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The UK paramedic profession has undergone significant development since professional regulation almost twenty years ago. Improvement planning within the NHS has also driven change. The result is a large and developing paramedic skill set. The skills performed and incidents attended by paramedics are highly variable in relation to the frequency with which they will be encountered as well as the procedural complexity. This consideration, in the context of the literature around clinical skills practice, competence, confidence and perception of performance invites inquiry in relation to competence of paramedics, as well as their ability to recognise practice issues. The aims of this study were to: (i) develop a map of incidents attended and skills commonly used in one UK ambulance service, (ii) assess the performance of clinicians across different types of skills and (iii) explore clinicians’ perceptions of their competence and confidence in relation to their objectively assessed performance. The study was carried out in two phases: Phase one was a retrospective review of clinical records (n=600), seeking to establish the frequency of incidents attended and skills practiced by UK paramedics and Phase two examined actual and perceived competence in clinical skills across a range of frequency and complexity, it also explored confidence (n= 69 paramedic participants). This was achieved through participation in a simulated clinical scenario and completion of a number of measures, participants also completed questionnaires in relation to the scenario and clinical skills.

Games are one of the most popular multiuser applications currently in use on the Internet. They have become so in spite of the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees offered by the current Internet, which are typically believed to be a requirement for delay-sensitive multimedia applications such as games. Understanding how networked games have become popular is therefore important for designing applications that can become successful with or without the presence of QoS guarantees. One reason for the popularity of games may be the interaction between players in a multiuser game. It is this interaction that compels users to play a networked game, since without other players there is little benefit to the networked component of the game. Players may be willing to tolerate lower QoS if they are able to enjoy a game with other users. This thesis examines users' preferences for one QoS parameter, delay, in networked First Person Shooter (FPS) games. We consider a player's absolute delay (the delay between a player and the game server), and their relative delay (the difference between a user's delay and that of the other players). We employ controlled and uncontrolled objective and subjective experiments: monitoring of publicly-available game servers, group experiments, a survey of game players, and controlling the delay to servers for the FPS game, Half-Life. We find that users are drawn to game servers where they can interact with a greater number of players. Delay has a greater effect on a player's decision to join a game than to leave, and a player's tolerance for delay increases with the time that they remain in the game. Although they believe relative delay to be important, in practice users are more concerned about absolute than relative delay, and can find it difficult to accurately distinguish their relative delay.

In our data-driven society, personal data affecting individuals as data subjects is increasingly being collected and processed by sizeable, international companies. While data protection laws and privacy technologies attempt to limit the impact of data breaches and privacy scandals, they rely on individuals having a detailed understanding of the available recourse, resulting in the responsibilisation of data protection. Existing data stewardship frameworks incorporate data protection considerations and employ data-protection-by-design principles but may not include data subjects in the process itself, relying on supplementary legal doctrines to strengthen data protection enforcement. Current data protection solutions also lack support for protecting individual autonomy over personal data through co-creation and participation, particularly where there is socio-technical and communal value to collaborative data from which data subjects may not currently benefit. These challenges motivate the application of a theoretical and practical framework that can encourage co-creation of data protection solutions, increase awareness of different stakeholder interests, and rebalance power between data subjects and data controllers. In this thesis, we propose adapting the commons framework to create a data protection-focused data commons. We conduct interviews with commons experts to identify the institutional barriers to creating a commons and challenges of incorporating data protection principles into a commons. We propose requirements for establishing a data protection-focused data commons by applying our interview findings and data protection principles. We then deploy the data protection-focused data commons using an online learning use case. We conduct a study to explore the usefulness of the commons for supporting students' agency and co-creating data protection solutions in response to tutorial recordings, their consent preferences, and attitudes towards privacy and online learning. We find that a data protection-focused data commons as a socio-technical framework can support the collaboration and co-creation of data protection solutions for the benefit of data subjects.

In the current Internet, mobile devices with multiple connectivity are becoming increasingly common; however, the Internet protocol itself has not evolved accordingly. Instead, add-on mechanisms have emerged, but they do not integrate well. Currently, the user suffers from disruption to communication on the end-host as the physical network connectivity changes. This is because the IP address changes when the point of attachment changes, breaking the transport layer end-to-end state. Furthermore, while a device can be connected to multiple networks simultaneously, the use of IP addresses prevents end-hosts from leveraging multiple network interfaces - a feature known as host multihoming, which can potentially improve the throughput or reliability. While solutions exist separately for mobility and multihoming, it is not possible to use them as a duality solution for the end-host. This work extended ILNPv6, an engineering solution of Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) implemented as a superset of IPv6 on the Linux kernel. The existing implementation was extended to enable mobility and multihoming duality. First, the mobility implementation was enhanced to support continuous mobility; a comparative analysis against Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) showed superior performance during a series of handoffs. Second, multihoming was implemented and integrated with mobility; the evaluation with a flexible multi-connectivity scenario with load-balancing showed negligible loss and consistent throughput. Finally, the impact of the combined mobility-multihoming mechanism was evaluated with a real-time video streaming application showing continuous uninterrupted real-time video playback up to 2160p (4K ultra high definition). Overall, this work has demonstrated that mobility-multihoming duality is possible for end-hosts over IPv6 for existing applications without changing the network infrastructure.

