The ageing of the global population is creating a crisis in chronic disease management. In the USA, 29 million people (or 9.3% of the population) suffer from the chronic disease of diabetes; according to the WHO, globally around 200 million people are diabetic. Left unchecked, diabetes can lead to acute and long-term complications and ultimately death. Diabetes prevalence tends to be the highest among those aged 65 and older (nearly 20.6%), a population which often lacks the cognitive resources to deal with the daily self-management regimens. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) and wireless sensor system which patients use in their own homes to capture daily activity, an important component in diabetes management. Following Fogg's 2009 persuasion theory, we mine the activity data and provide motivational messages to the subjects with the intention of changing their activity and dietary behaviour. We introduce a novel idea called "persuasive sensing" and report results from two home implementations that show exciting promise. With the captured home monitoring data, we also develop analytic models that can predict blood glucose levels for the next day with an accuracy of 94%. We conclude with lessons learned from these two home case studies and explore design principles for creating novel IoT systems.

Students drop classes for many reasons. Some are personal such as medical conditions, family issues, or financial difficulties. Others are course specific such as course contents, instructor, or classmates. In either way, class drop is a serious problem to institutions because without students there will be no students learning. As a first step to understand students drops, this study will address the issue of students' behaviors in online classrooms.

California like the entire nation is aging. There are 4.3 million Californians 65 and older accounting for about 11% of the total state population. We also find that 58% of older adults have high blood pressure; about 21% have been told that they have diabetes. California in particular has the highest incidence of new diabetes cases and nearly 4 million people (diagnosed and undiagnosed) are estimated to be suffering from the disease. Diabetes is a chronic disease, which if unchecked leads to acute and long-term complications and ultimately death. Our older adult population often lacks the cognitive resources to deal with the daily self-management regimens. Many unpaid family members are caring for them today but this is unsustainable. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a wireless sensor network system within the home environment that captures activity of daily living. We mine the data and provide feedback via SMS/text (daily) and tailored newsletter (weekly). We introduce a novel idea called “persuasive sensing” and report results from two home implementations that are showing exciting promise. Moreover we show that with the help of an Artificial Neural Network, we can predict bloodglucose levels for the next day from accumulated data with an accuracy of 94%. The predictive model presented here is a break-through in at-home sensing research.

Online courses are popular in the United States. In particular, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platform such as Coursera and edX are used to deliver online courses exclusively. Although these courses often do not provide any college level credits or degrees, scores of people have already joined the courses and finished them. Many schools are struggling to incorporate online modalities into their curricula. Often they do not have enough resources to develop and deliver the online courses. In addition, delivered online courses are not as promising as expected, not just because the resources are lacking, but because they have different modalities from traditional classroom based courses. In this study, we proposed a model of relationship between online presence and student learning outcomes. By identifying the proper measures of online presence, instructors can not only pass on their knowledge, but also drastically improve the learning experience for their students.

Diabetes mellitus is a common but serious chronic disease that kills thousands of patients worldwide each year. While there are several useful regimens that can be followed to manage the disease, elderly adult patients have particular difficulties in self-managing the disease. In this paper we present a novel approach to self-management – persuasive sensing – that uses environmental and body-wearable sensors that continuously detects activities and physiological parameters. Our system sends persuasive text messages and a weekly health newsletter aimed to alter the subject’s behavior. We present the findings from an in-home monitoring implementation. The results obtained are quite encouraging. We discuss the challenges and lessons learned from such a field experiment and how we can improve upon the technology.

Instant messaging is an application that enables networked users to send and receive short messages. Presence provides information about users' reachability and willingness to accept/reject a brief chat session. Various proprietary IM and presence (IM&P) solutions are currently on the market, and standards are emerging. There are interoperability problems between the two dominant standards (SIMPLE and XMPP); as a result, this important application is finding difficulty in widespread deployment within college campuses and businesses. We describe a brief history of the development of IM&P technology discuss the current standardization work being done within IETF, and present an overall architecture of emerging standards. We provide a comparison between the SIP/SIMPLE and Jabber/XMPP standards. We also present data and its analysis from a survey of campus organizations that sheds light into the main issues of deploying, managing and provisioning of IM&P services on college campus.

