Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.

Virtual commerce applies immersive technology such as augmented reality and virtual reality into e-commerce to shift consumer perception from 2D product catalogs to 3D immersive virtual spaces. In virtual commerce, the alignment of application design paradigms and the factors influencing consumer behavior is paramount to promote purchase of products and services. The question of their relation needs to be answered, together with the possible improvement of application design. This paper used a systematic literature review approach to synthesize research on virtual commerce from both application design and consumer behavior research, considering the promotion of purchase in virtual commerce settings. Throughout the review, influential factors to purchase and preeminent design artifacts were identified. Then, the research gaps were discovered by mapping the design artifacts to the influential factors, which can inspire future research opportunities on the synergy of these two research directions. Moreover, the evolution of virtual commerce research along with multiple directions were discussed, including the suggestion of meta-commerce as a future trend.

In the last decade, blockchain smart contracts emerged as an automated, decentralized, traceable, and immutable medium of value exchange. Nevertheless, existing blockchain smart contracts are not compatible with legal contracts. The automatic execution of a legal contract written in natural language is an open research question that can extend the blockchain ecosystem and inspire next-era business paradigms. In this paper, we propose an AI-assisted Smart Contract Generation (AIASCG) framework that allows contracting parties in heterogeneous contexts and different languages to collaboratively negotiate and draft the contract clauses. AIASCG provides a universal representation of contracts through the machine natural language (MNL) as the common understanding of the contract obligations. We compare the design of AIASCG with existing smart contract generation approaches to present its novelty. The main contribution of AIASCG is to address the issue in our previous proposed smart contract generation framework. For sentences written in natural language, existing framework requires editors to manually split sentences into words with semantic meaning. We propose an AI-based automatic word segmentation technique called Separation Inference (SpIn) to fulfill automatic split of the sentence. SpIn serves as the core component in AIASCG that accurately recommends the intermediate MNL outputs from a natural language sentence, tremendously reducing the manual effort in contract generation. SpIn is evaluated from a robustness and human satisfaction point of view to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the robustness evaluation, SpIn achieves state-of-the-art F1 scores and Recall of Out-of-Vocabulary (R_OOV) words on multiple word segmentation tasks. In addition, in the human evaluation, participants believe that 88.67% of sentences can be saved 80–100% of the time through automatic word segmentation.

Tracking the process of remote task execution is critical to timely process analysis by collecting the evidence of correct execution or failure, which generates a process digital twin (DT) for remote supervision. Generally, it will encounter the challenge of constrained communication, high overhead, and high traceability demand, leading to the efficient remote process tracking issue. Existing approaches can address the issue by monitoring or simulating remote task execution. Nevertheless, they do not provide a cost-effective solution, especially when unexpected situation occurs. Thus, we proposed a new cloud-edge collaboration framework for process DT generation. It addresses the efficient remote process tracking issue with a real-virtual collaborative process tracking (RVCPT) approach. The approach contains three patterns of real-virtual collaboration for tracking the entire process of task execution with a coevolution pattern, identifying unexpected situations with a discrimination pattern, and generating a process DT with a real-virtual fusion pattern. This approach can minimize tracking overhead, and meanwhile maintains high traceability, which maximizes the overall cost-effectiveness. With prototype development, case study and experimental evaluation show the applicability and performance advantage of the new cloud-edge collaboration framework in remote supervision.

Virtual worlds have become global platforms connecting millions of people and containing various technologies. For example, No Man’s Sky (nomanssky.com), a cross-platform virtual world, can dynamically and automatically generate content with the progress of user adventure. AltspaceVR (altvr.com) is a social virtual reality platform supporting motion capture through Microsoft’s Kinect, eye tracking, and mixed reality extension. The changes in industrial investment, market revenue, user population, and consumption drive the evolution of virtual-world-related technologies (e.g., computing infrastructure and interaction devices), which turns into new design requirements and thus results in the requirement satisfaction problem in virtual world system architecture design. In this paper, we first study the new or evolving features of virtual worlds and emerging requirements of system development through market/industry trend analysis, including infrastructure mobility, content diversity, function interconnectivity, immersive environment, and intelligent agents. Based on the trend analysis, we propose a new design requirement space. We, then, discuss the requirement satisfaction of existing system architectures and highlight their limitations through a literature review. The feature-based requirement satisfaction comparison of existing system architectures sheds some light on the future virtual world system development to match the changing trends of the user market. At the end of this study, a new architecture from an ongoing research, called Virtual Net, is discussed, which can provide higher resource sufficiency, computing reliability, content persistency, and service credibility.

With the development of mobile technology, mobile virtual worlds have attracted massive users. To improve scalability, a peer‐to‐peer virtual world provides the solution to accommodate more users without increasing hardware investment. In mobile settings, however, existing P2P solutions are not applicable due to the unreliability of mobile devices and the instability of mobile networks. To address the issue, a novel infrastructure model, called Virtual Net, is proposed to provide fault‐tolerance in managing user content and object state. In this paper, the key problem, namely, object state update, is resolved to maintain state consistency and high interaction responsiveness. This work is important in implementing a scalable mobile virtual world.