Operating between Cultures and Langugages: Multilingual Films in Foreign Language Classes

Our societies have undergone two major changes during the last decades: firstly, the continuous rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to the global economy, migration and universal mobility, and secondly, the steady expansion and gathering impetus of the new communication media (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2012). In consequence, multilingualism, acquired or learned, has shaped our living together and pertains to our learners in the classroom. Similarly, polyglot movies, literatures and other cultural productions have become symbolic expressions for worldwide cross-cultural movements for all age groups. Both the multilingualism and the multi-/transculturalism inherent in the texts and images constitute a rich cultural resource for the Foreign Language (FL) classroom. This article argues that the creative potential of transnational film, to be found in its multilingualism and transculturalism, should be used as a complementary field of teaching film beyond the traditional and curriculum-bound (English only) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Germany and therefore supports multicultural, multilingual and multimodal learning. The article uses examples from Quentin Ta­rantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Gonzalez Iñarritu’s Babel (2012) and Wim Wenders’ documentary Pina (2011)

E Plus - a practice oriented and transnational approach to enhance graduate employability

This report presents, in an e-book format for ease of reference, researched and evaluated initiatives, models and practices developed to enhance the employability of students of the University and the b.i.b. International College. It concludes the jointly funded stage of the project as planned in the original project proposal. The project is based on the key themes of work-based learning, industry-focussed learning, international learning and career management learning, and cross-threading I&CT and transnational themes. Many different stakeholders including students, tutors, service support staff and employers from both institutions contributed to the project and its outcomes. The following 4 paragraphs indicate briefly the content of each theme. In response to increasing evidence that HE institutions should be providing more workbased learning opportunities, EU- funded work experience opportunities for b.i.b. and SSU students going to Southampton and Germany respectively are planned, and a more flexible model combining both work experience and the final year project at SSU is planned. An industry focussed learning theme describes models for more industry-related activities. These include a more organised approach to using the University as a business context for live activities (eg analysis of University data warehouse data to inform decision making), an “Everybody-Wins” model for “live”/industry-linked activities and an entrepreneurial activity for primarily Technology courses. An international learning theme describes an experiment designed to enable b.i.b. and SSU students to work collaboratively online in international teams, and consequently enhance their e-portfolio CVs and employability. A career management learning theme completes this contribution to the employability agenda by sharpening the focus on CVs and gaining employment. It presents the results of studies on the application of Mahara at b.i.b. and software for developing communication skills at interview. Following achievement of the intended outcomes of the project, including the embedding of some practice, further work includes the on-going EU and other work-based learning initiatives. In conclusion, diverse, collaborative, shared, scalable and informed practice in our respective institutions should lead in the longer term to improved employability of our students

Improving sensor network performance with wireless energy transfer

Through recent technology advances in the field of wireless energy transmission Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks have emerged. In this new paradigm for wireless sensor networks a mobile entity called mobile charger (MC) traverses the network and replenishes the dissipated energy of sensors. In this work we first provide a formal definition of the charging dispatch decision problem and prove its computational hardness. We then investigate how to optimise the trade-offs of several critical aspects of the charging process such as: a) the trajectory of the charger; b) the different charging policies; c) the impact of the ratio of the energy the Mobile Charger may deliver to the sensors over the total available energy in the network. In the light of these optimisations, we then study the impact of the charging process to the network lifetime for three characteristic underlying routing protocols; a Greedy protocol, a clustering protocol and an energy balancing protocol. Finally, we propose a mobile charging protocol that locally adapts the circular trajectory of the MC to the energy dissipation rate of each sub-region of the network. We compare this protocol against several MC trajectories for all three routing families by a detailed experimental evaluation. The derived findings demonstrate significant performance gains, both with respect to the no charger case as well as the different charging alternatives; in particular, the performance improvements include the network lifetime, as well as connectivity, coverage and energy balance properties

Energy-Efficient Cooperative Spectrum Sensing based on Stochastic Programming in Dynamic Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks Normal

Nowadays, Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks (CRSN) arise as an emergent technology to deal with the spectrum scarcity issue and the focus is on devising novel energy-efficient solutions. In static CRSN, where nodes have spatial fixed positions, several reported solutions are implemented via sensor selection strategies to reduce consumed energy during cooperative spectrum sensing. However, energy-efficient solutions for dynamic CRSN, where nodes are able to change their spatial positions due to their movement, are nearly reported despite today's growing applications of mobile networks. This paper investigates a novel framework to optimally predict energy consumption in cooperative spectrum sensing tasks, considering node mobility patterns suitable to model dynamic CRSN. A solution based on the Kataoka criterion is presented, that allows to minimize the consumed energy. It accurately estimates -with a given probability-the spent energy on the network, then to derive an optimal energy-efficient solution. An algorithm of reduced-complexity is also implemented to determine the total number of active nodes improving the exhaustive search method. Proper performance of the proposed strategy is illustrated by extensive simulation results for pico-cells and femto-cells in dynamic scenarios.This work was supported in part by the DICYT Project, Direction of Research, Development and Innovation, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, USACH, under Grant 061813KC, in part by the CONICYT-PFCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2016-21160292, and in part by the Spanish National Project TERESA-ADA (MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE) under Grant TEC2017-90093-C3-2-R

