• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.63-86
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• 2010

Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.13C no.4 s.107
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• pp.415-426
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• 2006

The essential characteristic of ubiquitous is context-awareness, and that means ubiquitous computing can automatically process the data that change according to space and time, without users' intervention. However, in circumstance of context awareness, since location information is able to be collected without users' clear approval, users cannot control their location information completely. These problems can cause privacy issue when users access their location information. Therefore, it is important to construct the location information system, which decides to release the information considering privacy under the condition such as location, users' situation, and people who demand information. Therefore, in order to intercept an outflow information and provide securely location-based information, this paper suggests a new system based CS-RBAC with the existing LBS, which responds sensitively as customer's situation. Moreover, it accommodates a merit of PCP reflecting user's preference constructively. Also, through privacy weight, it makes information not only decide to providing information, but endow 'grade'. By this method, users' data can be protected safely with foundation of 'Role' in context-aware circumstance.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.144-152
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• 2009

To provide intelligent service in mobile environment, it needs to estimate user's intention or requirement, through analyzing context information of end-users such as preference or behavior patterns. In this paper, we infer context information from uncertain log stored in mobile device. And we propose the inference method of end-user's behavior to match context information with service, and the proposed method is based on context-tree. We adopt bayesian probabilistic method to infer uncertain context information effectively, and the context-tree is constructed to utilize non-numerical context which is hard to handled with mathematical method. And we verify utility of proposed method by appling the method to intelligent phone book service.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.567-582
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• 2011

The growing popularity of the Internet has caused the size and complexity of communications and computing systems to greatly increase in recent years. To alleviate this increased management complexity, novel autonomic management architectures have emerged, in which many automated components manage the network's resources in a distributed fashion. However, in order to achieve effective collaboration between these management components, they need to be able to efficiently exchange information in a timely fashion. In this article, we propose a context dissemination framework that addresses this problem. To achieve scalability, the management components are structured in a hierarchy. The framework facilitates the aggregation and translation of information as it is propagated through the hierarchy. Additionally, by way of semantics, context is filtered based on meaning and is disseminated intelligently according to dynamically changing context requirements. This significantly reduces the exchange of superfluous context and thus further increases scalability. The large size of modern federated cloud computing infrastructures, makes the presented context dissemination framework ideally suited to improve their management efficiency and scalability. The specific context requirements for the management of a cloud data center are identified, and our context dissemination approach is applied to it. Additionally, an extensive evaluation of the framework in a large-scale cloud data center scenario was performed in order to characterize the benefits of our approach, in terms of scalability and reasoning time.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.205-211
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• 2008

Conventional context-aware service models permit the access of resources only by user authentication, but the ubiquitous environments where the context information around users is changing frequently require the resource access control according to the rapid changes. This paper proposes a scheme to control access permission of resource dynamically as context information of user changes. Our access control model is based on traditional CASA (Context-Aware Security Architecture), but can restrict the access of the user already has been authorized. With the real-time checking of context information, our scheme gives different access controls according to changes in environmental information, and provides more secure services than conventional context-aware models.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.110-115
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• 2006

In pure P2P environment, it is possible to provide service by using a little real-time information without using accumulated information. But in case of using only a little information that was locally collected, quality of recommendation service can be fallen-off. Therefore, it is necessary to study a method to improve qualify of recommendation service by using users' context information. But because a great volume of users' context information can be recognized in a moment, there can be a scalability problem and there are limitations in supporting differentiated services according to fields and items. In this paper, we solved the scalability problem by clustering context information per each service field and classifying it per each user, using SOM. In addition, we could recommend proper services for users by quantifying the context information of the users belonging to the similar classification to the service requester among classified data and then using collaborative filtering.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2004.10b
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• pp.613-615
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• 2004