In order to support the delivery of emerging network services, such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), teleconferencing, video conferencing, and telemedicine, the Internet must provide classes of service that are better than the traditional best-effort class of service commonly seen in low-bandwidth applications, such as e-mail. In computer networks, Quality of Service (QoS) is defined as the mechanisms that allow differentiation of traffic and services based on their requirements. To provide QoS over the current Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and others have proposed a number of architectures, including Integrated Service (IntServ) and Differentiated Service (DiffServ). However, pricing such QoS network remains as an open challenge. Determining the right pricing strategy will be important for the ultimate success of these new architectures. Traditional pricing of Internet services is based on economic models that focus on recovering costs or maximizing profits. To achieve these economic goals, various flat rate and dynamic (based on usage) pricing schemes have been developed but most of them suffer from the complexity and difficulty of the implementation. This research examines the basic issue of designing pricing models for Internet services at various quality levels. I developed a new pricing model that is based on a price-quality schema drawn from the marketing literature. Using this schema, I developed several price heuristic formulas that are further tested by simulation. By simulating a QoS network under conditions of various emerging applications, I defined and measured a quality index. This quality index is used in my pricing formula. I showed that service providers have a number of QoS variables that they can control, which in turn provide various levels of service that can maximize the revenue for the service provider. With the pricing scheme developed in this research, users can be charged for the service quality that they actually receive. The findings of this research suggest the need for additional research into both price perception and price determination under specific conditions unique to individual network service providers.

In order to support emerging network businesses, such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), virtual learning, video conferencing, and telemedicine, the Internet has to provide classes of service that are better than traditional ‘best-effort’ service. In computer networks, Quality of Service (QoS) is defined as the mechanisms that allow differentiation of network services based on their unique service requirements. To provide QoS over the current Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and others have proposed a number of architectures, including Integrated Service (IntServ) and Differentiated Service (DiffServ). This research examines the basic issue of designing pricing models for Internet services at various quality levels. By formulating a pricing formula that is based on price-quality schema drawn from marketing theory, this research provides a unique approach to understand the pricing of Internet services. The pricing model in this research provides a flexible and dynamic capability to develop Internet pricing for upcoming digital economy.

The entire telecommunications industry is going through very difficult times. Rapidly changing technology, lack of good business models, and lack of visibility in the near-term for renewed growth all create an uncertain environment. Yet, the global Internet is becoming a multi-service network infrastructure that can potentially replace existing disparate voice and data networks. Although it is widely believed in the telecommunications industry that network convergence of voice, data, video, and images is an industry driver, not much attention has yet been paid to a key proposition: what value does network convergence bring to business and residential customers? This paper explains how different industries are converging; the technological, economic and regulatory forces that are at play and how the various customer segments can benefit from network convergence. While technological advancement is transforming industry and business models rapidly, one question keeps coming back to haunt managers: Where is the business value? We illustrate the value proposition of convergence (for various players) by first explaining the paradigm shifts happening across industries and then highlighting the "high velocity spiral" of knowledge dissemination theory that is fueled by convergence.

Providing end-to-end (ETE) guarantees and quality-of-service to a diverse class of applications on the Internet has become the Holy Grail for networking researchers. As the growth of the Internet continues, service providers are facing interesting challenges that include: network design, engineering, pricing structures and business models that maximize profit. In this paper, we first present taxonomy of approaches to solving the ETE QOS problem. Most of these approaches are technical mechanisms that have been developed by various standardization bodies. However, we point out that there is clear evidence that suggests using socio-economic approaches to solve this problem. We describe a novel bandwidth broker approach that integrates game theory, utility theory and pricing mechanisms to come up with heuristics. This is on-going research but we describe our current work to date using these new ideas.