Improving Recommendation Accuracy Using Social Network of Owners in Social Internet of Vehicles

The latest manifestation of “all connected world" is the Internet of Things (IoT), and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is one of the key examples of IoT these days. In Social IoV (SIoV), each vehicle is treated as a social object where it establishes and manages its own Social Network (SN). Incidentally, most of the SIoV research in the literature is related to proximity-based connectivity and interactions. In this paper, we bring people in the loop by incorporating their SNs. While emphasizing a recommendation scenario, in which vehicles may require recommendations from SNs of their owners (in addition to their own SIoV), we proposed an agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) on a hypothetical population of smart vehicles. Some important hypotheses were tested using a realistic simulation setting. The simulation results reveal that a recommendation using weak ties is more valuable than a recommendation using strong ties in pure SIoV. The simulation results also demonstrate that recommendations using the most-connected person in the social network are not more valuable than recommendation using a random person in the social network. The model presented in this paper can be used to design a multi-scale recommendation system, which uses SIoV and a typical SN in combination.

Don’t Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too

Chris Dancy is a die-hard techie and a self-proclaimed consumption-aholic. Known as “the most connected person on earth” (21), Dancy used up to 700 sensors, devices, applications, and services to monitor, evaluate, and change his life—from his eating habits to his spirituality. Don’t Unplug consists of five main sections covering Dancy’s life from birth to age fifty. He shares a lot of his personal life in the book, which brings out feelings of sympathy, empathy, and pity in the reader. In each of the five sections, Dancy first shares his personal stories, and then offers his take-aways and advice from the experience. Dancy considers himself to have an obsessive and addictive personality. “By 2011, I understood that if a substance or situation could be abused, I would find a way to do so” (53). As you read the lengths Dancy goes to tracking his behaviors, it leaves you in no doubt that he did tend to take things to the extreme in every instance.

Emergency Sanitation

The increasing number of natural disasters and other emergency situations must lead to a reevaluation with regards to the supply of essentials for affected people, especially in the field of water and sanitation. Emergency sanitation facilities have to be wisely planned and implemented in time in order to reduce the risks of outbreaks of communicable diseases in shelters or temporary settlements. The presented technical solutions for post-disaster sewage are based on a compact-sized combination of mechanical sedimentation and anaerobic biological wastewater treatment processes. Using different types of prefabricated components, these systems are designed to meet the unique logistical requirements of disaster scenarios. An important “lesson learnt” from past experiences is the need to reduce the wastewater volume from shelters, as transport and space for appropriate treatment are always a limiting factor. The applied wastewater treatment following DEWATS-principles will allow a reduction of BOD and COD of over 90%. In order to accelerate the startup, anaerobic sludge from existing plants will be injected into the reactors. Investment costs are below 5 $ per connected person and the maximum response time after identification of the location in demand until the start of operation is 5 days.