Architecture and Protocol of a Semantic System Designed for Video Tagging with Sensor Data in Mobile Devices

Current mobile phones come with several sensors and powerful video cameras. These video cameras can be used to capture good quality scenes, which can be complemented with the information gathered by the sensors also embedded in the phones. For example, the surroundings of a beach recorded by the camera of the mobile phone, jointly with the temperature of the site can let users know via the Internet if the weather is nice enough to swim. In this paper, we present a system that tags the video frames of the video recorded from mobile phones with the data collected by the embedded sensors. The tagged video is uploaded to a video server, which is placed on the Internet and is accessible by any user. The proposed system uses a semantic approach with the stored information in order to make easy and efficient video searches. Our experimental results show that it is possible to tag video frames in real time and send the tagged video to the server with very low packet delay variations. As far as we know there is not any other application developed as the one presented in this paper

An investigation into the use of B-Nodes and state models for computer network technology and education

This thesis consists of a series of internationally published, peer reviewed, conference research papers and one journal paper. The papers evaluate and further develop two modelling methods for use in Information Technology (IT) design and for the educational and training needs of students within the area of computer and network technology. The IT age requires technical talent to fill positions such as network managers, web administrators, e-commerce consultants and network security experts as IT is changing rapidly, and this is placing considerable demands on higher educational institutions, both within Australia and internationally, to respond to these changes

The Role of General Practitioners in Disaster Health Management

Disasters are a time of excess demand for medical care overwhelming available medical services. General Practitioners (GPs) are local healthcare professionals already onsite managing the ongoing health of the majority of the community when disaster strikes. They are a medical resource, knowledgeable about the local community context, and remain to share the journey of adaptation and recovery with their local community in the days to years of aftermath. Early observations at commencement of this research demonstrated that whether GPs chose to or not, as local community health professionals they will be involved in some way in any disaster that strikes their community either during, and/or after the event. In most countries, including Australia, GPs are excluded from disaster response systems. The research aim was to identify the role of GPs in disaster health management, and to propose a system of involvement that aligns with: - the epidemiological evidence of disaster healthcare needs relevant to GPs, - the perceptions of GPs and Disaster Managers (DM) experts, and - the current All Hazards All Agencies Prevention-Preparedness-Response-Recovery (PPRR) international framework of disaster management The first study was a systematic literature review utilising PRISMA guidelines to categorise the epidemiology of physical health consequences of disasters relevant to GPs. Following this the thesis reports a series of three qualitative studies employing a constructivist grounded theory approach: two using semi-structured interviews, and one using a focus group, with disaster-experienced GPs and DMs. These studies explored barriers and facilitators to inclusion of GPs and investigated current and future roles. Research findings led to a conceptual representation for future integration of GPs, utilising the PPRR framework. Ultimately the thesis proposes a strategy for integration of GPs into existing disaster health management systems that addresses some of the barriers highlighted by the research, and elucidates the roles of GPs. The researchers sought to synthesise the emerging knowledge and facilitate implementation by key stakeholders with the intention of closing the gap between what is known and what is practiced. Findings were disseminated as per Graham's Knowledge to Action framework. Key outputs were enacted through peer-reviewed journal publications, textbook sections, guidelines for a broad range of practitioners, presentations internationally and nationally, policy revision through professional committee memberships, and advocacy for GP involvement at international, national, and local levels. To manage the challenges of disasters, countries require a resilient healthcare system that maximises capacity of all levels of local health resources, accommodates the surge in demand, and continues to sustain the local health services response in the aftermath. Comprehensive, people-focused coordination & continuity of care has the potential to improve the holistic health outcomes of disaster-affected people. Examination of the evidence from this doctorate suggests clear roles for GPs in disaster healthcare across all phases of disasters, with sustained contributions over the recovery. A knowledge of the temporal epidemiological patterns of health effects provides an opportunity for surveillance for emerging conditions over time, prevention of deterioration of existing conditions, and promotion of patient preparedness for future events, all roles within the usual realm of General Practice healthcare. An important element of GP integration is ongoing research on disaster healthcare needs presenting to GPs to continue to evaluate, justify and support ongoing GP involvement. The future challenge is to change the focus of disaster health management to person-centred healthcare integrated across all levels of usual healthcare, including evidence-based General Practice primary care contributions

