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As the adoption of Federated Learning (FL) in the manufacturing industry grows and systems get increasingly complex, a need to inspect their behavior arises. Stakeholders of the FL process want a more transparent system to understand the current state and analyze how its performance changed over time. However, current representation approaches are often not designed for industrial applications and do not cover the entire FL model lifecycle. We propose the Lifecycle Dashboard, which considers the different requirements and perspectives of industrial stakeholders by visualizing information from the FL server. In addition, our representation approach is generic enough to be applied to different use cases and industries. We evaluate the Lifecycle Dashboard in a semi-structured expert interview, show improvements in the understandability of FL systems, and discuss possible use cases in the industry.

The two articles in this special section represent ongoing Internet of Things applications in the context of Europe trying to make solutions usable to people in daily times.

The articles in this special section illustrates the wide range of ways in which pervasive fabrication technologies can contribute to producing physical artifacts that fulfill user needs in a more tailored and customized way than today’s mass production does. At the same time, they provide a glimpse of the future, where technology-informed and technology enabled making can address physical needs individually.

Computing evolution has brought about multiple paradigm shifts in how we use technologies. In the living laboratory that is modern life, our ability to design and control the computers and computing power of the future will require an ability to program systems and applications in situ and in vivo.

Advances in digital fabrication have simultaneously created new capabilities while reinforcing outdated workflows that constrain how, and by whom, these fabrication tools are used. In this paper, we investigate how a new class of hybrid-controlled machines can collaborate with novice and expert users alike to yield a more lucid making experience. We demonstrate these ideas through our system, Turn-by-Wire. By combining the capabilities of a traditional lathe with haptic input controllers that modulate both position and force, we detail a series of novel interaction metaphors that invite a more fluid making process spanning digital, model-centric, computer control, and embodied, adaptive, human control. We evaluate our system through a user study and discuss how these concepts generalize to other fabrication tools.

Web and semantic technologies will form the foundation for ecosystems of machines that interact with each other and with people as never before.

Production processes in factories increasingly involve dynamic interactions between individual manufacturing devices that allow processes to evolve and enable rapid reconfigurations for the mass-customization of products. When participating machines start to be aware of their own functionality, processes can even be dynamically reconfigured at run time. We propose a system that supports operators within such environments by enabling them to directly observe which devices interact with each other and what data is transmitted between them at any given moment, using computer-mediated reality technology. We demonstrate the application of this system in a goal-driven manufacturing use case and discuss its applicability to the monitoring of smart environments in users’ homes.

This article introduces the Open Semantic Framework (OSF), a one-stop shop for creating and deploying semantic applications as well as their lifecycle management. The authors discuss how the OSF supports knowledge acquisition into semantic knowledge models via novel interface technologies, manages these models internally within core ontologies and pluggable knowledge packs, and provides moderated access to them via a REST API and prefabricated SPARQL queries. As an example of OSF's usage in a practical scenario, the authors show how it can increase worker safety in industrial settings by mitigating workplace safety hazards through the automatic insertion of safety-relevant actions directly in the workflow, based on a model of applicable workplace safety law and regulation. By facilitating the creation, integration, and provisioning of knowledge, the OSF represents an important step on the way to integrating knowledge models worldwide, enabling semantic applications globally to "stand on the shoulders of giants."

Social media have transformed the traditional marketing communication, resulting in companies evolving their customer approach and integrating social media into their marketing strategies. Although numerous examples of using social media platforms for marketing purposes exist, and despite the various efforts from the companies and the general popularity of the medium, measuring the effectiveness is elusive. An approach towards overcoming these challenges is examination of the activities undertaken by the companies and the consumers’ responses to them in the form of measurements and use of analysis tools. To contribute in this direction, we propose an evaluation framework that allows companies to perform social media analytics through continuous monitoring of the content and activities on their social media marketing channels, and to measure the effectiveness of social media utilization for marketing purposes. We describe the specific methods and illustrate the application of the proposed approach using a Facebook brand page case study. Finally, we discuss the benefits it brings to the companies.

The adoption of NFC technology has taken longer than expected after its inception in 2004. Several projects on ticketing and payment are gaining momentum. However, the actual state of adoption of NFC is still unclear. As an alternative to consultants’ prediction (which mostly prove wrong), this paper describes a gamification-based approach to motivate users themselves to report on NFC tags they spotted in their environment. As part of a trading card context, users get rewarded with gadgets and points for documenting the existence of NFC technology in their environment. This paper describes the development of this game and the experiences of two release cycles. The paper concludes with lessons learned and provides an outlook on next steps.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16 (6), ISSN:1617-4909, ISSN:1617-4917, ISSN:0949-2054

The EPC Network is a global RFID data sharing infrastructure based on standards that are built around the Electronic Product Code (EPC), an unambiguous numbering scheme for the designation of physical goods. The authors present the fundamental concepts and applications of the EPC Network, its integration with enterprise systems, and its functionality for data exchange between organizations in the supply chain.

