Proactive Users Research Articles

Cybersecurity discussions in Stack Overflow: a developer-centred analysis of engagement and self-disclosure behaviour

Stack Overflow (SO) is a popular platform among developers seeking advice on various software-related topics, including privacy and security. As for many knowledge-sharing websites, the value of SO depends largely on users’ engagement, namely their willingness to answer, comment or post technical questions. Still, many of these questions (including cybersecurity-related ones) remain unanswered, putting the site’s relevance and reputation into jeopardy. Hence, it is important to understand users’ participation in privacy and security discussions to promote engagement and foster the exchange of such expertise. Objective: Based on prior findings on online social networks, this work elaborates on the interplay between users’ engagement and their privacy practices in SO. Particularly, it analyses developers’ self-disclosure behaviour regarding profile visibility and their involvement in discussions related to privacy and security. Method: We followed a mixed-methods approach by (i) analysing SO data from 1239 cybersecurity-tagged questions along with 7048 user profiles, and (ii) conducting an anonymous online survey (N=64). Results: About 33% of the questions we retrieved had no answer, whereas more than 50% had no accepted answer. We observed that proactive users tend to disclose significantly less information in their profiles than reactive and unengaged ones. However, no correlations were found between these engagement categories and privacy-related constructs such as perceived control or general privacy concerns. Implications: These findings contribute to (i) a better understanding of developers’ engagement towards privacy and security topics, and (ii) to shape strategies promoting the exchange of cybersecurity expertise in SO.

Understanding your audience: The influence of social media user‐type on informational behaviors and hazard adjustments during Hurricane Dorian

AbstractIn 2019, Hurricane Dorian affected Atlantic Canada with widespread impacts across the region. In the days preceding landfall, there was a great deal of discussion about the storm and its potential impacts. This discussion also extended onto Twitter, which provided a platform for users to engage with storm‐related information. In this research, we disseminated a questionnaire to residents of Atlantic Canada from late September to late October through Qualtrics, an online survey provider. The questionnaire explored how Twitter influenced respondents' (n = 1218) self‐reported informational behaviors (i.e., searching, sharing, and processing) and behavioral responses before, during, and after the storm. The results demonstrate that users' informational needs and preferences were closely related to their online behaviors. For example, conduits (i.e., those who both searched for and shared information) were highly proactive users who disseminated information about evacuations, recommended protective actions, and other official guidance more so than others. Conduits were also the most likely to heed official guidance in terms of their own preparedness and response. Amplifiers (i.e., those who only share information) and consumers (i.e., those who only search for information) were also motivated to take action by information they saw online, albeit at lower rates than conduits. Lastly, the results demonstrate that users can be positively influenced by information they see online even if they do not actively engage with it. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that Twitter users may interact with storm‐related information in more nuanced and complex ways than previously understood.

Architecture and basic conditions for organizing video hosting based on a p2p-network

The paper discusses the principles of developing a software package based on a distributed registry (proprietary blockchain) for performing applied tasks within a decentralized video portal. Such structure is concerned to distribute of user-generated content, implying the principles of “reverse economy” that suggest to reward proactive users of the service via sharing advertising revenue of the video portal amongst all participants in the advertising chain.

Silver Finance—Asset Management of Elderly People in the Modern Era

This study aims to explore the elderly people’s knowledge, attitude, and understandings toward financial management, and how they behave in using IT-supported financial services. Mixed methodologies, including quantitative street survey and qualitative focus group interviews, are used. The result shows an active involvement with investment market of the mature segments despite claiming safe and stable returns as the paramount principle of asset management. They also have a substantial knowledge on some of the technological-enabled financial services, particularly the younger groups (age 50-59). Cybersecurity is their major concern and barrier on whether to use them or not. Besides, their value and behaviors of buying mature adult financial products should be understood within a context of traditional family culture value. Based on the above analysis, the elderly can be categorized into three major types in using IT-supported financial products and services, including proactive users, passive followers and hard opposition. On the one hand, this research breaks up the outdated stereotype of technology use among elderly people; on the other hand, aged people are facing the challenges of cognitive and physical decline led by ageing. As such, it is essential to conduct specific financial literacy intervention. This project brings new insights into the financial education which is appropriate to the elderly.