유비쿼터스 컴퓨팅 환경에서 가장 중요한 이슈중의 하나는 상황인지(Context-Aware)가 가능한 환경을 구축하는 것이다. Context-Aware 환경이 구축되면 주변의 상황을 감지하여 특정 어플리케이션을 실행한다거나, 시스템을 재구성하는 등의 일을 수행할 수 있다. 그동안 이런 상황인지가 가능한 환경을 Context-Aware 미들웨어를 통해 구현하려는 연구가 많이 수행되었다. Context-Aware 미들웨어를 구현하기 위해 무엇보다도 중요한 것은 실제 세계의 다양한 종류의 상황을 컴퓨팅 환경에 적용시키는 것이다. 그러나 현실 세계에서 Context의 종류는 거의 무한하다고 할 수 있다. 기술이 발전하게 되면서 인지 가능한 Context의 종류도 무한정 늘어나게 될 것이다 또한 실제 세계에서의 Context들은 추상적인 경우가 많이 있다. 그러나 Context가 추상적이라 해도 다른 Context 정보를 이용해서 구체화 할 수 있다. 이런 과정을 위해 Conte지들을 계층적으로 관리해야 할 필요가 있다. 본 논문에서는 Context-Aware 미들웨어를 구현할 때 Context들의 이런 여러 가지 특성들을 고려해서 Context Type을 관리랄 수 있는 하나의 객체를 제안하고, 다른 방법들과 비교, 분석해 보았다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Emotion and Sensibility Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.96-97
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• 2012

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.43-61
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• 2011

In this research, we propose a dynamic decision making using social context based on ontology. Dynamic adaptation is adopted for the high qualified decision making, which is defined as creation of proper information using contexts depending on decision maker's state of affairs in ubiquitous computing environment. Thereby, the context for the dynamic adaptation is classified as a static, dynamic and social context. Static context contains personal explicit information like demographic data. Dynamic context like weather or traffic information is provided by external information service provider. Finally, social context implies much more implicit knowledge such as social relationship than the other two-type context, but it is not easy to extract any implied tacit knowledge as well as generalized rules from the information. So, it was not easy for the social context to apply into dynamic adaptation. In this light, we tried the social context into the dynamic adaptation to generate context-appropriate personalized information. It is necessary to build modeling methodology to adopt dynamic adaptation using the context. The proposed context modeling used ontology and cases which are best to represent tacit and unstructured knowledge such as social context. Case-based reasoning and constraint satisfaction problem is applied into the dynamic decision making system for the dynamic adaption. Case-based reasoning is used case to represent the context including social, dynamic and static and to extract personalized knowledge from the personalized case-base. Constraint satisfaction problem is used when the selected case through the case-based reasoning needs dynamic adaptation, since it is usual to adapt the selected case because context can be changed timely according to environment status. The case-base reasoning adopts problem context for effective representation of static, dynamic and social context, which use a case structure with index and solution and problem ontology of decision maker. The case is stored in case-base as a repository of a decision maker's personal experience and knowledge. The constraint satisfaction problem use solution ontology which is extracted from collective intelligence which is generalized from solutions of decision makers. The solution ontology is retrieved to find proper solution depending on the decision maker's context when it is necessary. At the same time, dynamic adaptation is applied to adapt the selected case using solution ontology. The decision making process is comprised of following steps. First, whenever the system aware new context, the system converses the context into problem context ontology with case structure. Any context is defined by a case with a formal knowledge representation structure. Thereby, social context as implicit knowledge is also represented a formal form like a case. In addition, for the context modeling, ontology is also adopted. Second, we select a proper case as a decision making solution from decision maker's personal case-base. We convince that the selected case should be the best case depending on context related to decision maker's current status as well as decision maker's requirements. However, it is possible to change the environment and context around the decision maker and it is necessary to adapt the selected case. Third, if the selected case is not available or the decision maker doesn't satisfy according to the newly arrived context, then constraint satisfaction problem and solution ontology is applied to derive new solution for the decision maker. The constraint satisfaction problem uses to the previously selected case to adopt and solution ontology. The verification of the proposed methodology is processed by searching a meeting place according to the decision maker's requirements and context, the extracted solution shows the satisfaction depending on meeting purpose.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2011

Gestures have been employed for human computer interaction to build more natural interface in new computational environments. In this paper, we describe our approach to develop a gesture interface using spatial context information. The proposed gesture interface recognizes a system action (e.g. commands) by integrating gesture information with spatial context information within a probabilistic framework. Two ontologies of spatial contexts are introduced based on the spatial information of gestures: gesture volume and gesture target. Prototype applications are developed using a smart environment scenario that a user can interact with digital information embedded to physical objects using gestures.