Fernando Beltran

The University of Auckland, Information Systems and Operation Management, Faculty Member

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Fernando Beltrán (f.beltran@auckland.ac.nz) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at The University of Auckland Business School. He received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.

As an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Universidad de Los Andes, he taught a range of courses in Operations Research (Linear Programming, Integer and Combinatorial Optimization, Probability Models, Queueing Theory, Network Flows and Game Theory). He led the creation of a graduate programme in Industrial Organization and a Master's programme in Public Utility Regulation. He taught Industrial Organization and Pricing Theory in the IO track of the Masters of Industrial Engineering and Competition in Telecommunications in the Masters of Regulation.

At the University of Auckland, he leads the Information and Technology Management major of the Bachelor of Computer Sciences. He teaches Telecommunications Management for the PostGraduate programme in Information Systems. His undergraduate courses for the Information Systems and Operations Management degree include Information Technology Infrastructure, Simulation Modeling, and Business Data Communications.

An academic visitor to the US Federal Communications Commission, CITI Columbia University Business School, EECS Department of UC Berkeley, INRIA Rennes, France, and UPC Barcelona, Spain, he has consulted for various government agencies and telecommunications operators in New Zealand, Colombia, Uruguay and the United States.

Research interests
Radio spectrum policy, spectrum sharing, spectrum auctions.
Data privacy protection and the price of data, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for identity protection.
Immersive Analytics for data visualization

Media Keywords:
Optimal resource allocation in telecommunication networks, telecommunications policy and regulation, spectrum auction design, and data pricing are under privacy constraints. Immersive Analytics.

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Papers by Fernando Beltran

Co-Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Health Monitoring Tool Using Smartwatch Data: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Future Internet

Computational analysis and integration of smartwatch data with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) p... more Computational analysis and integration of smartwatch data with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) present potential uses in preventing, diagnosing, and managing chronic diseases. One of the key requirements for the successful clinical application of smartwatch data is understanding healthcare professional (HCP) perspectives on whether these devices can play a role in preventive care. Gaining insights from the vast amount of smartwatch data is a challenge for HCPs, thus tools are needed to support HCPs when integrating personalized health monitoring devices with EMR. This study aimed to develop and evaluate an application prototype, co-designed with HCPs and employing design science research methodology and diffusion of innovation frameworks to identify the potential for clinical integration. A machine learning algorithm was developed to detect possible health anomalies in smartwatch data, and these were presented visually to HCPs in a web-based platform. HCPs completed a usability que...

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Designing and Developing a Weed Detection Model for California Thistle

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology

With a great percentage of farms in New Zealand as pastures, they are mainly important in contrib... more With a great percentage of farms in New Zealand as pastures, they are mainly important in contributing to the milk and meat industries. Pasture quality is highly affected by weeds. Weeds grow fast and invade pastures by seed pollination. They consume the nutrients, water, and other minerals, and once they are bitter, cattle do not eat them. Therefore, dairy farmers have to allocate a significant portion of their budget and time to monitor and clean weeds. Unfortunately, most weed management tasks are manual with no consistent technology. Thus, the motivation behind this paper was to design an object detection model for weed monitoring and control in pastures. The model was designed and tested on California thistle, a dominant and widespread weed on New Zealand pastures. Our study is one of the major model designs for identifying weeds in an in-pasture environment, one of the most complicated environments for any object detection model. A synthetic methodology was used to create thre...

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Selling Data at an Auction under Privacy Constraints

arXiv (Cornell University), May 19, 2020

Private data query combines mechanism design with privacy protection to produce aggregated statis... more Private data query combines mechanism design with privacy protection to produce aggregated statistics from privately-owned data records. The problem arises in a data marketplace where data owners have personalised privacy requirements and private data valuations. We focus on the case when the data owners are single-minded, i.e., they are willing to release their data only if the data broker guarantees to meet their announced privacy requirements. For a data broker who wants to purchase data from such data owners, we propose the Single-MindedQuery (SMQ) mechanism, which uses a reverse auction to select data owners and determine compensations. SMQ satisfies interim incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and budget feasibility. Moreover, it uses purchased privacy expectation maximisation as a principle to produce accurate outputs for commonly-used queries such as counting, median and linear predictor. The effectiveness of our method is empirically validated by a series of experiments.

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Architecture and implementation of an agent-based simulation tool for market-based pricing in next-generation wireless networks

2nd International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities, 2006. TRIDENTCOM 2006., 2006

we present a generic, agent-based simulation environment for dynamic pricing in next-generation w... more we present a generic, agent-based simulation environment for dynamic pricing in next-generation wireless networks. While a lot of effort has been put into simulation platforms for recreating the behaviour of IP-based traffic in fixed and wireless networks, no standard platform for simulating different pricing schemes in such networks has yet emerged. Our work is driven by the vision of a ubiquitous wireless network environment, in which users can dynamically request network resources for various uses from different, potentially competing network providers. For such a scenario, new pricing approaches are needed to charge the user according to dynamic factors such as current congestion levels or the the number of customers present at a specific location. The developed simulation environment serves as a generic tool for implementing and testing different pricing approaches.