Day-Ahead Optimization of Prosumer Considering Battery Depreciation and Weather Prediction for Renewable Energy Sources

In recent years, taking advantage of renewable energy sources (RESs) has increased considerably due to their unique capabilities, such as a flexible nature and sustainable energy production. Prosumers, who are defined as proactive users of RESs and energy storage systems (ESSs), are deploying economic opportunities related to RESs in the electricity market. The prosumers are contracted to provide specific power for consumers in a neighborhood during daytime. This study presents optimal scheduling and operation of a prosumer owns RESs and two different types of ESSs, namely stationary battery (SB) and plugged-in electric vehicle (PHEV). Due to the intermittent nature of RESs and their dependency on weather conditions, this study introduces a weather prediction module in the energy management system (EMS) by the use of a feed-forward artificial neural network (FF-ANN). Linear regression results for predicted and real weather data have achieved 0.96, 0.988, and 0.230 for solar irradiance, temperature, and wind speed, respectively. Besides, this study considers the depreciation cost of ESSs in an objective function based on the depth of charge (DOD) reduction. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, predicted output and the real power of RESs are deployed, and a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is used to solve the presented day-ahead optimization problem. Based on the obtained results, the predicted output of RESs yields a desirable operation cost with a minor difference (US$0.031) compared to the operation cost of the system using real weather data, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed EMS in this study. Furthermore, optimum scheduling with regard to ESSs depreciation term has resulted in the reduction of operation cost of the prosumer and depreciation cost of ESS in the objective function has improved the daily operation cost of the prosumer by $0.8647.

Multi-facet user preference learning for fine-grained item recommendation

Existing recommendation methods mainly learn user preference from historical user-item interaction data, while ignoring the extent of interactions, i.e., diverse user experience and user intention. To be more specific, for new users with little or no experience, they may turn to popular items preferred by majority users. In terms of those medium-level users who already have interacted with some items, they may require and expect items to meet their personal preferences. As pro-active users are likely to leave rich behavior (action) feedback (e.g., view, like) on the items they interacted with, the system will have good chance to better interpret users’ intention, and thus generate more accurate and elaborate recommendations to hit their preferences. In this paper, we propose a generic Multi-facet User Preference Learning (MUPL) framework for fine-grained item recommendation. By considering diverse user experience and intention, MUPL captures user preference in the level of group-, individual- and action-facet. Besides, the importance of user preference in different facets can be automatically learnt by MUPL. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets (Xing, Sobazaar) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over other state-of-the-art methods.

Events 2.0 in the transmedia branding strategy of World Cultural Heritage Sites

The events designed and disseminated through social networks and from the perspective of transmedia storytelling are integrated into territorial marketing strategies as resources that reinforce the value of destinations. This type of events is key element in the construction of the World Heritage Sites (Unesco) brands. The new role of tourists as proactive users and the engagement generated towards the destination management organization are decisive elements for the online reputation management of territories. The monitoring of events let us evaluate the participation and interaction of tourist users in platforms 2.0. The aim of this research is to analyze the engagement (global, positive and negative) of events 2.0 integrated into the marketing strategy of the 40 World Cultural Heritage Sites in Spain on Facebook and Twitter. These social networks are the most frequently used in marketing strategies of destination marketing organizations. An exploratory study of events integrated in digital tourism marketing strategy of the World Cultural Heritage Sites is carried out through content analysis. Results show that there are substantial differences in the management of events 2.0. The different levels of interaction (reactions, sharing and comments) allow the destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to evaluate the rate of engagement. This latter parameter can be used as a reference for the efficient design of future events linked to the 2.0 promotion of cultural destinations.

Coverage analysis of ultra-dense heterogeneous cellular networks with interference management

Deploying ultra-dense small base stations (SBSs) in the coverage umbrella of a macro base station (MBS) requires proactive users offloading form MBS to SBSs to achieve maximum performance gain in heterogeneous cellular networks. However, it degrades the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the offloaded users due to strong interference received from MBS. To improve users’ SINR, an efficient interference mitigation scheme is required to be used in conjunction with users offloading. Soft frequency reuse (SFR) is an attractive and spectrally efficient interference mitigation scheme that allocates available bandwidth among all cell users associated with $$k{\text{BS}}$$, where $$k\in ({\text{M}},{\text{S}})$$. To address the problem of interference, we use the SFR scheme together with power control factor $$(\beta )$$ to transmit at different power levels for interior and edge regions of $$k{\text{BS}}$$, i.e., $$r^i_{k} \,{\text{and}}\, r^e_{k}$$, respectively. We further consider uniform and nonuniform SBS distribution in the premises of MBS and analyse the effect of the SFR scheme on the proposed model with the help of Stochastic geometry. Mathematical expressions for coverage probabilities are derived and validated through simulations. Numerical results show that the proposed model achieves better coverage probability due to reduced interference. Moreover, nonuniform SBS distribution together with the SFR scheme further improves the performance gain of the proposed model.

Integrating building and urban semantics to empower smart water solutions

Current urban water research involves intelligent sensing, systems integration, proactive users and data-driven management through advanced analytics. The convergence of building information modeling with the smart water field provides an opportunity to transcend existing operational barriers. Such research would pave the way for demand-side management, active consumers, and demand-optimized networks, through interoperability and a system of systems approach. This paper presents a semantic knowledge management service and domain ontology which support a novel cloud-edge solution, by unifying domestic socio-technical water systems with clean and waste networks at an urban scale, to deliver value-added services for consumers and network operators. The web service integrates state of the art sensing, data analytics and middleware components. We propose an ontology for the domain which describes smart homes, smart metering, telemetry, and geographic information systems, alongside social concepts. This integrates previously isolated systems as well as supply and demand-side interventions, to improve system performance. A use case of demand-optimized management is introduced, and smart home application interoperability is demonstrated, before the performance of the semantic web service is presented and compared to alternatives. Our findings suggest that semantic web technologies and IoT can merge to bring together large data models with dynamic data streams, to support powerful applications in the operational phase of built environment systems.

Attitudes towards assisted living inAustria-A qualitative study

Surveys in German speaking countries identified motives for choosing assisted living, but their importance in the context of decision making remains unclear. This study aimed to identify types of attitudes towards assisted living among older persons in Austria that result from the interplay of single motives. A comparative qualitative study with semi-structured interviews was conduCted in the land Salzburg among residents of assisted living facilities and home dwelling older adults. Data were analysed by using qualitative content analysis according to Mayring and subsequent construction of types. Among residents types of attitudes were "proactive users" who expected more safety or comfort and persons who "moved m due to external circumstances" like taking the opportunity of available place or feeling forced by functional/imitations or be ing influenced by significant others. Types of attitudes among home dwelling older persons were "conditional acceptance';"rejection" and ;'indecisiveness':Vague ideas about assisted living often prevented an informed decision. Choice of assisted living only depends to some extent on specific expectations. Better information,advice by significant others and availability of a place may favour a decision to move in.

Web-based collaboration in individual care planning challenges the user and the provider roles - toward a power transition in caring relationships.

Background and objectiveThe Individual Care Plan (ICP) was introduced in Norway to meet new statutory requirements for user participation in health care planning, incorporating multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. A web-based solution (electronic ICP [e-ICP]) was used to support the planning and documentation. The aim of this study was to investigate how web-based collaboration challenged user and professional roles.MethodsData were obtained from 15 semistructured interviews with users and eight with care professionals, and from two focus-group interviews with eight care professionals in total. The data were analyzed using systematic text condensation in a stepwise analysis model.ResultsUsers and care professionals took either a proactive or a reluctant role in e-ICP collaboration. Where both user and care professionals were proactive, the pairing helped to ensure that the planning worked well; so did pairings of proactive care professionals and reluctant users. Proactive users paired with reluctant care professionals also made care planning work, thanks to the availability of information and the users’ own capacity or willingness to conduct the planning. Where both parties were reluctant, no planning activities occurred.ConclusionUse of the e-ICP challenged the user–professional relationship. In some cases, a power transition took place in the care process, which led to patient empowerment. This knowledge might be used to develop a new understanding of how role function can be challenged when users and care professionals have equal access to health care documentation and planning tools.

Media awareness among Hong Kong primary students

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which Hong Kong primary students have access to various media, how they evaluate the credibility of the media, what they know about the media, and how they choose among different media, as well as teachers’ expectations towards their students’ views and consumption of media. Since little is known about young children in the context of media education, this paper fills a research gap by studying the media awareness and use of upper primary students. A questionnaire on media awareness and media use patterns was given to the teachers, who were asked to answer the questions from the perspective of their students. The same questionnaire was administered to students during class time. The descriptive statistics of the data were analyzed and compared. Students believed that the most reliable media for providing news was the television, followed by the radio, the newspaper, and the Internet; about half of the students believed that they were capable of distinguishing true from false news; students were more proactive media users than the teachers thought. The findings of this study suggest that more contextual and in-depth approaches to research would be beneficial to assess the media use patterns of students, from which relevant media education models can be derived.

User Experience of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Respiratory Disease Dashboard

A successful electronic disease surveillance system requires both organizational support and the active participation of data contributors. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has established the Respiratory Disease Dashboard (RDD) to monitor respiratory pathogens since the 2009 pandemic influenza. A user satisfaction survey conducted within the DoD's global surveillance network reflected challenges ahead with the implementation of electronic surveillance data entry in various settings. It is only with vigilant and proactive users in ensuring timely and accurate data input that an electronic surveillance system, such as RDD, can become a useful tool for the basis of disease detection and response.