General Boolean Expressions in Publish-Subscribe Systems

The increasing amount of electronically available information in society today is undeniable. Examples include the numbers of general web pages, scientific publications, and items in online auctions. From a user's perspective, this trend will lead to information overflow. Moreover, information publishers are compromised by this situation, as users have greater difficulty in identifying useful information. Publish-subscribe systems can be applied to cope with the reality of information overflow. In these systems, users specify their information interests as subscriptions and, subsequently, only matching information (event messages) is delivered; uninteresting information is filtered out before reaching users. In this dissertation, we consider content-based publish-subscribe systems, a sophisticated example of these systems. They perform the information-filtering task based on the content of provided information. In order to deal with high numbers of subscriptions and frequencies of event messages, publish-subscribe systems are realized as distributed systems. Advertisements---publisher specifications of potential future event messages---are optionally applied in these systems to reduce the internal distribution of subscriptions. Existing work on content-based publish-subscribe concepts mainly focuses on subscriptions and advertisements as pure conjunctive expressions. Therefore, subscriptions or advertisements using operators other than conjunction need to be canonically converted to disjunctive normal form by these systems. Each conjunctive component is then treated as individual subscription or advertisement. Unfortunately, the size of converted expressions is exponential in the worst case. In this dissertation, we show that the direct support of general Boolean subscriptions and advertisements improves the time and space efficiency of general-purpose content-based publish-subscribe systems. For this purpose, we develop suitable approaches for the filtering and routing of general Boolean expressions in these systems. Our approaches represent solutions to exactly those components of content-based publish-subscribe systems that currently restrict subscriptions and advertisements to conjunctive expressions. On the subscription side, we present an effective generic filtering algorithm, and a novel approach to optimize event routing tables, which we call subscription pruning. To support advertisements, we show how to calculate the overlap between subscriptions and advertisements, and introduce the first designated subscription routing optimization, which we refer to as advertisement pruning. We integrate these approaches into our prototype BoP (BOolean Publish-subscribe) which allows for the full support of general Boolean expressions in its filtering and routing components. In the evaluation part of this dissertation, we empirically analyze our prototypical implementation BoP and compare its algorithms to existing conjunctive solutions. We firstly show that our general-purpose Boolean filtering algorithm is more space- and time-efficient than a general-purpose conjunctive filtering algorithm. Secondly, we illustrate the effectiveness of the subscription pruning routing optimization and compare it to the existing covering optimization approach. Finally, we demonstrate the optimization effect of advertisement pruning while maintaining the existing overlapping relationships in the system

Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)

Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on "wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue" approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking, automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Debugging Type Errors with a Blackbox Compiler

Type error debugging can be a laborious yet necessary process for programmers of statically typed functional programming languages. Often a compiler compounds this by inaccurately reporting the location of a type error, a problem that has been a subject of research for over thirty years. However, despite its long history, the solutions proposed are often reliant on direct modifications to the compiler, often distributed in the form of patches. These patches append another level of arduous activity to the task of debugging, keeping them modernised to the ever-changing programming language they support. This thesis investigates an additional option; the blackbox compiler. Split into three central parts, it shows the individual solutions involved in using a blackbox compiler to debug type errors in functional programming languages. First is a demonstration of how the combination of a blackbox compiler and a generic debugging algorithm can successfully locate type errors. Next tackled is a side-effect of this new combination, the introduction of extra errors, combated with a new speed boosted algorithm, evaluated with a proposed framework based on Data Science techniques to quantify the quality of a type error debugger. Lastly, the algorithms employed throughout this thesis, along with the blackbox compiler, have agnostic properties, they do not need language-specific knowledge. Thus, the final part presents utilising the agnostic abilities for an agnostic debugger to locate type errors

Intelligent Sensor Networks

In the last decade, wireless or wired sensor networks have attracted much attention. However, most designs target general sensor network issues including protocol stack (routing, MAC, etc.) and security issues. This book focuses on the close integration of sensing, networking, and smart signal processing via machine learning. Based on their world-class research, the authors present the fundamentals of intelligent sensor networks. They cover sensing and sampling, distributed signal processing, and intelligent signal learning. In addition, they present cutting-edge research results from leading experts

System engineering and evolution decision support, Final Progress Report (05/01/1998 - 09-30-2001)

The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for system engineering automation and decision support. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focused on decision support for designing operations of complex modular systems that can include embedded software. Emphasis areas included engineering automation capabilities in the areas of design modifications, design records, reuse, and automatic generation of design representations such as real-time schedules and software.U.S. Army Research OfficeFunding number(s): DSAM 90387, DWAM 80013, DWAM 90215

7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21)

Information and communication technologies together with new teaching paradigms are reshaping the learning environment.The International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd) aims to become a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experiences,opinions and research results relating to the preparation of students and the organization of educational systems.Doménech I De Soria, J.; Merello Giménez, P.; Poza Plaza, EDL. (2021). 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD21.2021.13621EDITORIA