This research topic can only be taken by Thesis route and Project route student. This research topic include the following project development. The project outcome needs to be examined by well-designed experiment for quanititative and qualitative data analysis (for Thesis route student) and pilot testing for usability and technology acceptance analysis (for both Thesis and Project students).
Travelers could receive information and materials provided by the system wherever they are located in the real world. There is a problem in such mobile systems. The problem is that travelers might don’t know where to go to visit. They will spend time for moving in the real world and time for visiting the places they are interested. A good guidance message can lead them to the right place more quickly. The research team has proposed a method to generate the guidance message with knowing spatial knowledge (context-aware) for guiding travelers when they are visiting a new city (location-based). The navigator leads the travelers moving in the real world from one spot to another with guidance messages just like the driving guidance systems in cars. When users are roaming in real-life environment and looking for specific place for learning (e.g., Gothic architecture) or fun (e.g., Bar Tour for the happy hour), it is important for them to have a guidance from the map, the people, and may be the mobile phone! The current landmark-based mobile navigation system takes the following two issues into consideration: (1) in the real learning environment such as national park or zoo, sometimes there is no road or no named road, and (2) not all mobile devices have built-in GPS receiver and compass and even the devices have GPS receivers, sometimes, it can not receive GPS signals due to the weather issue or the user is inside a building (e.g., museum).
The navigation system currently only considers the relations among situated objects and doesn't take shortest path planning into consideration. Travelers might still need to spend long time to travel and search, because the system chooses the path from one spot to anther based on if it is easy to navigate rather than distance. Beside the shortest path issue, the proposed method has simplified the problems by ignoring the curviform line objects and non-quadrilateral shape objects. How to transform these specific objects into the situated map is the object shaping issue. Furthermore, this research also chooses to not take the no-trespassing situated shape objects as the landmarks. So how to inform travelers make a suitable detour to pass the no-trespassing situated shape object under the situation that the mobile devices have no location-aware feature is the no-trespassing object issue. At last, the geographical information should also be taken into consideration, because the landmarks might not be able to see by travelers due to its positions, heights, and even shapes, i.e., the visibility issue. Solving these four issues are the objectives of this research project.
Tasks of this project also include:
The student can learn how to design an Android app. Also, the student needs to consider how to make the app still useful when the internet access is not available; therefore, appropriate synchronizers and multi-agent system may need to design and implement as well. New relevant functions have to be developed in modularized JSPs to give flexibility and reusability in future development and enhancement for working with other systems. A pilot study is needed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the usability of the Landmark-based Mobile Navigation app.
In this project, the student needs to design and develop the following functions in corresponding web and Android platform:
1. replace the use of google map with Open Street Data so the Landmark-based Mobile Navigation System can be used when users have no Internet access
2. map data pre-fetch function on Android platform
3. refine the database that Landmark-based Mobile Navigation System currently has to make the point of interests (and its categories), map objects, map tags, and map data available for the system
4. daemon of updating (download and upload map data, objects, and tags) Open Street Data for Landmark-based Mobile Navigation System
5. map annotation function for users to add and to see map tags and objects as well as the covered area on the Web platform
6. design and implement algorithm to identify the travel behavior such as walking, running, driving (take bus and subway OR driving), etc. that a user may have so the system can give more appropriate guidance messages based on its findings
7. design and implement algorithm to identify the visit and stay behavior that a user may have while his or her device can not receive GPS signal
8. refine the algorithm of making guidance messages by taking the shortest path issue, the object shaping issue, the no-trespassing object issue, and the visibility issue into consideration.
Learning outcomes:
The student can learn how to design a multi-agent based Android app as well as distributed services/agents in modularized JSPs. Also, the student can know how to design a pilot (or a complete experiment for thesis students) to gather the perception that users may have toward the system and to do usability analysis for the system (in addition, for thesis students, they can learn how to design research model, make hypotheses, verify the causal relationships amongst factors, do quantitative and qualitative data analysis). Skills of designing and evaluating a questionnaire's validity and reliability can be learnt either.
For taking this topic, the student is better to have the following skills or knowledge:
1. Familiar with XML, JSON, HTML, CSS, Java Script, and AJAX
2. Having experience in developing Android applications
3. Having experience in developing application in Java standalone application (acts as startup daemons running in Debian OS), JSP, and Java servlets
4. Information collection, re-organization, summarization, and reports
5. Using screen capture software and video editing software/tool to creating instructional video clips |