Functional Requirements of Mobile Applications for Fishermen

Unusable information technology products and its unacceptability have been traced to the inability of the tech products to meet the needs and desire of the users, for whom the products are provided. Malaysia government has also been recording same users’ neglect on information technological infrastructure provided despite huge amount of money invested on the ICT project, most especially for the rural dwellers. The major reason of this users’ unacceptability have been traced to lack of proactive users’ requirements gathering. To address this in the intending development of mobile application for fishermen; who are also members of the target group to be provided mobile technologies by the Malaysian government, this study aims to validate the functional requirements of mobile applications for fishermen using a Qualitative-based users’ participatory design methodology. The result of the study shows that fishermen’s ability to get weather updates, water safety information, track of storm and rain intensity, advertizing fish catch, real time market price and general fishing tips are functional requirements of a mobile application for fishermen.

Associating Crash Avoidance Maneuvers With Driver Attributes and Accident Characteristics: A Mixed Logit Model Approach

Objective: The current study focuses on the propensity of drivers to engage in crash avoidance maneuvers in relation to driver attributes, critical events, crash characteristics, vehicles involved, road characteristics, and environmental conditions. The importance of avoidance maneuvers derives from the key role of proactive and state-aware road users within the concept of sustainable safety systems, as well as from the key role of effective corrective maneuvers in the success of automated in-vehicle warning and driver assistance systems. Methods: The analysis is conducted by means of a mixed logit model that represents the selection among 5 emergency lateral and speed control maneuvers (i.e., “no avoidance maneuvers,” “braking,” “steering,” “braking and steering,” and “other maneuvers) while accommodating correlations across maneuvers and heteroscedasticity. Data for the analysis were retrieved from the General Estimates System (GES) crash database for the year 2009 by considering drivers for which crash avoidance maneuvers are known. Results: The results show that (1) the nature of the critical event that made the crash imminent greatly influences the choice of crash avoidance maneuvers, (2) women and elderly have a relatively lower propensity to conduct crash avoidance maneuvers, (3) drowsiness and fatigue have a greater negative marginal effect on the tendency to engage in crash avoidance maneuvers than alcohol and drug consumption, (4) difficult road conditions increase the propensity to perform crash avoidance maneuvers, and (5) visual obstruction and artificial illumination decrease the probability to carry out crash avoidance maneuvers. Conclusions: The results emphasize the need for public awareness campaigns to promote safe driving style for senior drivers and warning about the risks of driving under fatigue and distraction being comparable to the risks of driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Moreover, the results suggest the need to educate drivers about hazard perception, designing a forgiving infrastructure within a sustainable safety systems, and rethinking in-vehicle collision warning systems. Future research should address the effectiveness of crash avoidance maneuvers and joint modeling of maneuver selection and crash severity.

Social-structural lag revisited

This paper revisits Lawton’s classic distinction between individual and social-structural lag. We discuss Lawton’s original work in the light of two precursors on which he strongly relied: Riley’s notion of structural lag, and Lawton’s own environmental docility vs. proactivity argument. We then unravel two related implications of a social-structural lag perspective: (i) Older persons should be seen as proactive users of technology. (ii) Technology, in turn, should be explored in terms of the role opportunities it does or does not provide. A brief review of research in gerontechnology reveals that these implications have thus far not received adequate treatment. To rectify this, we make use of insights from the sociological and economic study of innovation, in particular the notions of script and domestication. We conclude with three propositions to augment the gerontechnology agenda on social-structural lag. In sum, research on and design for social-structural lag has to avoid an excessive concern with user needs; rather, it should focus on the inputs of users to evolving technology.

A definição de categorias para o estudo de comportamentos proativos na recuperação de informações

Este estudo explora o relacionamento existente entre as características técnicas de um projeto de sistema de informação e apoio à decisão e os comportamentos dos usuários no seu uso. Seu objetivo: apresentar um modelo conceitual de Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), construído a partir da literatura, das tendências tecnológicas e de estudos de caso, que identificam características de sistema para comportamentos proativos dos usuários na recuperação de informações. Entre os principais resultados, pode-se destacar a definição de categorias relacionadas com as características dos sistemas - flexibilidade, integração e apresentação - e de categorias relacionadas com os comportamentos dos usuários na recuperação de informações - exploração de dados (scanning) e busca focada (focus search) - bem como a apresentação de um modelo conceitual para sistemas EIS. Pode-se destacar também a exploração de uma nova técnica para métodos qualitativos, denominada Modelagem de Casos, desenvolvida com o objetivo de buscar maior exploração do contexto na fase de análise de dados.