Investigating smart city adoption from the citizen's insights: empirical evidence from the Jordan context

This study aims to investigate the factors that perceive citizens' intention to adopt smart city technologies in the Arab world. A self-administered questionnaire that included 312 end users as citizens in Amman, Jordan's capital city, was used in this study. This study uses advanced statistical techniques to test an expanded technology acceptance model (TAM) that incorporates the determinants of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, security and privacy, ICT infrastructure and inadequate Internet connectivity, social influence, and demographic profiles. Based on the results, perceived ease of use and ICT infrastructure and Internet connectivity showed positive association with the intention of citizens to adopt smart city services in Jordan. By recognizing the factors that predict citizens' adoption of smart city services, this study presents some theoretical implications and practical consequences related to smart city service adoption.

A Case Of Affordances-Collaborative Governance Using Smartphones

This study attempts to explore the contextual factors that play a significant role in promoting collaborative governance using mobile phones in developing countries. The study utilises review of academic literature and experts’ opinion to identify critical conversion factors and their interrelationship. Affordance Theory is used as a theoretical lens to identify eight significant factors covering development of infrastructure, citizen up-skilling, cost of access, ease of use, reliable infrastructure, ensured privacy & security, process accountability and a standardised m-governance policy. A combination of Total Interpretative Structure Modelling (TISM) and Cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis is employed to prioritise these conversion factors and classify them based on their dependence and driving power. A priority-based hierarchical model is proposed for establishing a sustainable m-governance ecosystem.

Analyzing the Evolution of Interdisciplinary Areas

Recently, various new areas of research have been of great interest to researchers. As these areas are highly based on academic and industrial needs, it is necessary to examine the change and evolution in research. This study proposed a framework for identifying emerging areas and their evolution. The proposed framework suggests that latent Dirichlet allocation is applied to identify emerging topics and their networks in such interdisciplinary areas. The simulation for empirical network analysis was then applied to the identified topic networks to terminate continuous evolution. The proposed framework is applied to a smart city, which is one of the most interdisciplinary and fast-evolving areas. These findings indicate that the evolution of smart transportation and smart grids is likely to be the focus. The findings also indicate that newly emerging research may lack openness and diversity. This study contributes to further investigate research trends and planning research strategies for new and interdisciplinary areas.

Security, Privacy and Risks Within Smart Cities: Literature Review and Development of a Smart City Interaction Framework

The complex and interdependent nature of smart cities raises significant political, technical, and socioeconomic challenges for designers, integrators and organisations involved in administrating these new entities. An increasing number of studies focus on the security, privacy and risks within smart cities, highlighting the threats relating to information security and challenges for smart city infrastructure in the management and processing of personal data. This study analyses many of these challenges, offers a valuable synthesis of the relevant key literature, and develops a smart city interaction framework. The study is organised around a number of key themes within smart cities research: privacy and security of mobile devices and services; smart city infrastructure, power systems, healthcare, frameworks, algorithms and protocols to improve security and privacy, operational threats for smart cities, use and adoption of smart services by citizens, use of blockchain and use of social media. This comprehensive review provides a useful perspective on many of the key issues and offers key direction for future studies. The findings of this study can provide an informative research framework and reference point for academics and practitioners.

Determinants of Smart Digital Infrastructure Diffusion for Urban Public Services

Government of India’s ‘Digital India’ initiative intends to build robust digital ecosystem that fosters innovation & entrepreneurship enabling better citizen service & citizen empowerment. Digitization in India involves geo-demographic & socio-economic dependency, choice of smart technologies undergoing rapid innovation, strategic roll-out planning & flawless implementation as prerequisite of technology diffusion & benefit realization. This study identifies technical & non-technical determinants of smart digital framework roll out that can accelerate digital diffusion in urban public services in India. This study follows inductive exploratory method, combining grounded theory & text mining for primary data analysis. Study reveals digitization is an ecosystem of private & public enterprises and citizen participation, identifies integrated use analytics & IoT can enable connected smart city, whereas technology cost, digital literacy & sustainable innovation as non-technological determinant towards resilient urban digital infrastructure in India.

Fantasy visions, informal urbanization, and local conflict: an evolutionary perspective on smart city governance in India

Smart city imaginaries have emerged in southern cities driven by neoliberal logics in the urban space. Scholarly work in India has continued to engage with sweeping accounts of cities as opposed to detailed empirical studies of local projects. This paper attempts to address this gap through an in-depth ethnographic inquiry of a slum redevelopment project in the city of Bhubaneswar, India. The key objective is to understand the ways in which informal residents adapted to and changed smart city policies in India in recent years. Using an evolutionary lens, and drawing on participant observation; document analysis; and semi-structured interviews, the paper puts forth a descriptive cases that advances the notion that smart cities imaginaries have resulted in abrupt changes in the institutional context while getting entangled itself within the legal system. The paper also demonstrates how smart cities discourses counter-intuitively result in emergent spaces of resistance in the form of counter-hegemonic practices, thus allowing spaces for the evolution of new actors and imaginaries from unfamiliar territories. The paper concludes by discussing that city planning and governance pathways in India risk creating complicated path dependencies and rigid governance future pathways that may amplify conflict.

Cybersecurity Risk Assessment in Smart City Infrastructures

The article is devoted to cybersecurity risk assessment of the dynamic device-to-device networks of a smart city. Analysis of the modern security threats at the IoT/IIoT, VANET, and WSN inter-device infrastructures demonstrates that the main concern is a set of network security threats targeted at the functional sustainability of smart urban infrastructure, the most common use case of smart networks. As a result of our study, systematization of the existing cybersecurity risk assessment methods has been provided. Expert-based risk assessment and active human participation cannot be provided for the huge, complex, and permanently changing digital environment of the smart city. The methods of scenario analysis and functional analysis are specific to industrial risk management and are hardly adaptable to solving cybersecurity tasks. The statistical risk evaluation methods force us to collect statistical data for the calculation of the security indicators for the self-organizing networks, and the accuracy of this method depends on the number of calculating iterations. In our work, we have proposed a new approach for cybersecurity risk management based on object typing, data mining, and quantitative risk assessment for the smart city infrastructure. The experimental study has shown us that the artificial neural network allows us to automatically, unambiguously, and reasonably assess the cyber risk for various object types in the dynamic digital infrastructures of the smart city.

A Comparison of Retrieval Result Relevance Judgments Between American and Chinese Users

Relevance judgment plays an extremely significant role in information retrieval. This study investigates the differences between American users and Chinese users in relevance judgment during the information retrieval process. 384 sets of relevance scores with 50 scores in each set were collected from 16 American users and 16 Chinese users as they judged retrieval records from two major search engines based on 24 predefined search tasks from 4 domain categories. Statistical analyses reveal that there are significant differences between American assessors and Chinese assessors in relevance judgments. Significant gender differences also appear within both the American and the Chinese assessor groups. The study also revealed significant interactions among cultures, genders, and subject categories. These findings can enhance the understanding of cultural impact on information retrieval and can assist in the design of effective cross-language information retrieval systems.

Coping Strategies and Paradoxes Related to BYOD Information Security Threats in France

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) refers to the provision and use of personal mobile devices by employees for both private and business purposes. Although there has been research on BYOD, little attention has been paid to employees' perception of threats to their personal information security (ISS) when using a BYOD, especially in a professional context. This article investigates employee coping strategies related to BYOD ISS threats in France. The results of a survey of 223 employees indicate that while perceived behavioral control exerts only direct effects on problem-focused (i.e., disturbance handling) and emotion-focused (i.e., self-preservation) coping strategies, ISS concern exhibits significant direct and moderating influences. Several security paradoxes could be identified, namely, discrepancies between the respondents' ISS concern and the adopted coping strategies. This article offers the first insights into the French context and can serve as a basis for comparisons in future research and to help improve employees' personal ISS in the professional context.

Prevention of cybercrimes in smart cities of India: from a citizen’s perspective

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing the citizens of India to prevent cybercrimes in the proposed Smart Cities of India.

Design/methodology/approach

A conceptual model has been developed for identifying factors preventing cybercrimes. The conceptual model was validated empirically with a sample size of 315 participants from India. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with SPSS and AMOS softwares.

