Handheld Device Use

In this paper, we describe the experience of designing a collaborative learning activity for a traditional historical/cultural museum. The activity, based on a "Mystery in the Museum" story, involves collaboration of small groups of students through mobile handheld devices. An application has been built that permits authoring of such activities, while a usability evaluation study was performed that revealed some of the limitations of the design. The reported findings can be of use to those interested in following similar approaches in cultural and educational settings, and draw conclusions of general interest relating to interaction and collaboration through mobile technology.

Protection of data against long fading time is one of the greatest challenges posed by a satellite delivery system offering multimedia services to mobile devices like DVB-SH. To deal with this challenge several enhancements and modifications of the existing terrestrial mobile TV (DVB-H) physical and link layers are being considered. These solutions provide the required protection depth but they don't take into account the specificity of mobile handheld devices such as power consumption, memory constraints and chipsets implementation costs. In this report, we propose an innovative algorithm (called Multi Burst Sliding Encoding or MBSE) that extends the DVB-H intra-burst (MPE-FEC) protection to an inter-burst protection so that complete burst losses could be recovered while taking into account the specificity of mobile handheld devices. Based on a clever organisation of the data, our algorithm allows to provide protection against long term fading while still using RS code implemented in DVB-H chipsets. We evaluate the performance of MBSE by both theoretical analysis as well as intensive simulations and experiments. The results also show good performance in terms of protection, battery and memory saving. The MBSE is now under standardisation and it is considered by the DVB Forum as the main solution for the DVB-SH class terminals.

Collaborative design projects are often complex affairs in which a number of resources, concerns, and sources of inspiration are brought into play in the shaping of future design concepts. This paper presents the Design Space Explorer, a framework for managing these multiple sources of information and domain concerns in collaborative design projects. The Design Space Explorer captures and gives an overview of design materials and forms, domain locations and situations, interaction styles, and content types. Furthermore, it provides a platform for designers to combine these aspects into scenarios for design concepts. We present and discuss the use of the Design Space Explorer in two specific design cases in the domain of interactive media façades, part of the emerging field of digital urban living.

Presently, mobile handheld device has successfully replaced traditional telephone to become the most popular wireless communication tools. Mobile Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) fulfill almost all the user requirements as an effective communication and information delivering service. Since SMS/MMS become so popular on daily communication, there is a demand to communicate or exchange confidential information in a secure environment. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a proven solution, which using pairing of key, for secure communication encryption. In this paper, M-PKI is introduced to provide PKI encryption to the mobile SMS and MMS.

Case-study descriptions of secondary and middle school classrooms in diverse contexts provide examples of how teachers implement connected classroom technology to facilitate formative assessment in science instruction. Connected classroom technology refers to a networked system of handheld devices designed for classroom use. Teachers were surprised at the knowledge they gathered about student learning in connected classrooms. They recognized that their

This paper describes an ingenious way of using Bluetooth-Enabled Mobile Phones to control the PC applications with the help of a Software Application, which is based on Client Server architecture. The application "Application Remote Control using Bluetooth" or (ARC) along with the Mobile Phone possess the ability to control various Software Applications such as Windows Media Player and Microsoft PowerPoint Slideshows. It can also control electrical devices such as LEDs, fans using parallel (LPT) port of the PC, and PC monitor.

The research project "NEXUS" aims at the development of a generic platform that supports location aware applications with mobile users. It is currently being carried out within a so-called research group supported by the DFG (German Research Council) in

This paper attempts to establish the fact that Proactive transport protocols are better than conventional Reactive transport protocols in terms of overall utilization of resources. This has been proved analytically in this paper using a mathematical model developed for proactive congestion avoidance. The paper also provides a mathematical framework for Proactive Transport Protocol and predicts the congestion window evolution and throughput achieved by single and multiple proactive TCP flows. The congestion window evolution and throughput of a Proactive TCP connection are modeled as functions of the bandwidth, delay, packet size, number of concurrent TCP flows and the penalty factor used by the proactive protocols. Results obtained from the model are verified with ns2 simulation. The optimal value of the penalty factor is derived mathematically from the designed model. It has also been shown how the derived optimal values enhances the performance of the protocol and almost a near maximum utilization of resources is achieved by extensive simulation in ns2 considering both single and multiple TCP flows.