RFID technology tracks the flow of physical items and goods in supply chains to help users detect inefficiencies, such as shipment delays, theft, or inventory problems. An inevitable consequence, however, is that it generates huge numbers of events. To exploit these large amounts of data, the Supply Chain Visualizer increases supply-chain visibility by analyzing RFID data, using a mix of automated analysis techniques and human effort. The tool's core concepts include rule-based analysis techniques and a map-based representation interface. With these features, it lets users visualize the supply-chain structure, together with performance metrics, and detect problematic hot spots.

Product authentication is needed to detect counterfeit products and to prevent them from entering the distribution channels of genuine products. Security is a critical property of product authentication systems. In this paper, we study trust and security in RFID-based product authentication systems. We first present a formal definition for product authentication process and then derive the general chain of trust as well as functional and nonfunctional security requirements for product authentication. Most of the scientific literature that covers the topic focuses on cryptographic tag authentication only. This paper, however, provides a broader view including also other known approaches, most notably location-based authentication. To derive the functional security requirements, we employ the concept of misuse cases that extends the use case paradigm well known in the field of requirements engineering. We argue that the level of security of any RFID-based product authentication application is determined by how it fulfills the derived set of functional and nonfunctional requirements. The security of different RFID-based product authentication approaches is analyzed. To study how RFID supports secure product authentication in practice, we investigate how the current EPC standards conform to the functional security requirements of product authentication and show how the unaddressed requirements could be fulfilled. The benefits of implementing a service that detects the cloned tags in the level of the network's core services are identified.

Social and socially-enabled applications have established themselves as a large and important set of scenarios that make sense in personal as well as in enterprise settings. However, it is still not clear how to best promote an open and extensible ecosystem of social applications. This makes it hard to design and implement applications that are good SOA citizens and can participate in an open and growing set of social interactions. Our work presents an architecture and implementation based on Activity Streams, which uses and slightly extends the format to work as a foundation for a SOA that allows applications to bridge vertical silos in the Internet of Things. In this paper, we discuss the application of our architecture in several different domains and our findings from mashing up applications across silos using Activity Streams. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of this approach, we believe that our work can serve as illustration and guidance in the ongoing effort to standardize the next version of Activity Streams.

We present a pilot study, which investigates the role of activity data visualization in the context of interaction and communication with health coaches. The data is obtained from commercially available wearable wellness sensors such as Basis Watch, or Lumo Back. We studied how interface design's ability to synthesize and flexibly display data from wearable sensors help participants to understand their daily wellness related physical condition and activities. We also investigated how the interface enhances the communication between users and their health coaches. We discuss the implications for the design.

Ubiquitous computing technologies enable new in situ data-collection opportunities that can reveal insights into mobile users' behaviors and preferences.

We present a novel approach to enhance avalanche companion rescue using wearable sensing technologies. The time to find and extricate victims is most crucial: once buried by an avalanche, survival chances drop dramatically after the first 15 min. Current technology offers only information on the location of a single victim. Statistics show that in many cases there are multiple victims. In our research we address this issue and also investigate how the use of wearable sensors can further enhance such devices. We report on experiments using sensors to measure vital signs and environmental conditions and their suitability for avalanche rescue. Visualization for this type of application is addressed and two design sketches, both visualizing multiple victims and urgency, are presented. The architecture of current devices is extended by component to integrate these additional functions. We have developed a prototypical implementation of an avalanche beacon supporting multiple victims and visualisation of vital signs. This prototype was used for further experiments and offered a basis for participatory evaluation with practitioners in the field. A short overview thereof is presented.

The global trade item number (GTIN) is traditionally used to identify trade items and look up corresponding information within industrial supply chains. Recently, consumers have also started using GTINs to access additional product information with mobile barcode scanning applications. Providers of these applications use different sources to provide product names for scanned GTINs. In this paper we analyze data from eight publicly available sources for a set of GTINs scanned by users of a mobile barcode scanning application. Our aim is to measure the correctness of product names in online sources and to quantify the problem of product data quality. We use a combination of string matching and supervised learning to estimate the number of incorrect product names. Our results show that approximately 2 % of all product names are incorrect. The applied method is useful for brand owners to monitor the data quality for their products and enables efficient data integration for application providers., Electronic Markets, 24 (2), ISSN:1019-6781, ISSN:1422-8890

Benefits and opportunities of NFC technology have been discussed for many years. Continuous promises of handset manufacturers to embed this technology into their series of devices anytime soon have been fulfilled only partly so far. Contrasting with that, research and practice have outlined a number of applications that yield great attention among users. Among these applications are Smart Posters. However, the prevailing low market penetration of NFC-equipped smart phones poses a barrier for the implementation of many Smart Poster scenarios. Accordingly, for certain scenarios this paper proposes to switch the role between fixed tags and mobile phones by affixing mobile phones to posters and hand out the much cheaper tags to the users instead. The paper describes the approach and shows its feasibility by reporting lessons learned of a case study.

Retailers and brands are just starting to utilize online social media to support their businesses. Simultaneously, public displays are becoming ubiquitous in public places, raising the question about how these two technologies could be used together to attract new and existing customers as well as strengthen the relationship toward a focal brand. Accordingly, in a field experiment we displayed brand- and product-related comments from the social network Facebook as pervasive advertising in small-space retail stores, known as kiosks. From interviews conducted with real customers during the experiment and the corresponding analysis of sales data we could conclude three findings. Showing social media comments resulted in (1) customers perceiving brands as more innovative and attractive, (2) a measurable, positive effect on sales on both the brand and the product in question and (3) customers wanting to see the comments of others, but not their own, creating a give-and-take paradox for using public displays to show social media comments.

In this paper we develop a method and relevant feature constructs for the measurement of accident risk exposure from a large sample of real-world GPS data that includes accident and accident-free drivers. For trip frequency and accumulated driven distance features, an evaluation of their discriminatory power is given based on computational results. In our conclusion, we briefly discuss suitable classification approaches and limitations arising from external validity considerations.

This paper describes an experimental setup for the analysis of e-bike usage characteristics based on GPS data. Usage characteristics include parameters such as average and maximum velocity, trip lengths and distribution over daytime. Based on high resolution position measurement these parameters are extracted and compared to other studies on both e-bikes and conventional bicycles. We show that applying location technology to concurrent monitoring of a fleet of e-bikes yields higher quality in terms of resolution and accuracy (1), and is less intrusive (2) than obtaining these data by conventional user surveys. The findings form a proof-of-concept for the adoption of location technology to transportation and behavioral sciences and suggest further interdisciplinary collaboration in these fields.

Approximately 25 researchers from Europe, Asia, and the US discussed applications and new challenges of linking networked objects reporting about their state, location, and conditions to mobile phones, networked appliances, and devices. Reports of several research projects yielded a consensus that simply building platforms and tools is not enough for doing successful research. Instead, research should target larger user bases and aim for larger-scale evaluations. Accordingly, discussions emerged about how to drive user adoption of research prototypes, when development transits from research to service provision, and a new notion of privacy where users who share their own data are be granted access to services that build on this data. The overall conclusion was that users no longer communicate only with people but also are empowered to interact with objects. The IoT was seen to reach a tipping point of not only embracing corporate users but also approaching the everyday user.

Research has shown that product reviews on the Internet not only support consumers when shopping, but also lead to increased sales for retailers. Recent approaches successfully use smart phones to directly relate products (e.g. via barcode or RFID) to corresponding reviews, making these available to consumers on the go. However, it is unknown what modality (star ratings/text/video) users consider useful for creating reviews and using reviews on their mobile phone, and how the preferred modalities are different from those on the Web. To shed light on this we conduct two experiments, one of them in a quasi-realistic shopping environment. The results indicate that, in contrast to the known approaches, stars and pre-structured text blocks should be implemented on mobile phones rather than long texts and videos. Users prefer less and rather well-aggregated product information while on the go. This accounts both for entering and, surprisingly, also for using product reviews.

When it comes to vehicle accidents, people are stressed out and overstrained, even if it is just a car body damage and no one is hurt. They often lack adequate and immediate assistance and may worry about the lengthy and paper-based loss report to their insurance carrier. At the same time, it is crucial for insurance companies to receive early and detailed case circumstances in order to decrease costs and assist customers with value-added services. Against this background, we propose the usage of mobile phones in order to assist people in the aftermath of an accident. We present a concept for mobile claims assistance along with a proto-typical implementation that features an asynchronous communication between mobile phones and claims management enterprise systems based on mobile Web Services. Finally, we discuss the user perspective on mobile insurance applications and present data we collected using a combination of focus groups and user surveys.

