Location Based Services

The study investigated effects of two innovative instructional delivery strategies on junior secondary school students’ achievement in Basic Science and Technology. The population comprised 3050 JSII students in 41 public co-educational junior secondary schools in Karu LGA of Nasarawa state made up of 1701 male students and 1349 female students. A quasi-experimental pre-test, posttest non-equivalent group research design was employed as design and without a control group. Through multi-stage random sampling, 2 intact JSII classes were selected with sample size of 121. Using balloting, one of the classes was assigned as experimental group taught using sensory stimulation strategy and the other with inquiry strategy. The instrument used for data collection was Basic Science and Technology Achievement Test (BSTAT) with a reliability coefficient of BSTAT is 0.82 analyzed using Spearman Brown rank order correlation. Two research questions were formulated with corresponding hypotheses and were tested at 0.05 level of significance for the study. Data collected were analyzed using mean, standard deviation and ANCOVA statistics. The study revealed significantly higher achievement for students taught Basic Science and Technology concepts using sensory stimulation as against those taught using inquiry strategies. Though male students achieved higher than their female counterparts when taught using sensory stimulation strategy, the difference is not significant. It is recommended that teachers of Basic Science and Technology should adopt sensory stimulation strategy in their instructional delivery approach. The multiple appeals to students’ senses by sensory stimulation strategy tends to make learning pleasurable and supports meta-cognitive processes which aids easy remembering, reduces agitation and increases alertness during learning.

Education is widely regarded as the key to economic prosperity, the key to scientific and technological advancement, the means to combat unemployment, and the foundation of social equity. Based on this fact, the Federal Government of Nigeria like other developing nations has at different times made serious efforts in increasing the number of children enrolled in primary schools though there are still many more who are not enrolled and who do not complete the primary education. This massive expansion has been possible by the allocation of large sums of monetary allocation to primary education. Although the functionality of this level of primary education is not doubted, in addition to the structural changes made to improve the system, it has been saddled with problems ranging from issues of enrolment, funding, infrastructure, teaching personnel and curriculum provisions. This paper discusses the productivity of primary education and some of the structural changes made to meet the demands of the society. More so, this paper discusses the issues earlier mentioned as the affect primary education system in Nigeria.

This research is focused on the area of mobile Big Data, particularly personal location data and its usage to gain insights into customers’ in-store behaviours. The objective of this research is to study the practical potential of mobile Big Data in order to evaluate its impact on business decision-making in the case company. This study was commissioned by Elgiganten AB – Haparanda. The case company is a part of Elkjøp Nordic AS, the largest consumer electronics and home appliances retailer in Sweden.

The study stemmed from the need to increase the case company’s understanding of the customers’ behaviours. This research is practically oriented with the theoretical framework revolving around studying the mobile Big Data, sensors’ tracking technologies and Apache Hadoop applications. To accomplish the objectives of this research, the business scenario using mobile Big Data to support decision making in the case company was formulated and scrutinised.

The qualitative research method was used in this single case study for the case company. Exploratory research approach was chosen due to the novelty of the research area. This research makes extensive use of both primary and secondary data. The primary data was gathered through in-depth interviews and questionnaire. The secondary data was collected from established research works conducted on mobile Big Data and its related issues, i.e. Big Data technologies, business value and ethics.

On the basis of the theoretical discussions, the business scenario, and the in-depth interviews and questionnaire, the research results indicate that mobile Big Data can provide various valuable insights into the customers’ behaviours in the case company’s retail store. Consequently, the business decision-making can be enhanced.

— Location-based services (LBS) require users to continuously report their location to a potentially untrusted server to obtain services based on their location, which can lead them to privacy risks. Unfortunately, present privacy-preserving techniques for Location Based Services have numerous restrictions, such as requiring a fully-trusted third party (FTTP), providing limited privacy guarantees and incurring high communication overhead. A user-defined privacy grid system called dynamic grid system (DGS) the first holistic system that fulfills four essential requirements for privacy-preserving snapshot and continuous Location Based Services. The system only requires a semi-trusted third party, blamable for carrying out simple matching operations correctly. This semi-trusted third party does not have any data about a user's location. Safe snapshot and continuous location privacy is guaranteed under our defined adversary models. The communication cost for the user does not depend on the user's desired privacy level, it only depends on the number of significant points of interest in the vicinity of the user. Although we only focus on range and k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) queries in this work, our system can be simply extended to support other spatial queries without changing the algorithms run by the semi-trusted third party and the database server, provided the required search area of a spatial query can be abstracted into spatial regions. Experimental outcomes show that our Dynamic Grid System is more efficient than the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving technique for continuous LBS.

Travelling and touring are popular leisure activities enjoyed by millions of tourists around the world. However, the task of travel itinerary recommendation and planning is tedious and challenging for tourists, who are often unfamiliar with the various Points-of-Interest (POIs) in a city. Apart from identifying popular POIs, the tourist needs to construct a travel itinerary comprising a subset of these POIs, and to order these POIs as a sequence of visits that can be completed within his/her available touring time. For a more realistic itinerary, the tourist also has to account for travelling time between POIs and visiting times at individual POIs. Furthermore, this itinerary should incorporate tourist preferences such as desired starting and ending POIs (e.g., POIs that are near the tourist's hotel) and a subset of must-see POIs (e.g., popular POIs that a tourist must visit). We term this the TourMustSee problem, which is based on a variant of the Orienteering problem. Following which, we propose the LP+M algorithm for solving the TourMustSee problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). Using a Flickr dataset of POI visits in seven touristic cities, we compare LP+M against various ILP-based baselines, and the results show that LP+M recommends better travel itineraries in terms of POI popularity, total POIs visited, total touring time utilized and must-visit POI(s) inclusion.

Restaurant recommendation system is a very
popular service whose accuracy and sophistication keeps
increasing every day. With the advent of smartphones, web 2.0
and internet services like 3G, this has become accessible by
every consumer. In this paper, we present a personalized
location based restaurant recommendation system integrated
in mobile technology. It ubiquitously studies the user’s
behavioral pattern of visiting restaurant using a Machine
Learning algorithm. We also address the issues faced by
today’s recommendation systems and propose methods to
rectify it.

Audio-based mobile technology is opening up a range of new interactive possibilities. This paper brings some of those possibilities to light by offering a range of perspectives based in this area. It is not only the technical systems that are developing, but novel approaches to the design and understanding of audio-based mobile systems are evolving to offer new perspectives on interaction and design and support such systems to be applied in areas, such as the humanities.

The advent of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled
Beacons is poised to revolutionize the indoor contextual aware
services to the users. Due to the lower energy consumption and
higher throughput, BLE could therefore be an integral pillar
of an Internet of Things (IoT) Location Based Service (LBS).
Tracking a user with high accuracy is known as Micro-Location.
This is a requirement of many IoT user-centric applications
for indoor environments. Although several technologies have
been used for tracking purposes, the accuracy has always been
a serious issue. At the same time, each vendor would install
different technologies. In this work, we propose to use the cutting edge and commercially available Apple’s iBeacon protocol and iBeacon BLE sensors for micro-location. We propose to leverage a control theoretic approach, namely particle filtering, in order to increase the tracking accuracy in an indoor environment. We performed extensive experiments and our results show that the proposed beacon based micro-location system can be used to locate a user in an indoor environment with an error as low as 0.27 meters.

The paper assesses the perception of the stakeholders on the integration of basic education into the curriculum of islamiyyah and ma'ahad schools in Nasarawa State. The research design used for this study was a survey research design, which involves the collection of data from random sample of the target population. The population of the study is made up of all Almajiris, their teachers and parents in Five (5) wards of Akwanga Local Government Area of Nasarawa State. The instrument used in conducting this study was an interview questions designed by the researcher, which has a definite set of questions and predetermined order of asking. The data for the study which were derived from the responses of the Almajiris, the teachers and parents to the interview items were analyzed, using simple percentages and mean scores. The hypotheses were tested by Kruskal-Wallis (H) statistics at 0.05 level of significance. The paper found that the major problems that may affect the integration of Almajiri system into formal education are lack of appropriate curriculum and lack of comprehensive integrated school structure that would address the need to merge the two systems into holistic integrated system. The paper recommended that food supply to the integrated school should be adequate, regular and the school environments should be made more convenient and conducive for learning. There is a need for training and retraining of the Almajiri teachers to enhance their performance and to able to suit in the demands of the models of integrating Almajiris system into the formal system of education.

Over the years the process of manual attendance has been carried out which is not only time consuming but also provides erroneous result. Automated time and attendance monitoring system provides many benefits to organizations. This reduces the need of pen and paper based manual attendance tracking system. Following this thought, we have proposed a smart location based time and attendance tracking system which is implemented on android mobile application on smartphone reducing the need of additional biometric scanner device. The location of an organization has a specific location, which can be determine by the GPS. Each employee's location can be determined by the GPS using smartphone. This location is defined as a key of time and attendance tracking in our paper.

This paper assesses the effect of paraphrasing and visual imagery learning strategies on English language students' academic achievement in College of Education, Pankshin. This study employed the two groups, randomized subjects, post-test design. The population of this study constitutes 600 (300 male and 400 female) English Language students from College of Education, Pankshin. The sample of this study constitutes 200 (100 male and 100 female) English Language students using stratified random sampling technique. For the purpose of this study, the researcher developed four instruments for data collection from students. The four instruments are English language achievement tests measuring different aspects of comprehension passage. The instruments are English language Comprehension Inference Achievement Test for Students (ECIATS), English language Comprehension Paraphrasing Achievement Test for Students (ECPATS), English language Comprehension Word Identification Achievement Test for Students (ECWIATS) and English language Comprehension Visual Imagery Achievement Test for Students (ECVIATS). The reliability coefficients of 0.80, 0.76, 0.82 and 0.86 were obtained for ECIATS, ECPATS, ECWIATS and ECVIATS respectively. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse research questions. t-test statistics of significance was used to test the formulated null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study found that the paraphrasing learning strategy improves the students' achievement in English Language regardless of gender. And the visual imagery learning strategy diminishes the students' achievement in English Language regardless of gender. Finally the paper recommended that seminars and workshops should be organized to teacher on the effective use of paraphrasing learning strategy in the teaching of English Language.

Despite the fact that advergaming, avatar-based marketing or alternate reality games are verified by marketing practice, the current development of new technologies implemented into digital games development such as location-based service, augmented and virtual reality pushes forward forms and strategies of the product/brand promotion utilizing digital games as well. The study focuses on the analysis of new trends within marketing communication based on digital games with emphasis on advergaming, determining their opportunities, limitations and possible future direction. New advergaming trends are subsequently demonstrated with a discursive analysis of location-based augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO.

Advertisements have become today’s most direct marketing channel that provide information and discount offers about products to customers and allow marketers to reach a precise goal by creating campaigns. Making these Ads location-specific would not only render them more relevant but also personalized and targeted to specific audience. This paper presents a brief survey on Location-based Advertisements (LBA) with emphasis on their applications in Public Transportation Systems (Buses, Trains, Airplanes, etc.). Furthermore, this paper also proposes the design and implementation of a low-cost embedded system using Global Positioning System (GPS) which displays these Ads on real-time passenger information display system inside the vehicle. The objective of this review is to summarize and compare some of the well-known extensive research done in the field of LBA in order to make the existing technology even better.

This paper investigates leadership transition and the growth of the church in ECWA Kafanchan District Church Council. The study utilized a quantitative research design. The population of this study consists of the Elders, Pastors, Agency leaders, and Retired Pastors within the ECWA Kafanchan District Church Council. Stratified random sampling technique was used to draw sample from the population. A total of 68 respondents were used for the study. The researcher used a structured questionnaire as an instrument for data collection from the respondents within the DCC. The validity of the instrument was determined by experts" appraisal and the reliability was ascertained through a process of a pilot study. The data collected through questionnaires were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The study found that leadership transition in the Church is the entire process of handing and taking over between the outgoing and the incoming leaders, (Predecessor/Successor). A smooth leadership transition in the church sustains both the relationship of the leaders and their subjects. The paper recommended that leadership transition should be made a constitutional matter duly supervised and emphasized. And workshops, seminars, retreat about leadership transition at the levels of both the leaders and the led to be a priority to fulfill or prevent the hazard of Hosea 4:6 "My people are perishing for lack of knowledge."

The emergence of Location-Based-Real-Time-Dating (LBRTD) apps such as Tinder has introduced a new way for users to get to know potential partners nearby. The design of the apps represents a departure from “old-school” dating sites as it relies on the affordances of mobile media. This might change the way individuals portray themselves as their authentic or deceptive self. Based on survey data collected via Mechanical Turk and using structural equation modeling, we assess how Tinder users present themselves, exploring at the same time the impact of their personality characteristics, their demographics and their motives of use. We find that self-esteem is the most important psychological predictor, fostering real self-presentation but decreasing deceptive self-presentation. The motives of use – hooking up/sex, friendship, relationship, traveling, self-validation, and entertainment – also affect the two forms of self-presentation. Demographic characteristics and psychological antecedents influence the motives for using Tinder, with gender differences being especially pronounced. Women use Tinder more for friendship and self-validation, while men use it more for hooking up/sex, traveling and relationship seeking. We put the findings into context, discuss the limitations of our approach and provide avenues for future research into the topic.

