User interface adaptation for ICT based alternative and augmentative applications

Podrška informacijsko komunikacijske tehnologije za potpomognutu komunikaciju može olakšati uključivanje osoba sa složenim komunikacijskim potrebama u svakodnevni život. Takvim je osobama, zbog specifičnih i često individualnih potreba, nužno omogućiti jednostavnu prilagodbu grafičkog korisničkog sučelja u skladu s njihovim potrebama, sposobnostima, teškoćama i mogućnostima. U radu se predlaže inicijalna automatska prilagodba korisničkog sučelja aplikacija PK koja se obavlja samo jednom, a zatim distribuira ostalim aplikacijama PK putem razvijene platforme. Adaptacija je formalno definirana Petrijevim mrežama i evaluirana od strane grupe korisnika, pri čemu su rezultati evaluacije uključeni u sam model. Cilj modela jest implementacija programskih komponenti koje će se moći opetovano koristiti bez potrebe za evaluacijom od strane korisnika PK što je vrlo bitno obzirom na poteškoće i složene potrebe takvih korisnika. Ovakav će pristup u konačnici omogućiti brži razvoj usluga i aplikacija PK. Uz navedeno, u radu se predlažu i evaluiraju metode za odabir simbola.Support of ICT in Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) has been recognized as the key enabler of better inclusion of persons with complex communication needs into everyday life. Due to complex, and often very individual, communication needs, such persons need the ability to quickly adapt graphical user interfaces according to their needs, skills, impairments and possibilities. The paper proposes initial automatic adaptation of AAC application user interfaces that is performed only once and then distributed across AAC applications through a specialized AAC platform. The adaptation is formally specified using timed Petri nets and evaluated on a group of users, aiming at producing components that can be re-used without the need for further evaluation, thus enabling rapid development of new applications without the need for real user testing, due to the nature and availability of AAC users. Finally, the paper proposes several methods of choosing symbols and weighs the benefits of each method according to evaluation results

CAA e 4Co: opportunità didattiche della comunicazione aumentativa e alternativa su dispositivi mobili

AAC and 4Co: Educational Opportunities of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication on Mobile DevicesIn this paper we present an experience of the application of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) with four persons with severe language and motor impairments. Two applications (apps) on Android tablets were tried with one subject who had negatively experienced traditional communication boards at school and with three subjects who had never been considered before for AAC intervention. After a six-month trial, based on the co-construction of a personalized communication table with each of the four subjects, we achieved encouraging results: the ease of use of the proposed instruments enabled the persons involved in the experimentation to improve their communication capabilities, to better express their choices and feelings, and to extend their communication circles. These results show that AAC can be successfully applied to severe disabilities and encourages research in this direction. The experience, which is in progress in other contexts and with other pathologies, was heavily time-consuming with reference to the efforts required by the personalized development phase. For the future, we propose a mix of universal design and personalization so that the resulting tools can be regarded as convenient, competent, consonant and contextual

Securing open multi-agent systems governed by electronic institutions

One way to build large-scale autonomous systems is to develop an open multi-agent system using peer-to-peer architectures in which agents are not pre-engineered to work together and in which agents themselves determine the social norms that govern collective behaviour. The social norms and the agent interaction models can be described by Electronic Institutions such as those expressed in the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC), a compact executable specification language based on logic programming and pi-calculus. Open multi-agent systems have experienced growing popularity in the multi-agent community and are expected to have many applications in the near future as large scale distributed systems become more widespread, e.g. in emergency response, electronic commerce and cloud computing. A major practical limitation to such systems is security, because the very openness of such systems opens the doors to adversaries for exploit existing vulnerabilities. This thesis addresses the security of open multi-agent systems governed by electronic institutions. First, the main forms of attack on open multi-agent systems are introduced and classified in the proposed attack taxonomy. Then, various security techniques from the literature are surveyed and analysed. These techniques are categorised as either prevention or detection approaches. Appropriate countermeasures to each class of attack are also suggested. A fundamental limitation of conventional security mechanisms (e.g. access control and encryption) is the inability to prevent information from being propagated. Focusing on information leakage in choreography systems using LCC, we then suggest two frameworks to detect insecure information flows: conceptual modeling of interaction models and language-based information flow analysis. A novel security-typed LCC language is proposed to address the latter approach. Both static (design-time) and dynamic (run-time) security type checking are employed to guarantee no information leakage can occur in annotated LCC interaction models. The proposed security type system is then formally evaluated by proving its properties. A limitation of both conceptual modeling and language-based frameworks is difficulty of formalising realistic policies using annotations. Finally, the proposed security-typed LCC is applied to a cloud computing configuration case study, in which virtual machine migration is managed. The secrecy of LCC interaction models for virtual machine management is analysed and information leaks are discussed

Arquitetura baseada em multiagentes georreferenciados para Sistemas de Vigilância

Desde sempre houve uma preocupação das pessoas com a segurança, quer com a sua vida, quer com a dos seus bens. Esta preocupação, levou a que ao longo do tempo fossem desenvolvidos sistemas de vigilância que ajudam a aler-tar para eventuais perigos. Estes sistemas têm vindo a evoluir ao longo do tem-po, no entanto, ainda existem aspetos em que podem ser melhorados, tais co-mo: a Cooperação entre humanos e os dispositivos de vigilância; a Descentrali-zação dos Sistemas; a Fusão da informação sensorial; ou a Reconfiguração e Di-namismo dos sistemas. Tendo em conta estas lacunas, neste trabalho é proposta uma arquitetura de Sistemas Inteligentes de Vigilância baseada em agentes de Software georre-ferenciados, com vista a aumentar a cooperação entre humanos e sensores. Esta arquitetura pretende melhorar o desempenho global dos sistemas de vigilância atuais utilizando a localização dos recursos humanos e a localização dos even-tos, para melhorar os tempos de resposta a eventos. Com base na arquitetura proposta, foi desenvolvido um sistema que per-mitiu testar a solução proposta. Os resultados obtidos através dos vários testes efetuados, permitiram comprovar que, entre outras melhorias, a arquitetura proposta permite uma redução nos tempos de resposta aos eventos

Fish4Knowledge: Collecting and Analyzing Massive Coral Reef Fish Video Data

This book gives a start-to-finish overview of the whole Fish4Knowledge project, in 18 short chapters, each describing one aspect of the project. The Fish4Knowledge project explored the possibilities of big video data, in this case from undersea video. Recording and analyzing 90 thousand hours of video from ten camera locations, the project gives a 3 year view of fish abundance in several tropical coral reefs off the coast of Taiwan. The research system built a remote recording network, over 100 Tb of storage, supercomputer processing, video target detection and