An autoregressive estimator for overhead reduction in Substitution Networks

International audienceA substitution network is a temporary networkthat self-deploys to dynamically replace a portion of a damagedinfrastructure by means of a fleet of mobile routers. Someefficient solutions deploy robots based on active measurements.A robot/node in the network may use active link monitoring toassess the link quality towards its neighbors through the useof probe packets. Such probe packets are sent periodically at agiven rate, and so, the accuracy of the measurements depends onthe number and the frequency of exchanged packets. However,exchanging probe packets is energy and bandwidth consuming,thus active monitoring is considered as a costly mechanism.Even so, active link monitoring is a technique widely used onmany network protocols. In this paper, we focus on an adaptivepositioning algorithm (APOLO) to self-deploy a network. APOLOis based on active monitoring to gather essential information fromnodes. Therefore, we show how autoregressive estimation maybe used to reduce the overhead caused by the active measuringtechnique. Moreover, it is possible to use surrogate data ratherthan real data to feed APOLO without impacting its performance

Infrastructure-less D2D Communications through Opportunistic Networks

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorIn recent years, we have experienced several social media blackouts, which have shown how much our daily experiences depend on high-quality communication services. Blackouts have occurred because of technical problems, natural disasters, hacker attacks or even due to deliberate censorship actions undertaken by governments. In all cases, the spontaneous reaction of people consisted in finding alternative channels and media so as to reach out to their contacts and partake their experiences. Thus, it has clearly emerged that infrastructured networks—and cellular networks in particular—are well engineered and have been extremely successful so far, although other paradigms should be explored to connect people. The most promising of today’s alternative paradigms is Device-to-Device (D2D) because it allows for building networks almost freely, and because 5G standards are (for the first time) seriously addressing the possibility of using D2D communications. In this dissertation I look at opportunistic D2D networking, possibly operating in an infrastructure-less environment, and I investigate several schemes through modeling and simulation, deriving metrics that characterize their performance. In particular, I consider variations of the Floating Content (FC) paradigm, that was previously proposed in the technical literature. Using FC, it is possible to probabilistically store information over a given restricted local area of interest, by opportunistically spreading it to mobile users while in the area. In more detail, a piece of information which is injected in the area by delivering it to one or more of the mobile users, is opportunistically exchanged among mobile users whenever they come in proximity of one another, progressively reaching most (ideally all) users in the area and thus making the information dwell in the area of interest, like in a sort of distributed storage. While previous works on FC almost exclusively concentrated on the communication component, in this dissertation I look at the storage and computing components of FC, as well as its capability of transferring information from one area of interest to another. I first present background work, including a brief review of my Master Thesis activity, devoted to the design, implementation and validation of a smartphone opportunistic information sharing application. The goal of the app was to collect experimental data that permitted a detailed analysis of the occurring events, and a careful assessment of the performance of opportunistic information sharing services. Through experiments, I showed that many key assumptions commonly adopted in analytical and simulation works do not hold with current technologies. I also showed that the high density of devices and the enforcement of long transmission ranges for links at the edge might counter-intuitively impair performance. The insight obtained during my Master Thesis work was extremely useful to devise smart operating procedures for the opportunistic D2D communications considered in this dissertation. In the core of this dissertation, initially I propose and study a set of schemes to explore and combine different information dissemination paradigms along with real users mobility and predictions focused on the smart diffusion of content over disjoint areas of interest. To analyze the viability of such schemes, I have implemented a Python simulator to evaluate the average availability and lifetime of a piece of information, as well as storage usage and network utilization metrics. Comparing the performance of these predictive schemes with state-of-the-art approaches, results demonstrate the need for smart usage of communication opportunities and storage. The proposed algorithms allow for an important reduction in network activity by decreasing the number of data exchanges by up to 92%, requiring the use of up to 50% less of on-device storage, while guaranteeing the dissemination of information with performance similar to legacy epidemic dissemination protocols. In a second step, I have worked on the analysis of the storage capacity of probabilistic distributed storage systems, developing a simple yet powerful information theoretical analysis based on a mean field model of opportunistic information exchange. I have also extended the previous simulator to compare the numerical results generated by the analytical model to the predictions of realistic simulations under different setups, showing in this way the accuracy of the analytical approach, and characterizing the properties of the system storage capacity. I conclude from analysis and simulated results that when the density of contents seeded in a floating system is larger than the maximum amount which can be sustained by the system in steady state, the mean content availability decreases, and the stored information saturates due to the effects of resource contention. With the presence of static nodes, in a system with infinite host memory and at the mean field limit, there is no upper bound to the amount of injected contents which a floating system can sustain. However, as with no static nodes, by increasing the injected information, the amount of stored information eventually reaches a saturation value which corresponds to the injected information at which the mean amount of time spent exchanging content during a contact is equal to the mean duration of a contact. As a final step of my dissertation, I have also explored by simulation the computing and learning capabilities of an infrastructure-less opportunistic communication, storage and computing system, considering an environment that hosts a distributed Machine Learning (ML) paradigm that uses observations collected in the area over which the FC system operates to infer properties of the area. Results show that the ML system can operate in two regimes, depending on the load of the FC scheme. At low FC load, the ML system in each node operates on observations collected by all users and opportunistically shared among nodes. At high FC load, especially when the data to be opportunistically exchanged becomes too large to be transmitted during the average contact time between nodes, the ML system can only exploit the observations endogenous to each user, which are much less numerous. As a result, I conclude that such setups are adequate to support general instances of distributed ML algorithms with continuous learning, only under the condition of low to medium loads of the FC system. While the load of the FC system induces a sort of phase transition on the ML system performance, the effect of computing load is more progressive. When the computing capacity is not sufficient to train all observations, some will be skipped, and performance progressively declines. In summary, with respect to traditional studies of the FC opportunistic information diffusion paradigm, which only look at the communication component over one area of interest, I have considered three types of extensions by looking at the performance of FC: over several disjoint areas of interest; in terms of information storage capacity; in terms of computing capacity that supports distributed learning. The three topics are treated respectively in Chapters 3 to 5.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks InstitutePrograma de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Claudio Ettori Casetti.- Secretario: Antonio de la Oliva Delgado.- Vocal: Christoph Somme

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities