Digital world | EPFL Graph Search

The notion of the digital world comprises the entirety of all individual phenomena that can be described by the concept of digital signals – including all their aspects of information processing and of graphical information interpretation into virtual worlds – or that can be influenced or transformed through the means of digital signals. Academic usage Humanities and education discussions of the 'Digital era' tend to create variations when categorizing and defining the mass of mediated technologies and human interactions that are suggested as part of the Digital World. The phrase 'digital world' is used loosely as a mass noun with many possible meanings and variations. Other types of usage It is most commonly used in when defining digital fluency, and digital literacy. The digital world is the availability and use of digital tools to communicate on the Internet, digital devices, smart devices and other technologies. Examples

An informal example is

An informal example is

Content and Context-Aware Interfaces for Smarter Media Control

Mathieu Hopmann

Since the arrival of the computer at home during the '80s, the importance of the digital world in our daily lives has hugely increased. First centralized on a unique computer, the digital world spread over several devices that surround us: smartphones, tablets, cameras, music players, etc. However, despite the increasing number of devices around our digital lives, the way we interact with them has barely evolved. Digital devices are not aware of their surrounding environment, and they often use interfaces and mechanisms which are computer-oriented. The next step in the evolution of our digital life will be centered on a better integration of the digital world with the ecosystem of devices that surrounds it. In this work, we illustrate this upcoming evolution through the development and evaluation of original interfaces dedicated to the control of digital media. Based on our research, we organize these interfaces in three areas of improvement: unification, automation and familiarity. This thesis is divided in four main chapters. The first chapter presents the evolution of our digital world over the last 30 years. The next three chapters are centered on the three areas of improvement that we defined: unification, automation and familiarity. Unification corresponds to the fusion of digital worlds as a unique and coherent whole that devices should interact with. Automation consists in using information obtained from the user and her environment in order to simplify or automate the interaction with the digital world. Finally, familiarity allows benefiting of users' past experiences in order to create friendly and intuitive interfaces.

EPFL2012

Contextual Bookmarks

Xavier Righetti, Daniel Thalmann

The role of digital information in everyday life divides out activities in interacting with the physical and the digital world. There is no connection between these worlds that is easily accessible, even though physical objects, persons, and real world events often have digital counterparts. The physical reality is actually overlaid by an additional virtual or digital layer. As we are acting in the physical and the digital world it is desirable that we can use links that bridge the gap between both worlds. In this paper we describe our approach to narrow this gap. Starting from a scenario that shows the demand for such connections, we present an architecture that allows users to bookmark specific situations. Based on these contextual bookmarks the user can request additional digital information. Our first prototype enables the user to bookmark content shown on public displays by taking photos of the display using a mobile phone. Our system combines content analysis of the photo with context information such as position, creation time, etc. in order to form the basis to establish a link to the digital world. The presented architecture will serve as a flexible solution to find and integrate further connections between the physical and the digital world.

2007

Security, Privacy and Economics of Online Advertising

Nevena Vratonjic

Online advertising is at the core of today’s Web: it is the main business model, generating large annual revenues expressed in tens of billions of dollars that sponsor most of the online content and services. Online advertising consists of delivering marketing messages, embedded into Web content, to a targeted audience. In this model, entities attract Web traffic by offering the content and services for free and charge advertisers for including advertisements in this traffic (i.e., advertisers pay for users’ attention and interests). Online advertising is a very successful form of advertising as it allows for advertisements (ads) to be targeted to individual users’ interests; especially when advertisements are served on users’ mobile devices, as ads can be targeted to users’ locations and the corresponding context. However, online advertising also introduces a number of problems. Given the high ad revenue at stake, fraudsters have economic incentives to exploit the ad system and generate profit from it. Unfortunately, to achieve this goal, they often compromise users’ online security (e.g., via malware, phishing, etc.). For the purpose of maximizing the revenue by matching ads to users’ interests, a number of techniques are deployed, aimed at tracking and profiling users’ digital footprints, i.e., their behavior in the digital world. These techniques introduce new threats to users’ privacy. Consequently, some users adopt ad-avoidance tools that prevent the download of advertisements and partially thwart user profiling. Such user behavior, as well as exploits of ad systems, have economic implications as they undermine the online advertising business model. Meddling with advertising revenue disrupts the current economic model of the Web, the consequences of which are unclear. Given that today’s Web model relies on online advertising revenue in order for users to have access and consume content and services for “free”, coupled with the fact that there are many threats that could jeopardize this model, in this thesis we address the security, privacy and economic issues stemming from this fundamental element of the Web. In the first part of the thesis, we investigate the vulnerabilities of online advertising systems. We identify how an adversary can exploit the ad system to generate profit for itself, notably by performing inflight modification of ad traffic. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of the identified threat on Wi-Fi routers. We propose a collaborative approach for securing online advertising and Web browsing against such threats. By investigating how a certificate-based authentication is deployed in practice, we assess the potential of relying on certificate-based authentication as a building block of a solution to protect the ad revenue. We propose a multidisciplinary approach for improving the current state of certificate-based authentication on the Web. In the second part of the thesis, we study the economics of ad systems’ exploits and certain potential countermeasures. We evaluate the potential of different solutions aimed at protecting ad revenue being implemented by the stakeholders (e.g., Internet Service Providers or ad networks) and the conditions under which this is likely to happen. We also study the economic ramifications of ad-avoidance technologies on the monetization of online content. We use game-theory to model the strategic behavior of involved entities and their interactions. In the third part of the thesis, we focus on privacy implications of online advertising. We identify a novel threat to users’ location privacy that enables service providers to geolocate users with high accuracy, which is needed to serve location-targeted ads for local businesses. We draw attention to the large scale of the threat and the potential impact on users’ location privacy.

EPFL2013