Presently, mobile handheld device has successfully replaced traditional telephone to become the most popular wireless communication tools. Mobile Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) fulfill almost all the user requirements as an effective communication and information delivering service. Since SMS/MMS become so popular on daily communication, there is a demand to communicate or exchange confidential information in a secure environment. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a proven solution, which using pairing of key, for secure communication encryption. In this paper, m–PKI is introduced to provide PKI encryption to the mobile SMS and MMS. This new approach allows the end-user to send private and classified message via SMS. The key pair generation and distribution are performed by the Certificate Authority (CA). The size of the key pair are studied and decided by the tradeoff between performance and security.

The purpose of this study was to document how teachers and students describe and comprehend the ways in which participating in an augmented reality (AR) simulation aids or hinders teaching and learning. Like the multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) interface that underlies Internet games, AR is a good medium for immersive collaborative simulation, but has different strengths and limitations than MUVEs. Within a designbased research project, the researchers conducted multiple qualitative case studies across two middle schools (6th and 7th grade) and one high school (10th grade) in the northeastern United States to document the affordances and limitations of AR simulations from the student and teacher perspective. The researchers collected data through formal and informal interviews, direct observations, web site posts, and site documents. Teachers and students reported that the technology-mediated narrative and the interactive, situated, collaborative problem solving affordances of the AR simulation were highly engaging, especially among students who had previously presented behavioral and academic challenges for the teachers. However, while the AR simulation provided potentially transformative added value, it simultaneously presented unique technological, managerial, and cognitive challenges to teaching and learning.

Recent advances in wireless communication have raised possibility of creating new sets of richer multimedia applications in wireless networks; on the other hand, despite the rapid evolution and growing popularity of mobile handheld devices such as PDAs and smart phones, they are still significantly computationally constrained by limited resources for some kind of applications (e.g. computer graphics).

Studies show that the phase of idea generation is essential for developing innovating new services. This phase can be based on involvement of potential users or customersand generally these can contribute positively to the generation of ideas. This paper takes is basis in the new service design of converged mobile rich media services for handheld devices (mobile phones). The overall purpose is to discuss the premises, methods, challenges and limitations, for idea generation based on involvement of users. The paper discusses the challenges of user involvement in a specific; the CAMMP project, where different stakeholders all need to have a saying in the service development for rich, mobile broadcasting services.

A simple method based on screen-printed electrodes and a handheld potentiostatic device is reported for the detection of water soluble CdS quantum dots modified with glutathione. The detection method is based on the stripping of electrochemically reduced cadmium at pH 7.0 by using square wave voltammetry. Various parameters that affect the sensitivity of the method are optimized. QD suspension volumes of 20 μl and a number of around 2 × 10 11 CdS quantum dots have been able to be detected. The proposed method should be of special interest for bioanalytical assays, where CdS quantum dots can be used as electrochemical tracers.

Detailed case-study descriptions of secondary and middle school classrooms in a variety of school contexts provide explicit examples of how teachers implement connected classroom technology to facilitate formative assessment in physical science instruction. Connected classroom technology refers to a networked system of handheld devices combined with software specifically designed for use in the classroom. Archer's social theory provides a framework to interpret progress in technology integration for physical science teachers who have completed their first year of a multi-year study of connected physical science classrooms. From the social theory perspective teachers initially faced challenges as the connected classroom required changes to existing classroom structures and procedures. However, teachers found the system compatible with traditional assessment, formative assessment and also hands-on data collection lessons. As their proficiency developed, teachers used the connected classroom to facilitate both interactive and preplanned classroom formative assessment. Teachers were surprised at the knowledge they gathered about student learning, recognized that their students were also better informed about their own learning, and believed that use of the technology increased student engagement in on-task behavior. Connected classroom technology reduced some barriers to the practice of formative assessment and informed teachers about their students as well as informed students about their own and other's learning.

Claims and disputes on time extension for delays are common in construction projects. Various methods and divergent approaches are used by different parties in assessing delays. Disputes then often arise on (a) eligibility of a delay event for claiming extension of time (EOT), (b) choice of method for evaluating EOT, and (c) quantification of the EOT. This research initiative aims at formulating a knowledge-based decision guidance system to help all concerned parties in navigating through these various options, in order to rationalize their approaches towards the preparation and evaluation of the EOT claims. Such rationalization is based on structured approaches, which are in turn devised from the particular contractual and project conditions. This rationalization is also expected to assist in a convergence of assessment approaches that would in turn reduce disputes and consequently wasted resources. In targeting those aims, a prototype of an integrated decision support system (DSS) for dealing with time extension claims was recently developed using (a) a structured web-based decision support framework, which is supplemented by (b) a Pocket PC based portable framework with seamless database integration. This paper presents some essential highlights on the development and usefulness of key modules of the DSS.

