PurposeA significant body of research has now been accumulated in the intercultural service encounter (ICSE) literature. However, no study to date has provided scholars and practitioners with a systematic review to map and better understand the ICSE domain.Design/methodology/approachTo fill this gap, the authors systematically review and critically examine the state of academic research on ICSE.FindingsBased on a systematic review of 31 journal articles published over the last two decades, the results illustrate that ICSE research is a vibrant and rapidly growing stream of the broader international business domain, and it is topically and methodologically diverse. This review also identifies significant knowledge gaps related to the adoption of different theoretical orientations by researchers examining ICSE at different levels of analysis, a lack of contextual positioning, as well as poor methodological rigor.Originality/valueBased on the findings, the authors introduce a multilevel and multidisciplinary conceptual framework that integrates the concepts of emotional intelligence (EI) and intercultural communication competence (ICC) as the key variables that explain trust development during the interaction between two key culturally different stakeholders: service providers (employees) and service receivers (customers). Finally, the authors discuss the contributions and implications for both academics and practitioners.

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The rising number of mobile devices and their increasing computational capabilities enable new interactive context-sensitive applications. Popular examples are augmented reality games such as Google's Ingress, where users interact with each other in the real world while being part of the game at the same time. This local interaction pattern in the real world as well as in the game is not reflected in the underlying communication pattern. Every locally generated game event is first transferred to a backend server via a cellular connection, from where it is then further disseminated to all players within the given area of interest. This communiation pattern introduces significant delays and limits the interactivity of the game. In this work, we propose an event dissemination system that exploits the locality characteristics of mobile augmented reality games to (i) enable and configure local peer-to-peer dissemination of events when appropriate and (ii) reconfigure or replace the utilized peer-to-peer protocol to adapt to a wide range of requirements. Through extensive evaluation we show that the proposed system decreases the delivery delay by a factor of eight compared to the existing communication pattern, leading to significantly increased information accuracy.

Cloud computing is increasingly used to deliver multimedia services with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, rather than simple infrastructure. Due to these requirements, the QoS-aware, cost-efficient selection of data centers arises as a new research challenge. In our ongoing work, we examine the corresponding Cloud Data Center Selection Problem and propose an exact optimization approach. A brief evaluation indicates that the proposed approach is primarily suited for small problem instances due to its high computational complexity, and hence highlights the need for the development of heuristic optimization approaches.

Cloud computing has evolved in the recent years to a well established computing paradigm. With this evolution, the complexity and requirements for monitoring cloud-based services have also increased. Without a doubt, monitoring for cloud computing is a crucial task which has been addressed in a number of research works. However, monitoring for cloud computing is often designed to be carried out by cloud providers. Monitoring by cloud providers on the one hand offers the flexibility and full control required for monitoring; on the other hand, the trustworthiness of the cloud provider is often questioned. In this work, we present a generic approach that can harmonize both of the aforementioned issues. Our solution abstracts from the complexity by using role-based templates for monitoring in combination with autonomous agents; thus, this approach can be used by both, cloud consumers and cloud providers. With a proof of concept prototype, we show that our approach can be adapted for large scale cloud monitoring scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that our monitoring solution can be extended to be applicable for different domains.