Urban fire causes significant threat to the loss of lives and property. The location of a fire station is critical to reduce response time to incident place and eventually increase possibility of beating life-threatening dangerous flashovers. Fuzzy international standards, population density, traffic conditions and distance to other existing fire stations, fire resources and hazardous are some of the criteria considered in the fire station location problem. In this paper, we conduct a thorough literature survey of well-founded research that bring forth methodologies for better fire stations locations. It compares methodologies that adopt fuzzy multi-objective optimisation, maximal coverage, geographic information system (GIS), genetic algorithm (GA), ant algorithm, Tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA) to solve the complex problem with higher efficiency and in due course of increasing possibility of rescue and survival. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Aleisa E. (xxxx) 'The fire station location problem: a literature survey', Int.

A theoretical framework including categories of factors and their associated indicators is derived from previous studies and used to examine e-Policing systems from the perspective of police and citizens in a developed nation (Singapore) compared to a developing nation (Maldives). Data collected by questionnaire from a sample of citizens and police from both nations is used to test hypotheses related to the indicators in the framework. The findings provide insights into e-Policing practices and services provided via social network services (SNS) and location-based services in a developed and a developing nation. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Mobile application uses and development is a rapidly growing sector. Nowadays mobile devices are more powerful and portable with plenty of useful tools for assisting people handle daily life. The main objective of this paper is to develop a mobile application that solves the problems facing bus drivers and parents when parents do not show up, and when kids wait for a long time. The application also produces the current drivers map to be used for bus fleet management purposes. The application makes use of the location service on Android to specify the current location of the driver, and the Google's cloud to device messaging to push approaching notifications to parents. The application is developed using an Extreme Programming (XP) based methodology that performs the analysis, design, implementation, and testing iteratively.

The recent outbreak of Corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to the total lockdown of major cities globally which resulted in the early closure of schools in the cities affected, Nigeria inclusive. It is hypothesized that COVID-19 may have a negative outcome on the achievement of senior secondary school students in (SS3) who are yet to write their 2020 external examination (West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate Examination as well as National Examination Council) especially in the science subjects namely Biology, Physics and Chemistry. This study collected data from three teachers who are science oriented and head of their respective departments in three government secondary schools in Kaduna South local government area of Kaduna State, Nigeria. A semi-structured interview was used to collect data from the teachers through phone calls and WhatsApp chats. This qualitative study employed a case study research approach. Findings from this study revealed that there is the possibility of a further drop in the pass rate (%) of senior secondary school students' in this year's external examinations if this pandemic is not contained soon knowing fully well that the school academic calendar has already been disrupted due to early closure of schools in Nigeria. As part of COVID-19 relief package, recommendations are made to the Federal government of Nigeria and stakeholders to distribute iPads and electronic tablets preloaded with e-textbooks in these subject areas to SS3 students and their teachers to facilitate online learning as this will enhance their achievement in Science subjects in this year's national examination.

This paper investigated the contribution of instructional materials to the academic achievement of secondary school students in Social Studies in Kaduna State. The population for the study comprised of all Junior Secondary School Class II students from among which 180 were sampled. The instrument for the study is a 30 multiple-choice self-designed Social Studies Achievement Test (SSAT). The instrument was validated by specialists in Social Studies, Test and Measurement and Educational Management. Test-re-test method and estimation of internal consistency was used to ascertain the reliability. The reliability coefficient of 0.73 and 0.75 were obtained respectively. The study generated four hypotheses that were tested at the significance level of 0.05. ANOVA and ANCOVA statistical tools were used to analyse the data collected. The study found that there was significant difference in the pre-test and post-test of students in the experimental group. The study also found that gender effect was not statistically significant in social studies. The study concluded that students who were taught with instructional materials achieved better than those taught without the use of instructional materials. The study, therefore recommended that teachers of Social Studies should make use of relevant instructional materials for their teaching and learning process also improvise where and when the materials are not available. It therefore becomes important to have concerted effort among parents, school and the government to make available important and necessary instructional materials to teachers of Social Studies for enhanced teaching and consequents improved achievement of students in the subject.

Smartphone's are existence utilize for various ranges of vigorous activities including social media, messaging, a chart, context directorate in addition for location applications. Emergency never comes with prior information. In real world case such emergencies and reporting them is a real challenge. This paper contains the existing systems detail survey and proposed system to overcome common problem of having manual intervention while reporting emergency. We are proposing the new idea for emergency detection and reporting. This system will record and report emergency in real time. Reporting of emergency comes with two ways either the person at emergency situation can report directly by Smartphone with nearest emergency facility or by reporting and response team comes with emergency facility like medical, fire, police. It works in three steps as detection of emergency with current location, user data collection and processing and reporting to web application. This is the client-...