Documentation is a major component of any traceability system where traceability is defined in the ISO Regulation 8402:1994 as the ability to trace the history, application and location of what is under consideration. Traceability systems are record keeping systems designed to track the flow of product or product attributes through the production process or supply chain. All international supply chains are forced to comply with traceability requirements. In this paper, we develop and implement an end-toend mobile application prototype that traces the poultry production. This application consists of frontend and back-end systems. At the front-end, the worker uses a GPRS enabled handheld device (cell phone, PDA, etc.) to capture information on poultry operations collected at a remote chicken farm and transmit it to a back-end server in the main office. Through customized application the back-end server analyses all information received from the front-end and based on a built-in business process and business rules, intelligently updates various stakeholders of any breach of bio-security measures that requires immediate attention. The proposed system administrators can also access this application via Internet for management decision making. The back-end system consists of web server, defined business application logic and database server.

In this paper, we describe the design of a personal cubic display that offers novel interaction techniques for static and dynamic 3D content. We extended one-screen Fish Tank VR by arranging five small LCD panels into a box shape that is light and compact enough to be handheld. The display uses head-coupled perspective rendering and a realtime physics simulation engine to establish an interaction metaphor of having real objects inside a physical box that a user can hold and manipulate. We evaluated our prototype as a visualization tool and as an input device by comparing it with a conventional LCD display and mouse for a 3D tree-tracing task. We found that bimanual interaction with pCubee and a mouse offered the best performance and was most preferred by users. pCubee has potential in 3D visualization and interactive applications such as games, storytelling and education, as well as viewing 3D maps, medical and architectural data. Figure 1. Five screen pCubee showing a 3D model of the globe; also shown are the A/D control boards and the headphones containing the head-tracking sensor.

We propose a method for computer-based speed writing, SHARK (shorthand aided rapid keyboarding), which augments stylus keyboarding with shorthand gesturing. SHARK defines a shorthand symbol for each word according to its movement pattern on an optimized stylus keyboard. The key principles for the SHARK design include high efficiency stemmed from layout optimization, duality of gesturing and stylus tapping, scale and location independent writing, Zipf's law, and skill transfer from tapping to shorthand writing due to pattern consistency. We developed a SHARK system based on a classic handwriting recognition algorithm. A user study demonstrated the feasibility of the SHARK method.

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) can be described as an infrastructure-less wireless network best suitable for short-lived and confined communication scenarios. In such types of wireless networks the devices connected are intelligent enough to create autonomous network structure and have efficient routing capabilities to forward information. Mobility of wireless devices in MANETS possess routing as a challenge for which various reactive and proactive ad hoc routing protocols may be used. This paper presents performance analysis of various proactive and reactive routing protocols using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as the transport layer protocol. For this a comparison using widely used performance metrics such as Throughput, End-to-End Delay and Packet Loss are used to conclude that Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol performs best among all protocols (DSR, AODV and DSDV) using either TCP or UDP connection for rapidly changing network topologies.

Embedded systems (ES) is a multidisciplinary field, requiring skills from control and signal processing theory, electronics, computer engineering and science, telecommunication, etc., as well as application domain knowledge. As ES designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality ES education becomes more and more important. This sixth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded systems education.

Application development on handheld devices using software agent technology is becoming more and more popular around the world. Escalation in the use of lightweight devices and PDA’s leads us to create a concrete base for future nomadic applications, positioned in a changing environment. However, constrained characteristics of handheld devices serve as the main hindrance towards achieving this goal. This paper presents the architecture of context aware FIPA complaint multi agent system for the lightweight devices called SAGE-Lite, which are capable of providing fault tolerance through the mechanism of object persistence. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. Since agents communicate via sending and receiving ACL messages, this architecture will minimize communication latency with in the platform. This framework allows implementing agent-based applications like business applications or e-commerce applications on these resource-constrained devices.

Can Augmented Reality (AR) techniques inform the design and implementation of a mobile multimedia guide for the museum setting? Drawing from our experience both on previous mobile museum guides projects and in AR technology, we present a fully functional prototype of an AR-enabled mobile multimedia museum guide, designed and implemented for the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, France. We report on the life cycle of the prototype and the methodology employed for the AR approach as well as on the selected mixed method evaluation process; finally, the first results emerging from quantitative evaluation are discussed, supported by evidence and findings from the qualitative part of the assessment process. We conclude with lessons learned during the full circle of conception, implementation, testing and assessment of the guide.

