Ambient Gestures

We present Ambient Gestures, a novel gesture-based system designed to support ubiquitous ‘in the environment’ interactions with everyday computing technology. Hand gestures and audio feedback allow users to control computer applications without reliance on a graphical user interface, and without having to switch from the context of a non-computer task to the context of the computer. The Ambient Gestures system is composed of a vision recognition software application, a set of gestures to be processed by a scripting application and a navigation and selection application that is controlled by the gestures. This system allows us to explore gestures as the primary means of interaction within a multimodal, multimedia environment. In this paper we describe the Ambient Gestures system, define the gestures and the interactions that can be achieved in this environment and present a formative study of the system. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and future applications of Ambient Gestures in ubiquitous computing

A deliberative model for self-adaptation middleware using architectural dependency

A crucial prerequisite to externalized adaptation is an understanding of how components are interconnected, or more particularly how and why they depend on one another. Such dependencies can be used to provide an architectural model, which provides a reference point for externalized adaptation. In this paper, it is described how dependencies are used as a basis to systems' self-understanding and subsequent architectural reconfigurations. The approach is based on the combination of: instrumentation services, a dependency meta-model and a system controller. In particular, the latter uses self-healing repair rules (or conflict resolution strategies), based on extensible beliefs, desires and intention (EBDI) model, to reflect reconfiguration changes back to a target application under examination

The Use of SMIL: Multimedia Research Currently Applied on a Global Scale

This paper describes the current use of the multimedia standard SMIL. SMIL features that relate to active areas of multimedia research are discussed. SMIL current implementation in existing browsers is described. Examples from the Web of SMIL applications representing different types of multimedia are presented. These discussions together provide an overview of how SMIL currently addresses the needs of multimedia distributed on the Web

TANGOW: Un sistema de enseñanza adaptativa a través de Internet

Proceedings of the Congreso Nacional de Informática Educativa CONIED'99 at Puertollano, Spain, November 1999. Published on CD.En este artículo se describe TANGOW, Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the Web, un sistema para la enseñanza de cursos accesibles a través de Internet. Los cursos definidos con TANGOW se adaptan a los estudiantes teniendo en cuenta tanto sus características propias (edad, idioma, etc.), como el conjunto de acciones que realizan durante el proceso de aprendizaje. Existe una estructura asociada con cada estudiante en la que se almacena el itinerario seguido por el estudiante en su interacción con el sistema, y que se restaura al inicio de cada sesión. Los cursos gestionados por el sistema se definen en términos de Tareas Docentes y Reglas. Las Reglas especifican la(s) relación(es) entre Tareas que, a su vez, corresponden a unidades conceptuales definidas por el diseñador del curso. Los ejemplos que se utilizan para ilustrar las características del sistema forman parte de un curso sobre educación vial.Este trabajo ha sido realizado dentro del proyecto InterEdu, financiado por la Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT), proyecto número TEL97-0306

Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach

Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform

A query description model based on basic semantic unit composite Petri-Net for soccer video

Digital video networks are making available increasing amounts of sports video data. The volume of material on offer means that sports fans often rely on prepared summaries of game highlights to follow the progress of their favourite teams. A significant application area for automated video analysis technology is the generation of personalized highlights of sports events. One of the most popular sports around world is soccer. A soccer game is composed of a range of significant events, such as goal scoring, fouls, and substitutions. Automatically detecting these events in a soccer video can enable users to interactively design their own highlights programmes. From an analysis of broadcast soccer video, we propose a query description model based on Basic Semantic Unit Composite Petri-Nets (BSUCPN) to automatically detect significant events within soccer video. Firstly we define a Basic Semantic Unit (BSU) set for soccer videos based on identifiable feature elements within a soccer video, Secondly we design Composite Petri-Net (CPN) models for semantic queries and use these to describe BSUCPNs for semantic events in soccer videos. A particular strength of this approach is that users are able to design their own semantic event queries based on BSUCPNs to search interactively within soccer videos. Experimental results based on recorded soccer broadcasts are used to illustrate the potential of this approach

Towards smart style : combining RDF semantics with XML document transformations

The 'Document Web' has established itself through the creation of an impressive family of XML and related languages. In addition to this, the 'Semantic Web' is developing its own family of languages based primarily on RDF. Although these families were both developed specifically for 'the Web', each language family has been developed from different premises with specific goals in mind. The result is that combining both families in a single application is surprisingly difficult. This is unfortunate, since the combination of semantic processing with document processing provides advantages in both directions --- namely using semantic inferencing for more intelligent document processing and using document processing tools for presenting semantic representations to an end-user. In this paper, we investigate this integration problem, focusing on the role of (RDF) semantics in selecting, structuring and styling (XML) content. We analyze the approaches taken by two example architectures and use our analysis to derive a more integrated alternative