Location-sharing services have become increasingly popular with the proliferation of smartphones and online social networks. People share their locations with each other to record their daily lives or satisfy their social needs. At the same time, inappropriate disclosure of location information poses threats to people's privacy. One of the reasons why people fail to protect their location privacy is the difficulty of using the current mechanisms to manually configure location-privacy settings. Since people's location-privacy preferences are context-aware, manual configuration is cumbersome. People's incapability and unwillingness to do so lead to unexpected location disclosures that violate their location privacy. In this thesis, we investigate the feasibility of using recommender systems to help people protect their location privacy. We examine the performance of location-privacy recommender systems and compare it with the state-of-the-art. We also conduct online user studies to understand people's acceptance of such recommender systems and their concerns. We revise our design of the systems according to the results of the user studies. We find that user-based collaborative filtering can accurately recommend location-privacy preferences and outperform the state-of-the-art when training data are insufficient. From users' perspective, their acceptance of location-privacy recommender systems is affected by the openness and the context of recommendations and their privacy concerns about the systems. It is feasible to use data obfuscation or decentralisation to alleviate people's concerns and meanwhile keep the systems robust against malicious data attacks.

Social network sites (SNSs) have become very popular, with more than 1.39 billion people using Facebook alone. The ability to share large amounts of personal information with these services, such as location traces, photos, and messages, has raised a number of privacy concerns. The popularity of these services has enabled new research directions, allowing researchers to collect large amounts of data from SNSs to gain insight into how people share information, and to identify and resolve issues with such services. There are challenges to conducting such research responsibly, ensuring studies are ethical and protect the privacy of participants, while ensuring research outputs are sustainable and can be reproduced in the future. These challenges motivate the application of a theoretical framework that can be used to understand, identify, and mitigate the privacy impacts of emerging SNSs, and the conduct of ethical SNS studies. In this thesis, we apply Nissenbaum's model of contextual integrity to the study of SNSs. We develop an architecture for conducting privacy-preserving and reproducible SNS studies that upholds the contextual integrity of participants. We apply the architecture to the study of informed consent to show that contextual integrity can be leveraged to improve the acquisition of consent in such studies. We then use contextual integrity to diagnose potential privacy violations in an emerging form of SNS.

When in physical proximity, data can be directly exchanged between the mobile devices people carry - for example over Bluetooth. If people cooperate to store, carry and forward messages on one another's behalf, then an opportunistic network may be formed, independent of any fixed infrastructure. To enable performant routing within opportunistic networks, use of social network information has been proposed for social network routing protocols. But the decentralised and cooperative nature of the networks can however expose users of such protocols to privacy and security threats, which may in turn discourage participation in the network. In this thesis, we examine how to mitigate privacy and security threats in opportunistic networks while maintaining network performance. We first demonstrate that privacy-aware routing protocols are required in order to maintain network performance while respecting users' privacy preferences. We then demonstrate novel social network routing protocols that mitigate specific threats to privacy and security while maintaining network performance.

Opportunistic networks provide an ad hoc communication medium without the need for an infrastructure network, by leveraging human encounters and mobile devices. Routing protocols in opportunistic networks frequently rely upon encounter histories to build up meaningful data to use for informed routing decisions. This thesis shows that it is possible to use pre-existing social-network information to improve existing opportunistic routing protocols, and that these self-reported social networks have a particular benefit when used to bootstrap an opportunistic routing protocol. Frequently, opportunistic routing protocols require users to relay messages on behalf of one another: an act that incurs a cost to the relaying node. Nodes may wish to avoid this forwarding cost by not relaying messages. Opportunistic networks need to incentivise participation and discourage the selfish behaviour. This thesis further presents an incentive mechanism that uses self-reported social networks to construct and maintain reputation and trust relationships between participants, and demonstrates its superior performance over existing incentive mechanisms.

As computing devices become increasingly portable, it is becoming necessary to support Mobility as a core network functionality. The availability of devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops as well as wireless network infrastructure is opening up the possibility of using Network Mobility to cater for multiple mobile nodes simultaneously. Network mobility may be useful in a number of mobile scenarios, where a large number of mobile nodes are moving in unison. A number of operational benefits stand to be gained by aggregating these nodes into a single mobile unit. Unfortunately, the current state for network mobility support, especially in terms of network layer protocols, is limited. This is in part due to the inherent complexity of mobile network scenarios, the high cost of testing mobile network protocols in operational environments and the difficulties in implementing such protocols. This thesis looks at how network mobility support may be better enabled by making experimentation with mobile networks more accessible. It shows this by first showing how analytical approaches can be useful in mobile network applications, as they abstract away from experimental details and allow for more straight forward protocol comparisons. It then goes on to look at the tools available to study mobile network protocols, where it introduces and extends an existing tool that uses virtual machines to allow for the study of mobile network protocols. Finally, it demonstrates a practical method in which mobile network support may be easily enabled in a practical setting.