Medical care at mass casualty incidents and disasters requires rapid patient triage and assessment, acute care and disposition often in the setting of overwhelming numbers of victims, limited time, and little resources. Current systems rely on a paper triage tag on which rescuers and medical providers mark the patient’s triage status and record limited information on injuries and treatments administered in the field. In this manuscript, we describe the design, development and deployment of a wireless handheld device with an electronic medical record (EMR) for use by rescuers responding to mass casualty incidents (MCIs) and disasters. The components of this device, the WIISARD First Responder (WFR), includes a personal digital assistant (PDA) with 802.11 wireless transmission capabilities, microprocessor and non-volatile memory, and a unique EMR software that replicates the rapidity and ease of use of the standard paper triage tag. WFR also expands its functionality by recording real-time medical data electronically for simultaneous access by rescuers, mid-level providers and incident commanders on and off the disaster site. WFR is a part of the Wireless Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD) architecture.

During the last three decades, more than one thousand Chinese input methods have been developed. However, people are still looking for better input methods in terms of easy to use, easy to remember, high input speed and small keypad implementation on handheld devices. The well-known strokebased Chinese input method using only five basic stroke types could achieve low learning curve and small numeric keypad implementation but its input speed is limited for complex Chinese characters with a lot of strokes. To tackle this problem, simplified stroke-based Chinese character and phrase coding methods using (3+3) rules are proposed in this paper. The proposed method only uses the first 3 stroke codes and the last 3 stroke codes to represent the first and last radical information of the character for achieving lower average code length and higher hit rate of first character on the candidate list. To further enhance the input speed, a very user-friendly (3+3) phrase coding rule is also proposed for inputting Chinese phrases in terms of 2character, 3-character and long-character phrases. Three special key assignment designs are developed for practical implementation of the proposed Chinese character and phrase input method using conventional QWERTY keyboard, PC's numeric keypad and mobile phone 12-key keypad. Experimental results have shown that the proposed character coding can achieve lower average code length and higher Hit Rate of First Character as compared with conventional stroke-based method and some well-known Chinese input methods. The proposed coding rules are also very easy to use and remember.

Presently, mobile handheld device has successfully replaced traditional telephone to become the most popular wireless communication tools. Mobile Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) fulfill almost all the user requirements as an effective communication and information delivering service. Since SMS/MMS become so popular on daily communication, there is a demand to communicate or exchange confidential information in a secure environment. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a proven solution, which using pairing of key, for secure communication encryption. In this paper, m–PKI is introduced to provide PKI encryption to the mobile SMS and MMS. This new approach allows the end-user to send private and classified message via SMS. The key pair generation and distribution are performed by the Certificate Authority (CA). The size of the key pair are studied and decided by the tradeoff between performance and security.

The motivation for this research is the emergence of mobile information systems where information is disseminated to mobile individuals via handheld devices. A key distinction between mobile and desktop computing is the significance of the relationship between the spatial location of an individual and the spatial location associated with information accessed by that individual. Given a set of spatially referenced documents retrieved from a mobile information system, this set can be presented using alternative interfaces of which two presently dominate: textual lists and graphical two-dimensional maps. The purpose of this paper is to explore how mixed reality interfaces can be used for the presentation of information on mobile devices.

Handheld computerised data-collection tools have been shown to be more accurate, less susceptible to recall errors and to encourage higher user-compliance than pen and paper alternatives. Pocket Interview is a configurable electronic diary and data collection tool that provides the ability to design and deliver questionnaires and collect data securely using handheld devices and desktop computers. The client software can be set to prompt the data contributor, via audible prompts, to provide entries at fixed times and preset intervals. The device also allows the users to record personally significant incidents out with the schedule times. Pocket Interview is designed for use, after minimal training, by both the data-provider(s) and the administrator. An administrator can define and/or amend the data they would like to be collected, via a graphical user interface. The system has been shown to be usable by both administrators and users.