Information about health, disease or environmental conditions is increasingly becoming available. We investigate the suitability of using mobile phones as an interface to provide information about risk-related events or conditions to the user. We approach the problem by conducting an online survey in order to match the requirements on a risk information service with the capabilities of the mobile phone and to evaluate different notification mechanisms, the usage frequency, and the influence of costs. Based on the results of the survey we confirm the suitability of the mobile phone to provide risk-related information as well as the user's willingness to pay for the service.

Though transponder ID (TID) numbers of RFID tags were originally introduced to identify the chip model, serialized TID numbers are currently advertised as security features of UHF chips. Serialized TID numbers do not provide any cryptographic protection, but they do introduce a practical hurdle against adversaries who want to clone RFID tags today. Furthermore, serialized TID numbers are important for end-users who want to protect their current UHF tags from cloning since cryptographic tags are not yet commercially available in that frequency range. In this overview paper, we analyze the suitability of serialized TID numbers for security applications by evaluating the effort to bypass the TID check based on known vulnerabilities and we compare this effort to the needed level of protection in an example of anti-counterfeiting in the tobacco industry. The analysis illustrates that the practical hurdle of TID checks is not high enough for industrial-scale security applications and that it can completely diminish due to commodification of the RFID technology. However, end-users of security applications can still benefit from the increased tag cloning resistance that serialized TID numbers provide before migrating to more secure solutions.

Among others, consumer products can be purchased in the Internet and in traditional stores. Each of the two has dedicated advantages. An online survey conducted within the frames of this work investigates these advantages. It motivates the transition of the advantages of online shopping, such as access to recommendations of other consumers, to the sales floor. Recent trends in mobile phone technology, for example the emergence of the mobile Internet, enable exactly this transition, potentially enriching the shopping experience in the real world. A key challenge though is a fast and convenient identification of products. This work compares five product identification modalities for mobile phones in a comparative study. The dependent variables evaluated are ‘task completion time’ and ‘perceived ease of use’. Our study is the first that quantifies the advantage of automatic identification. The results indicate that automatically identifying a product scanning a tag can be up to eight times faster than entering a product name in a text field. Surprisingly, barcode recognition using a camera phone can be conducted almost as fast and convenient as scanning an RFID tag. Our work provides a benchmark for developers having to choose appropriate identification technology for their mobile application.

In the era of ubiquitous devices and mobility, we increasingly carry objects of great value (in terms of data, money or emotions). Because of our increased mobility, we are also more inclined to lose these objects. When it comes to finding them again, current lost property offices seem rather inflexible and not fully adapted to our nomad lives. They lack dynamic information, introduce too many intermediates and induce high costs. We support the growth of a community of users able to solve the problem on their own using their mobile phones. We describe our concept and implementation of the idea based on prototypes of mobile phones enhanced with a novel type of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentifiaction) reader, the use of the EPC (Electronic Product Code) standards and the creation of both mobile and server-side software. We finally discuss how it can help making the current system more dynamic and efficient.

RFID was the most discussed topic at the Pervasive RFID/Near Field Communication Technology and Applications (PERTEC) workshop, held on March 19, 2007. Other topics discussed included management of data ownership in supply chains generated through RFID, integration of RFID and sensors, security and privacy, NFC applications, RFID-based location sensing, and emerging research challenges. RFID offers a huge variety of security approaches, starting from simple ID coding to lightweight cryptography and provide cost-effective solutions based on the value of products. RFID is a cheap, effective method to track many objects simultaneously, as well as it is unobtrusive and maintenance free. Other discussions at the conference centered on the value proposition of Near Field Communications (NFC) for end users and end-user innovation to build tools and infrastructure to allow users to use ubiquitous RFID tags.

As we become familiar with the idea of connecting PDAs, notebook PCs and wall-sized screens, as put forward in [1], ubiquitous computing in everyday environments creates yet new challenges for mobile ad-hoc networking. When looking at less powerful mobile and stationary devices that act as sensors or actors, new requirements for communication evolve.

Day by day Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a great attention from research community because of the importance of IoT technology in human life. IoT is a smart system which consists of different type of sensors and real world application connected with each other through internet via wired or wireless network structure. The IoT makes the world smart in every aspects means IoT gives the information regarding the surrounding condition of things with the help of technology i.e. smart home, smart cities, smart transportation, smart industries, smart agriculture and smart environment etc. In this paper we study a different concept of IoT, various applications, Issues regarding IoT and Future Scope of IoT which will give the appropriate guidance and motivation to the research community to do the research in this field., {"references":["1.\tSaini, Harpreet Singh, and R. D. 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