Tourism is a popular leisure activity and an important industry, where the main task involves visiting unfamiliar Places-of-Interest (POI) in foreign cities. Recommending POIs and tour planning are challenging and time-consuming tasks for tourists due to: (i) the need to identify and recommend captivating POIs in an unfamiliar city; (ii) having to schedule POI visits as a connected itinerary that satisfies trip constraints such as starting/ending near a specific location (e.g., the tourist's hotel) and completing the itinerary within a limited touring duration; and (iii) having to satisfy the diverse interest preferences of each unique tourist. While tourism-related information can be obtained from the Internet, travel guides and tour agencies, many of these resources simply recommend individual POIs or popular itineraries, but otherwise do not appeal to the interest preferences of users or adhere to their trip constraints.

In contrast to existing works on next-POI prediction and top-k POI recommendation that recommend a single POI or a ranked list of POIs, the task of tour recommendation involves the need to identify a set of interesting POIs and schedule them as an itinerary with various time and space constraints. While there are works on path planning that recommend an itinerary, this itinerary is typically optimized based on a global utility such as POI popularity, and thus offer no personalization for a tourist based on his/her interest preferences.
This thesis addresses the challenges associated with the automation and personalization of tour recommendation using data mining techniques to model user interest and POI-related information, and using optimization problems and techniques to formulate and solve more realistic tour recommendation problems. Our main contributions include:
1.) Proposing and implementing a framework that utilizes Flickr geo-tagged photos and Wikipedia to automatically determine user trajectories, interest preferences and POI-related information such as POI popularity and visiting times.
2.) Proposing the PersTour algorithm for recommending personalized tour itineraries based on POI popularity, users' interest preferences and trip constraints, where POI visit durations are customized based on user interests.
3.) Formulating the QueueTourRec problem for recommending queue-aware and personalized itineraries that schedule visits to popular and interesting POIs at times with minimal queuing times, and proposing a novel implementation of Monte Carlo Tree Search to solve this problem.
4.) Developing the TourRecInt algorithm for tour recommendation based on a variant of the Orienteering problem with a mandatory POI category, which is defined as the POI category that a tourist has most frequently visited.
5.) Formulating and solving the novel GroupTourRec problem, which involves recommending tour itineraries to groups of tourists with diverse interests and assigning tour guides with the right expertise to lead each tour group.
6.) Illustrating the application of our proposed approach in practice, by presenting a web-based system implementation of our PersTour algorithm, with the front-end component developed using HTML, PHP, jQuery and the Google Maps API, and the back-end based on Python, Java and PHP.

The relationships between museums, artefacts and original sites are complex. How may we use mobile augmented reality (AR) to bridge the gaps between both indoors and outdoors exhibitions as well as the opposition between central collections and the more peripheral sites of the original artefacts? In this paper we present two main cases (the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and the Calmecac Museum in Mexico City) where we have experimented with bringing a digital copy of the displaced artefact back to its original environment, as well as bringing a digital copy of the original environment into the displaced or isolated object in the museum exhibition. Further, we report on a solution to solve the problem with indoor positioning (IPS) and how it can be seamlessly combined with GPS-based outdoor positioning for smooth transitions between inside and outside. Finally, these cases were tested with three different hardware platforms tablets, smartphones and smartglasses.

In today's technological world of privacy-conscious users, the tracking of individuals via different positioning systems and services can be considered obtrusive. Furthermore, linking and integrating data from these positioning systems is not always possible or requires the major effort of creating new interfaces between systems. In this paper, we propose an architecture for the realisation of a decentralised positioning system based on the W3C's Solid platform specification. Using this specification, sensor data as well as an individual's location information is stored in secure decentralised data stores called Pods, that are hosted by user-selected Pod providers. We demonstrate that these Pods do not only offer transparent and interoperable data stores for persisting sensor data as well as processed location information, but also aid in linking multiple positioning systems for high-and low-level sensor fusion. For indoor positioning, this interoperability provides a way to offer users a single location-based service while also providing additional semantic context for other positioning systems to improve their data output. Developers of indoor positioning systems can store all data in a format that is readable, understandable and accessible by any other system that their users might be using, enabling collaboration between researchers and companies implementing these indoor positioning systems.

The paper attempts to unveil sources of both systematic and unsystematic errors that are prevalent in educational assessment which include those related to students such as test misconduct of any kind and those associated with teachers such as items development, test administration and scoring process among others. Therefore, the paper recommends that errors can be controlled to some extent by standardizing the measurement procedures and increasing the number of observations that are sampled for each person hence; the score will be formed by averaging over a sample of observations. Finally it concludes that errors in educational assessment cannot be completely controlled but can only be minimized and that is the focus of every measurement models.