The demands for accessing services at high data rates while on the move, anyplace and anytime, resulted in numerous research efforts to integrate heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks. The focus was mainly put on the integration of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and the wireless local area network (WLAN) IEEE 802.11, which is beneficial in terms of capacity, coverage and cost. With the advent of IEEE 802.16(e) the attention of the research community was shifted to its interworking, on one side, with complementary WLANs, and on the other, with UMTS for extra capacity. In addition, there has been also research on UMTS interworking with different broadcasting systems, including the Digital Video Broadcasting system for handheld devices (DVB-H). All these research activities resulted in various heterogeneous architectures where the interworking was performed at different levels in the network. In this article, we address the integration at the UMTS radio access level, known also as very tight coupling. This integration approach exhibits good vertical handover performance and may allow for seamless session continuity during the handover. However, it is a technology specific solution, where not all the mechanisms applied to the integration of one wireless technology can be straightforwardly reused for embedding another. This integration approach introduces various modifications to UMTS that have to be standardized, which makes it a long-term solution. We present here the general architecture for the integration at the UMTS radio access level and discuss the extension of the architectural framework for various types of access systems with as few as possible additional modifications. The focus of the work is put on the vertical handovers. We discuss various vertical handovers among WCDMA, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16e and DVB-H in the considered heterogeneous architecture. We present new handover types, describe the vertical handover procedures and provide performance evaluation of the vertical handovers in different scenarios and for different combinations of the wireless access technologies.

Current security model in Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) predominantly use symmetric key cryptography. The rapid advancement of Internet technology facilitates online trading, banking, downloading, emailing using resource-constrained handheld devices such as personal digital assistants and cell phones. However, these applications require more security than the present GSM supports. Consequently, a careful design of GSM security using both symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography would make GSM security more adaptable in security intensive applications. This paper presents a secure and efficient protocol for GSM security using identity based cryptography. The salient features of the proposed protocol are (i) authenticated key exchange; (ii) mutual authentication amongst communicating entities; and (iii) user anonymity. The security analysis of the protocol shows its strength against some known threats observed in conventional GSM security.

Unique features of handheld devices, including their mobility, personalization and location-awareness engender new types of applications for mobile commerce, such as mobile advertising. Mobile marketing and advertising applications deliver promotional information to consumers based on their preferences and location. In this paper, we present SMMART, a contextaware, adaptive and personalized m-commerce application designed to deliver targeted promotions to the users of mobile devices about the products they like while guarding the users' identity and protecting them from any unsolicited messages. Promotions distributed by SMMART are personalized by performing intelligent matching of the user's shopping interests to current promotions available at a retail site. SMMART can adapt to changing preferences of its user by inconspicuously monitoring his or her shopping habits. We describe a fully functional prototype of SMMART built for Pocket PCs running Windows CE with .NET Compact Framework. This paper also presents a study demonstrating end-user usability and economic viability of SMMART.

The focus of the study was to conduct the research on "Consumer attitude towards mobile advertising" Based on the literature survey the predictor variables were identified. These dimensions were User Acceptance of Advertising, User-Based Acceptance Drivers, Mobile Service Acceptance Drivers, Advertising Acceptance Drivers.

This work presents an innovative nanorobot architecture based on nanobioelectronics for diabetes. The progressive development toward the therapeutic use of nanorobots should be observed as the natural result from some ongoing and future achievements in biomedical instrumentation, wireless communication, remote power transmission, nanoelectronics, new materials engineering, chemistry, proteomics, and photonics. To illustrate the nanorobot integrated circuit architecture and layout described here, a computational approach with the application of medical nanorobotics for diabetes is simulated using clinical data. Integrated simulation can provide interactive tools for addressing nanorobot choices on sensing, hardware design specification, manufacturing analysis, and methodology for control investigation. In the proposed 3D prototyping, a physician can help the patient to avoid hyperglycemia by means of a handheld device, like a cell phone enclosed with cloth, that is used as a smart portable device to communicate with nanorobots. Therefore, this architecture provides a suitable choice to establish a practical medical nanorobotics platform for in vivo health monitoring.

This paper presents an implementation of a markerless tracking technique targeted to the Windows Mobile Pocket PC platform. The primary aim of this work is to allow the development of standalone augmented reality applications for handheld devices based on natural feature tracking. In order to achieve this goal, a subset of two computer vision libraries was ported to the Pocket PC platform. They were also adapted to use fixed point math, with the purpose of improving the overall performance of the routines. The port of these libraries opens up the possibility of having other computer vision tasks being executed on mobile platforms. A model based tracking approach that relies on edge information was adopted. Since it does not require a high processing power, it is suitable for constrained devices such as handhelds. The OpenGL ES graphics library was used to perform computer vision tasks, taking advantage of existing graphics hardware acceleration. An augmented reality application was created using the implemented technique and evaluations were done regarding tracking performance and accuracy