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Socio-Economic Impact of Alternative Spectrum Assignment Approaches in Latin America

Latin American Economics eJournal, 2015

The essential input to the exploitation of mobile broadband known as radio spectrum is a scarce r... more The essential input to the exploitation of mobile broadband known as radio spectrum is a scarce resource, whose allocation and eventual assignment by telecommunications regulator and spectrum authorities across the world is of outmost importance. The most popular approach to spectrum assignment is to run an auction where frequency bands get assigned over a fairly large time horizon; this feature of spectrum assignment plays a role in shaping the mobile telecommunications markets and may foreclose the emergence of alternative, plausibly more efficient, new modes of spectrum utilization. This paper's objective is to demonstrate that conventional spectrum assignment processes (based on auctioning of single use licenses) can be enriched with other approaches, such as reserving portion of spectrum to unlicensed use. The methodology explores alternative spectrum assignment scenarios (fully based on licenses and mixed) for a Latin American country, and quantifying their impact in terms...

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SEC-TOE Framework: Exploring Security Determinants in Big Data Solutions Adoption

As in any new technology adoption in organizations, big data solutions (BDS) also presents some s... more As in any new technology adoption in organizations, big data solutions (BDS) also presents some security threat and challenges, especially due to the characteristics of big data itself the volume, velocity and variety of data. Even though many security considerations associated to the adoption of BDS have been publicized, it remains unclear whether these publicized facts have any actual impact on the adoption of the solutions. Hence, it is the intent of this research-in-progress to examine the security determinants by focusing on the influence that various technological factors in security, organizational security view and security related environmental factors have on BDS adoption. One technology adoption framework, the TOE (technological-organizational-environmental) framework is adopted as the main conceptual research framework. This research will be conducted using a Sequential Explanatory Mixed Method approach. Quantitative method will be used for the first part of the research...

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A note on some properties of an efficient network resource allocation mechanism

Revista de Ingeniería, 2004

A Comparative Analysis of Selected National and Regional Investment Initiatives That Seek to Achieve Broadband Expansion by Deploying NGA Networks

Journal of Information Policy, 2018

Expectations about higher economic growth and the ever-increasing demand for higher bandwidth are... more Expectations about higher economic growth and the ever-increasing demand for higher bandwidth are driving the worldwide deployment of Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks. The paths followed to achieve this goal markedly vary, however, across different countries. This article offers a comparison of a handful of leading NGA deployments that rely on different investment models. We study the broadband national initiatives of New Zealand and Australia and a group of selected regional NGA deployments in Europe. While New Zealand's approach partially relies on a public–private partnership model of investment, Australia's National Broadband Network is a wholly government-funded initiative and the European local initiatives in Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal use a range of mixed models of investment. We use a common technology–policy–market framework that allows for a clear mapping of the incentives, goals, and actions of those involved in network deployment. Our main ...

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The Efficiency and Effectiveness of a Mixed Public-Private Broadband Deployment: The Case of New Zealand's Ultra Fast Broadband Deployment

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Although it is widely accepted that the future telecommunications access infrastructure relies he... more Although it is widely accepted that the future telecommunications access infrastructure relies heavily on Fiberto-the-Home (FTTH), its deployment is compromised because it requires substantial investment. As such, if the decision to go ahead with the investment is made, the partners involved should make sure the deployment and operations are performed as efficiently and effectively as possible, to ensure both economic and social viability. A deployment is efficient if achieved at minimum expense and is effective if it reaches the outlined goals. This paper analyses the impact of policy decisions affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of New Zealand's public-private partnership in charge of building up a nationwide FTTH network: the Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) network. The paper concludes that in the context of such type of partnership a tradeoff exists between efficiency and effectiveness. Although both concepts are well suited for assessing the performance of largescale projects such as FTTH rollouts, they are not necessarily always aligned.

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Comparing Traffic Discrimination Policies in an Agent-Based Next-Generation Network Market

Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, 2012

Presently, the network neutrality paradigm governs the manner in which most data is transported o... more Presently, the network neutrality paradigm governs the manner in which most data is transported over the Internet. However, experts often question whether keeping such a policy remains reasonable. In the context of new technologies, such as all-IP Next Generation Networks (NGN), traffic discrimination promises to benefit both network providers and users, but also imposes risks. We develop an agent-based NGN market model, in order to investigate the effects of neutral and non-neutral traffic management policies on the performance of Internet market participants. A simulation-based analysis of different policy and competition scenarios suggests that content providers perform best when network neutrality is imposed, while network providers and consumers may benefit from traffic discrimination, under certain circumstances.

