Vasilios Stefanis

Use of RSS feeds for content adaptation in mobile web browsing

While mobile phones are becoming more popular, wireless communication vendors and device manufacturers are seeking new applications for their products. Access to the large corpus of Internet information is a very prominent field, however the technical limitations of mobile devices pose many challenges. Browsing the Internet using a mobile phone is a large scientific and cultural challenge. Web content must be adapted before it can be accessed by a mobile browser. In this work we build on the proxy server solution to present a new technique that uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for the adaptation of web content for use in mobile phones. This technique is based in concrete design guidelines and supports different viewing modes. Experimentation shows a significant decrease in the transformed content of about 80% in size facilitating cost-effective web browsing.

Patterns of usage and context in interaction with communication support applications in mobile devices

Contact lists are one of the most frequently used applications on mobile devices. Users are reluctant to delete or remove contacts from their repositories and as modern smartphones provide an unlimited contact list storage space, these become increasingly large, sometimes measuring several hundred entries. In this paper we present our findings from two experiments with user-subjective and quantitative data concerning the use of mobile contact lists. We examine the role that frequency and recency of usage plays in the determination of a contacts importance, with a view to aid the speed and efficacy of the information seeking and retrieval process during the use of the contact list application.

MokE: a tool for Mobile-ok evaluation of web content

The ever-growing corpus of web content is now accessible from mobile devices. But is web content ready for mobile access? Which characteristics provide an acceptable user experience when using a mobile device? Based on W3Cs MobileOK best practices and tests we present MokE (Mobile OK Evaluator), a tool that helps creators of web content, webmasters and site administrators to evaluate how a mobile user will experience browsing of their content. By making use of W3Cs basic tests this tool is comprised of a set of modules that crawl a web site, analyze its content (including a hidden web capability) and provide an evaluation of its appropriateness for mobile access.

Using RSS feeds for effective mobile web browsing

While mobile phones are becoming more popular, wireless communication vendors and device manufacturers are seeking new applications for their products. Access to the large corpus of Internet information is a very prominent field. However, the technical limitations of mobile devices pose many challenges. Browsing the Internet using a mobile phone is a large scientific and cultural challenge. Web content must be adapted before it can be accessed by a mobile browser. This work presents a new methodology that uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for the adaptation of web content for use in mobile phones. This methodology is based on concrete design guidelines and supports different viewing modes. The mobile tool provided using the RSS feeds is evaluated based on user-centered evaluation and the results are presented.

Application of dimensionality reduction techniques for mobile social context

We propose the application of a dimensionality reduction algorithm that could provide a breakthrough in the efforts to retrieve and present mobile personal information to the user in context.

An interface for context-aware retrieval of mobile contacts

Our work discusses a mobile contact retrieval interface which attempts to contextually predict the contacts a user is likely to need access to, in order to facilitate the retrieval process. We compare our prototype implementation with retrieval from traditional applications (contact list and call log) in a preliminary lab experiment and discuss our findings from user behaviour. We conclude with suggestions on how to improve this interface in order to further enhance the retrieval process.

System's Design and Implementation for Easy Creation of Mobile Commerce Systems

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is a rather new field in the business world. It depends on wireless networks for accessing the Internet from mobile devices and for exchanging data between such devices. Wireless technologies on the one hand evolve rapidly and are met in many different applications. On the other hand a plethora of factors encourage market to make advances towards the m-commerce market. New ideas about m-commerce services and applications find acceptance by the business world and by users. Unfortunately not all users know how to create m-commerce services and applications. Thus a system which can easily create mobile commerce systems can be proved very helpful. In this paper we present a system which can create other m-commerce systems in a user friendly way. The system is meant to be used in the m-commerce market as a mean of developing hotel Websites and mobile sites. It uses a simple form which guides the user to create fully functional websites and mobile sites. We focus on implementation issues and evaluate our system after testing it. Finally, conclusions are extracted and future work is proposed.

Assessing Physical Location as a Potential Contextual Cue For Adaptive Mobile Contact Lists

The retrieval of the appropriate contact in order to start a new communication session from the contact repository of mobile devices can be a time consuming procedure since mobile contact lists usually contain hundreds of items. Several researchers have focused in the past on predicting the next contact a user is likely to call, a task that could prove useful in designing adaptive context-aware interfaces for the mobile contact list. Most of the researchers propose several contextual dimensions that could be used to predict the next callee, location being one of them. However, none of these research works have ever examined the impact of location on mobile communications and only few have actually incorporated this contextual dimension on their implementations. In this paper, we examine physical location as a contextual cue for adaptive mobile contact lists by analyzing call logs from the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge dataset. Our work indicates that, contrary to previous literature, the consideration of physical location as a context dimension does not necessarily lead to improvements in the accuracy of predicting the likelihood of communication with contacts for all types of users included in the dataset under review. Finally, we also discuss the possible reasons behind this limited impact.

A Framework for the Quality Evaluation of B2C M-Commerce Services

Business to consumer m-commerce services are here to stay. Their specifics, as software artifacts, indicate that they are primarily and most importantly user-driven; as such user perceived quality assessment should be an integral part of their design process. Mobile design processes still lack a formal and systematic quality control method. This paper explores m-commerce quality attributes using the external quality characteristics of the ISO9126 software quality standard. The goal is to provide a quality map of a B2C m-commerce system in order to facilitate more accurate and detailed quality evaluation. The result is a new evaluation framework based on decomposition of m-commerce services to three distinct user-software interaction patterns and mapping to ISO9126 quality characteristics.

Efficient Support of Context-Driven Interfaces for Mobile Devices

We examine the performance of the Fast Map algorithm when applied on mobile devices for context dimensionality reduction. Our results show that this algorithm is extremely fast and is appropriate for mobile context datasets that need to be processed in real time. This fact supports our vision for context-driven interfaces generated by applying the method of mobile context dimensionality reduction that will support the richness of data stored in personal devices.