficient and privacy preserving. The central tracking of geo-positions is avoided.

Emerging, Collective Intelligence for Personal, Organisational and Social Use

The main objective of this chapter is to present novel technologies for exploiting multiple layers of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together constitute Collective Intelligence, a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition among many individuals, and that seemingly has a mind of its own. User contributed content is analysed by integrating research and development in media analysis, mass content processing, user feedback, social analysis and knowledge management to automatically extract the hidden intelligence and make it accessible to end users and organisations. The exploitation of the emerging Collective Intelligence results is showcased in two distinct case studies: an Emergency Response and a Consumers Social Group case study.

A Social Location-Based Emergency Service to Eliminate the Bystander Effect

The availability of inexpensive smartphones with GPS units and the ability to run 3rd party software facilitated the rapid emergence of a large number of location-based services (LBS). While LBSs are mostly developed for supporting travel and navigation related application scenarios, in this contribution we want to motivate the use of mobile devices for personal safety services. The problem of getting help in a crowd has been addressed by research in social psychology for more than 30 years. Obstacles in the social help process have been summarized in the concept of the bystander effect. This contribution aims to show how a LBS can overcome these obstacles by activating the social group of a victim. We discuss features of an emergency alert service that notifies nearby contacts of a victim of the incident and guides them to the victim so that they can provide help. Furthermore, we will discuss several ways to develop an emergency alert service as an industrial product which infers the social closeness of service participants from different sources of data. Also, we will discuss and compare approaches for the system design we considered while implementing a prototype. A feasibility assessment indicates that this service will actually provide benefits in practice.

Application of a Community Membership Life Cycle Model on Tag-Based Communities in Twitter

Social networks are the backbone of Web 2.0. More than 500 million users are part of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, discussion boards or other virtual online communities. In this work we report on a first empirical study of the conceptional community membership life-cycle model of (Sonnenbichler, A Community Membership Life Cycle Model, Sunbelt XIX International Social Network Conference, University of California, San Diego, USA, 2009) applied on message data from the micro-blogging service Twitter. Based on hash tags we analyze ad-hoc communities of Twitter and we operationalize the roles of the conceptional model with the help of activity-levels and the local interaction structure of community members. We analyze the development of roles over the life-time of the community. Our explorative analysis supports the existence of the roles of the conceptional model and is a first step towards the empirical validation of the model and its operationalization. The knowledge of a community’s life-cycle model is of high importance for community service providers, as it allows to influence the group structure: Stage transitions can be supported or harmed, e.g. to strengthen the binding of a user to a site and keep communities alive.

ThesesDB – blended self-service and supervision of students’ theses

e-learning can be seen as service creation process between students and supervisors. In order to automate and enhance thesis and seminar processes at our university, we aim to increase transparency, traceability, communication, and success for our students and lecturers. Therefore, we suggest standardized process templates for students’ theses and their implementation with an IT support system. We start analyzing and designing processes for bachelor, master, and PhD theses as well as bachelor and master seminars and suggest process templates to cover these processes. To implement these standard processes, we design and implement an enhanced IT web application platform, ThesesDB. By providing a centralized view, we offer a self-service for students and supervisors in the process. Our approach is evaluated by the Computer System Usability and USE Questionnaire. Received on 20 January 2017; accepted on 06 June 2017; published on 20 June 2017

ThesesDB – Single-Source of Information and Workflow Support for Students’ Work

e-Learning can be seen as service creation process including core, enabling and enhancing services. We focus on enhancing services for managing thesis and seminar processes at our university in order to support transparency, track-ability, communication, and success for our students and lecturers. We analyze the processes for bachelor, master, and PhD theses and bachelor and master seminars. Consequently, we suggest process templates to cover these processes. The process templates are implemented as an enhanced IT web application, named ThesesDB, utilizing modern web technologies and used in our lectures. We evaluate our approach by the Computer System Usability and USE Questionnaire.

Computer Aided Exercise Generation - A Framework for Human Interaction in the Automated Exercise Generation Process

Creating exercises for tutorials and exams is part of lecturers’ daily business. Manually creating new exercises for each course is very time expensive. Literature shows many technical solutions in terms of online learning platforms supporting exercise generation, answer checking and students’ progress follow up. Most approaches solve specific problems and cannot be generalized in a way that a pattern for system design can be deducted. In this paper we point out a generic model for human interaction in the automated exercise generation process by identifying general constructs of exercise generation and by applying them on the outlined user interaction pattern. The application of the findings in a prototype for multi-criteria decision analysis indicates viability of the explained concept.

Social Access Control

Facebook is one of the most important social networking sites used by over a billion of people. Facebook offers a specialized and rather limited approach to decide upon content privacy for its users. In this paper we analyze the content protection features Facebook offers. We suggest four classes of Facebook users ranging from consumers with very limited content privacy requirements to consumers interested in fine-granular content restrictions. We want to empower the customer to choose on the access control model meeting their specific requirements. The access control model shall be customer-based and not modeled on a general Facebook-wide level. We show how such a flexible approach can be introduced into Facebook by the usage of the Access Definition and Query Language.

Territorial Safety Networks

It has been shown that crime and fear of crime are related to a loss of social control in large cities. Furthermore, the by-stander effect might prevent help for people in need in the case of an emergency. In this paper we suggest the Community Watch Service. It is a conceptional IT-framework to enable citizens create and/or join virtual, territorial communities. We define virtual, territorial communities as virtual communities which are linked to certain territorial aspects, e.g. a community for a certain city district, a specific street, a small town, a administrative border or any other territorial district. The Community Watch Service enriches each territory with certain software services offering functionality like reporting damage to public property, receiving information from public authorities or organizing help in the neighborhood. The Community Watch Service framework aims to improve social control in a positive way and to increase public safety in large cities. The framework is demonstrated with a prototype. It is available for standard web browsers and Android-based mobile phones.