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Distributional Impacts of Infrastructure Privatization in Colombia

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Resilient Organisations in the Cloud

A Simulation-Based Approach to Bidding Strategies for Network Resources in Competitive Wireless Networks

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Multiple equilibria in symmetric strategies for simultaneous auctions in next-generation bandwidth markets

Proceedings of the 2nd International ICST Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, 2007

We investigate equilibrium properties of a bidding strategy in a situation in which bidders attem... more We investigate equilibrium properties of a bidding strategy in a situation in which bidders attempt to purchase a given amount of a divisible resource by bidding on multiple auctions. Each seller uses the Progressive Second-Price auction. A domain of application is the next-generation of wireless networks, in which multiple, competing network providers sell bandwidth to multiple users able to aggregate their purchased bandwidth shares. Every bidder needs to coordinate his bids to maximise the utility derived from all auction. In order to deal with aggregation and coordination of bids, we introduce the notion of an aggregate market, which is an artificial construct that each bidder uses to distribute his demand among the auctions. Furthermore, the aggregate market helps to understand convergence of the bidding process occurring at each individual auction. We show that by using an incentive-compatible, efficient mechanism at each single auction bidders have incentives to truthfully reveal their demand to the aggregate market.

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Cost-Based Congestion Pricing in Network Priority Models Using Axiomatic Cost Allocation Methods

A Research Perspective

Congestion effects are the negative externalities or social costs that users generate on each oth... more Congestion effects are the negative externalities or social costs that users generate on each other when using a shared network resource. Under a congestion-based pricing scheme, networks with enough slack capacity should reflect a very low priced negative externality, while a network with reduced capacity to provide one more unit of the requested resource should reflect the negative effects in the form of higher prices for the use of network resources. This chapter deals with the efficient distribution of congestion costs among network users. First, we present a review of different approaches found in the literature, ranging from methods that advocate for congestion-based pricing to methods that, after being critical about considering congestion, advocate for price definition based on the investors' need for return on their investment. We then proceed to introduce an axiomatic approach to conges-IGI PUBLISHING

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An agent-based simulation model of a market for dynamic spectrum access

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Radio and Advanced Spectrum Management, 2011

The dramatic increase in the demand for spectrum-based services and devices, combined with the lo... more The dramatic increase in the demand for spectrum-based services and devices, combined with the long-term exclusive model of spectrum management, has led to an apparent spectrum scarcity. To overcome this scarcity, the concerned literature has proposed a more dynamic spectrum management using Cognitive Radio (CR) networks and Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM). This paper takes on the analysis of a potential market for dynamically accessing the spectrum. Our work introduces an agent-based simulation model whose design principles include simplicity - to provide a versatile prototype - and modularity - so that it can be easily modified to include different market mechanisms and agents' behaviours. We report on the results of several experiments to obtain a measure of market performance either through providers' revenues or overall social welfare - while analysing several plausible scenarios.

Introduction to Diffusions, Impacts, Adoption and Usage of ICTs upon Society Minitrack

2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2013

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How can you get more economic growth out of your ICT? Take care of your digital divide

acorn-redecom.org

 -inequalities in  access to the Internet,  extent of use,  knowledge of search strategies, ... more  -inequalities in  access to the Internet,  extent of use,  knowledge of search strategies,  quality of technical connections and social support,  ability to evaluate the quality of information, and  diversity of uses‖  Identify useful parameters to assess ICT's effectiveness

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The Use of Efficient Cost Allocation Mechanisms for Congestion Pricing in Data Networks with Priority Service Models

International Journal of Business Data Communications and Networking, 2005

This paper demonstrates the application of two efficient cost allocation mechanisms on a simple F... more This paper demonstrates the application of two efficient cost allocation mechanisms on a simple FIFO network model in order to find congestion-based prices for network access services. It is shown that it is possible to obtain congestion-dependent prices in data networks (such as the Internet), establishing simultaneously different service quality levels among the users. The rationale behind these efficient distribution mechanisms is an axiomatic framework that determines a set of basic principles, highlighting the need for a fair allocation. Due to the characteristics of the price mechanisms and the possibilities of the parameter space in which these mechanisms might be applied, it is also shown that, in some cases, such mechanisms need additional weighting schemes in order to establish coherent differences among the service quality levels. In conclusion, even though the axiomatic framework guarantees efficient allocation, checking coherency in its use is left to the network manager.

Internet as a critical infrastructure: lessons from the backbone experience in South America

Fernando Beltran

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