At Delft University of Technology there is a project running on the development of a traffic information-system. The paper presents a using of XML for multimodal communication with an intelligent travel assistant. The personal Intelligent Travel Assistant(PITA) provides the user with a personalized, up-to-date advice on a handheld device, which takes into account actual delays and user preferences. The travelers themselves provide information about delays of trains, using GPS to estimate whether a user is experiencing a delay. Furthermore a website of the Dutch Railways provides information on delays for 83 stations in the Netherlands. To find optimal routes, considering train changes and the user preferences, an adapted version of the DYNET algorithm was selected and implemented. By extending the static information on the train schedule with dynamic information on delays, a prototype of a dynamic route guidance system was designed and implemented with multimodal interface, which runs on a Sharp Zaurus handheld.

This paper presents a complete Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for camera captured image/graphics embedded textual documents for handheld devices. At first, text regions are extracted and skew corrected. Then, these regions are binarized and segmented into lines and characters. Characters are passed into the recognition module. Experimenting with a set of 100 business card images, captured by cell phone camera, we have achieved a maximum recognition accuracy of 92.74%. Compared to Tesseract, an open source desktop-based powerful OCR engine, present recognition accuracy is worth contributing. Moreover, the developed technique is computationally efficient and consumes low memory so as to be applicable on handheld devices.

Embedded systems (ES) is a multidisciplinary field, requiring skills from control and signal processing theory, electronics, computer engineering and science, telecommunication, etc., as well as application domain knowledge. As ES designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality ES education becomes more and more important. This sixth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded systems education.

Systems for radio-frequency identification (RFID) realize a bidirectional wireless communication between a reader device and cheap passive tags (e.g., an RFID chip with an antenna printed on badges for access-control systems) in the near field of an antenna. This paper deals with the automatic and fast tuning of the resonant reader antennas in the widely used 13.56-MHz frequency band, resulting in a performance improvement and an increased READ/WRITE range. A novel RFID reader system is proposed with a tuning transformer for the automatic adjustment of the resonant circuit center frequency. This is achieved by shifting the magnetic operating point (i.e., the biasing direct-current (dc) magnetization) of a Ni-Zn ferrite transformer by means of an additional dc winding. The operation principle and the performance potential of this device are demonstrated by measurements on a prototypical RFID system.

Timely information access and knowledge support is critical for law enforcement, because officers require convenient and timely access to accurate data, relevant information, and integrated knowledge in their crime investigation and fighting activities. As an integrated system that provides such support, COPLINK can improve collaboration within and across agency boundaries. This study examines field officers' acceptance and actual use of COPLINK Mobile, a critical technology that offers COPLINK core query functionalities through a lightweight, handheld device or mobile applications running on a small bandwidth. We propose and empirically test a factor model explaining the focal technology acceptance with survey data collected from 40 field officers. The data support our model and most of the hypotheses, which can reasonably explain an officer's acceptance and actual use of COPLINK Mobile. Among the determinants investigated, perceived usefulness has the greatest impact and depends on both efficiency gain and social influence. Our findings have important implications for both research and practice.

Due to the advent of the Internet, electronic business transactions have exploded around the globe. Along with the Internet, wireless technology has exponentially developed as well. Today, new technologies that allow mobile (cellular) phones and other handheld devices to access the Internet have made wireless business transactions possible. This phenomenon is known as mobile commerce or M-Commerce. It has been predicted that the number of mobile phones connected to the mobile Internet will exceed the number of Internet-connected PCs before 2007. The mobile phone will therefore become the most prevalent device for accessing the Internet. Several industry analysts predict that Mcommerce will constitute a multibillion dollar business by 2005. However, M-Commerce brings new challenges in providing information security as information travels through multiple networks often across wireless links. What must be done to secure financial transactions via mobile commerce? Generally speaking, M...

We present an overview of the embeddability features of SQL Anywhere, a full-function relational data- base system designed for frontline business environments with minimal administration. SQL Anywhere supports features common to enterprise-class database management systems, such as intra-query par- allelism, materialized views, OLAP functionality, stored procedures, triggers, and hot failover. SQL Anywhere can serve as a high-performance workgroup server, an embedded database that is installed along with an application, or as a mobile database installed on a handheld device that provides full database services, including two-way synchronization, to applications when the device is disconnected from the corporate intranet. We illustrate how SQL Anywhere's embeddability features work in concert to provide a robust data management solution in zero-administration environments.