Stanislav Kurkovsky

Using ubiquitous computing in interactive mobile marketing

Unique features of handheld devices, including their mobility, personalization and location-awareness engender new types of applications for mobile commerce, such as mobile advertising. Mobile marketing and advertising applications deliver promotional information to consumers based on their preferences and location. In this paper, we present SMMART, a context-aware, adaptive and personalized m-commerce application designed to deliver targeted promotions to the users of mobile devices about the products they like while guarding the users’ identity and protecting them from any unsolicited messages. Promotions distributed by SMMART are personalized by performing intelligent matching of the user’s shopping interests to current promotions available at a retail site. SMMART can adapt to changing preferences of its user by inconspicuously monitoring his or her shopping habits. We describe a fully functional prototype of SMMART built for Pocket PCs running Windows CE with .NET Compact Framework. This paper also presents a study demonstrating end-user usability and economic viability of SMMART.

RFID-Based Authentication Middleware for Mobile Devices

Ever-growing popularity of mobile devices, such as smart phones and netbooks, coupled with anytime and anyplace availability of high-speed network access is changing the ways how we compute and communicate. Mobile devices play an increasingly important role in our lives and tend to become representations of our digital selves when we trust these devices with sensitive information. Consequently, the problem of securing mobile devices against unauthorized access has never been more important. We present an RFID-based Authentication Middleware (RFID-AM) that combines point of entry and continuous authentication with transparent on-demand encryption of user files. This paper details the architecture of RFID-AM, discusses its fully functional prototype, and presents experimental results demonstrating its performance in various conditions. This paper also surveys different methods and technologies that have been proposed and implemented on mobile devices.

Mobile computing and robotics in one course: why not?

Robotic technology offers an excellent platform providing a hands-on learning environment for reinforcing theoretical topics in computer science, computer and electrical engineering, and mathematics. Robotics has been successfully used to promote student interest in computing and other STEM disciplines. However, students whose interest in computing may have been sparked or sustained by robots may be seeking more experience with robotics in the rest of the computing curriculum. This paper describes an effort to introduce robotics-related material into an existing upper-level course in mobile computing and discusses the rationale for such a pairing.

SMMART, a context-aware mobile marketing application: experiences and lessons

A new class of m-commerce applications is emerging due to the unique features of handheld devices, such as mobility, personalization and location-awareness. This paper presents SMMART, a context-aware, adaptive and personalized m-commerce application designed to deliver targeted promotions to the users of mobile devices. SMMART adapts to changing interests of its user by monitoring his or her shopping habits and guarantees the privacy of its users by not transmitting any personally identifiable information to the retailers. We describe our experiences of building and evaluating a fully functional prototype of SMMART implemented for Pocket PCs.