Findings

The study reveals that the “awareness of cybercrimes” significantly influences the actual usage of technology to prevent cybercrimes in Smart Cities of India. The study reveals that government initiative (GI) and legal awareness are less influential in spreading of the awareness of cybercrimes (AOC) to the citizens of the proposed smart cities.

Research limitations/implications

The conceptual model utilizes two constructs from the technology adoption model, namely, perceived usefulness and ease of use. The study employs other factors such as social media, word of mouth, GIs, legal awareness and organizations constituting entities spreading awareness from different related literature works. Thereby, a comprehensive theoretical conceptual model has been proposed which helps to identify the factors that may help in preventing cybercrimes.

Practical implications

This study provides an insight to the policy maker to understand several factors influencing the AOC of the citizens of the proposed Smart Cities of India for the prevention of cybercrimes.

Originality/value

There are few existing studies analyzing the effect of AOC to mitigate cybercrimes. Thus, this study offers a novel contribution.

Prioritization of multi-dimensional risk for digital services using the generalized analytic network process

Purpose

In current times, organizations operating in emerging economies are providing digital services to its citizen the internet. Literature indicates that digital services are facing major challenges with respect to its adoption among users groups due to the perceived risks.

Design/methodology/approach

With the use of generalized analytic network process (GANP), prioritization of different dimensions of risk has been done on the basis of an empirical survey among user groups in India.

Findings

The result indicates that dimensions like privacy risk, performance risk and financial risk are more important risks across digital services models. However, physical risk, social risk, psychological risk and time risk are comparatively less important risks across digital services. This research also finds out that the end users are reluctant to provide their personal information.

Research limitations/implications

The sample size is relatively small which limits generalizability of results beyond India. However, an application of GANP has been showcased for empirical research.

Practical implications

The research outcome can help managers in deciding which dimensions of risk are more important for digital service delivery and thus facilitate adoption.

Originality/value

This paper focused on the different facets of risk perceived by consumers, toward the digital services available in smart cities. Perceived risk dimensions such as privacy risk, performance risk, financial risk, physical risk, social risk, psychological risk and time risk have shown that there is a need to prioritize these risks to the digital services which is offered to the residents of the smart cities.

A Study on Effective Measurement of Search Results from Search Engines

This article describes how as internet technology continues to change and improve lives and societies worldwide, effective global information management becomes increasingly critical, and effective Internet information retrieval systems become more and more significant in providing Internet users worldwide with accurate and complete information. Search engine evaluation is an important research field as search engines directly determine the quality of information users' Internet searches. Relevance-decrease pattern/model plays an important role in search engine result evaluation. This research studies effective measurement of search results through investigating relevance-decrease patterns of search results from two popular search engines: Google and Bing. The findings can be applied to relevance-evaluation of search results from other information retrieval systems such as OPAC, can help make search engine evaluations more accurate and sound, and can provide global information management personnel with valuable insights.

Secure and Lightweight Cloud-Assisted Video Reporting Protocol over 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

In the vehicular networks, the real-time video reporting service is used to send the recorded videos in the vehicle to the cloud. However, when facilitating the real-time video reporting service in the vehicular networks, the usage of the fourth generation (4G) long term evolution (LTE) was proved to suffer from latency while the IEEE 802.11p standard does not offer sufficient scalability for a such congested environment. To overcome those drawbacks, the fifth-generation (5G)-enabled vehicular network is considered as a promising technology for empowering the real-time video reporting service. In this paper, we note that security and privacy related issues should also be carefully addressed to boost the early adoption of 5G-enabled vehicular networks. There exist a few research works for secure video reporting service in 5G-enabled vehicular networks. However, their usage is limited because of public key certificates and expensive pairing operations. Thus, we propose a secure and lightweight protocol for cloud-assisted video reporting service in 5G-enabled vehicular networks. Compared to the conventional public key certificates, the proposed protocol achieves entities’ authorization through anonymous credential. Also, by using lightweight security primitives instead of expensive bilinear pairing operations, the proposed protocol minimizes the computational overhead. From the evaluation results, we show that the proposed protocol takes the smaller computation and communication time for the cryptographic primitives than that of the well-known Eiza-Ni-Shi protocol.