Euthimios Panagos

Information filtering and personalization: Context, serendipity and group profile effects

Information filtering and personalization are central to the viability of many advanced connected services that are currently being developed for mobile consumer electronic devices. The usability of these services is closely tied to their ability to offer relevant, context sensitive information while shielding the user from both information overload and missing information that she/he did not know to ask for. Furthermore, in many cases, groups of users may use such services in social situations and this dictates the need for deriving group preferences which are based on the preferences of individual group members. In this paper we present a unified information filtering and personalization model that captures the above features. In addition, we present preliminary results from a case study that provides supporting evidence for our unified model.

The mHealth Stack: Technology Enablers for Patient-Centric Mobile Healthcare

Applications accessible through mobile devices, such as mobile phones, are playing an increasingly important part in the delivery of high quality and personalized healthcare services. In this paper, we examine current usage of mobile devices and networks by mobile healthcare applications, and present our views on how mobile devices and networks could be used for creating patient-centered healthcare applications. The patient-centered healthcare paradigm allows for increased quality of care and quality of life for patients while increasing personal freedom to move about and be always connected to care-givers and healthcare services. The structure of our discussion is analogous to layered protocol stack in communications, progressing from the network and radio technologies, servicing middleware, cloud services, health sensors, mobile smartphones, and applications. All these layers come into play to support future mobile healthcare services.

Near Real–Time Call Detail Record ETL Flows

Telecommunication companies face significant business challenges as they strive to reduce subscriber churn and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) by offering new services and incorporating new functionality into existing services. The increased number of service offerings and available functionality result in an ever growing volume of call detail records (CDRs). For many services (e.g., pre-paid), CDRs need to be processed and analyzed in near real-time for several reasons, including charging, on-line subscriber access to their accounts, and analytics for predicting subscriber usage and preventing fraudulent activity. In this paper, we describe the challenges associated with near real-time extract, transform, and load (ETL) of CDR data warehouse flows for supporting both the operational and business intelligence needs of telecommunication services, and we present our approach to addressing these challenges.

Selective replication for content management environments

Content management applications typically depend on information stored in both relational database tables and operating system files. Often, content providers replicate all or parts of the available database data and associated files to increase application availability, address resource constraints and costs, or better support geographically dispersed and mobile users. This article presents a solution that addresses integrated and selective database and file replication in the context of an enterprise voice portal. The solution is transparent to existing applications and imposes minimal storage overhead.

Trusted Access to Sensitive Information in a Diverse Services Environment

Mobile application service providers are trying to strike a balance between offering personalized services and safeguarding user privacy. Being able to offer targeted and relevant services requires access to sensitive user information, such as health records, financial transactions, preferences, and location. Users, on the other hand, are reluctant to allow access to their sensitive information when no mechanisms are in place to ensure the proper usage of this information. In this paper, we describe TASER, a trusted gateway between service providers and sensitive information owners. TASER ensures that only authorized and reputable service providers are given access to sensitive information required by their services for users that have opted-in to such services.

Privity: Scalable infrastructure for enforcing privacy and security of personal information

Today, privacy and security concerns are being perceived as major roadblocks to creating vibrant marketplaces for context-aware personalized information services. Marketplace members would benefit if a trusted third-party could manage the complex privacy and security requirements associated with such services accessing end-users personal and confidential information. This paper describes a clearinghouse approach that can foster information services marketplaces for end-users, personal and confidential information database owners, and value-added Application Service Providers (ASPs). The paper focuses on a credential-delegation crypto-system for scaling the clearinghouse by obviating the need for ASPs to proxy every request to the clearinghouse for approval.