Many-to-Many Invocation: A New Object Oriented Paradigm for Ad Hoc Collaborative Systems

Many-to-Many Invocation (M2MI) is a new paradigm for building collaborative systems that run in wireless proximal ad hoc networks of xed and mobile computing devices. M2MI is useful for building a broad range of systems, including multiuser applications (conversations, groupware, multiplayer games); systems involving networked devices (printers, cameras, sensors); and collaborative middleware systems. M2MI provides an object oriented method call abstraction based on broadcasting. An M2MI invocation means \Every object out there that implements this interface, call this method. An M2MI-based application is built by de ning one or more interfaces, creating objects that implement those interfaces in all the participating devices, and broadcasting method invocations to all the objects on all the devices. M2MI is layered on top of a new messaging protocol, the Many-to-Many Protocol (M2MP), which broadcasts messages to all nearby devices using the wireless network\u27s inherent broadcast nature instead of routing messages from device to device. M2MI synthesizes remote method invocation proxies dynamically at run time, eliminating the need to compile and deploy proxies ahead of time. As a result, in an M2MI-based system, central servers are not required; network administration is not required; complicated, resource-consuming ad hoc routing protocols are not required; and system development and deployment are simplifi ed

SFDL: MVC Applied to Workflow Design

Process management based on workflow systems is a growing trend in collaborative environments. One of the most notorious areas of improvement is that of user interfaces, especially since business process definition languages do not address efficiently the point of contact between workflow engines and human interactions. With that in focus, we propose the MVC pattern design to workflow systems. To accomplish this, we have designed a new dynamic view definition language called SFDL, oriented towards the easy interoperability with the different workflow definition languages, while maintaining enough flexibility to be represented in different formats and being adaptable to several environments. To validate our approach, we have carried out an implementation in a real banking scenario, which has provided continuous feedback and enabled us to refine the proposal. The work is fully based on widely accepted and used web standards (XML, YAML, JSON, Atom and REST). Some guidelines are given to facilitate the adoption of our solution

RoboJam: A Musical Mixture Density Network for Collaborative Touchscreen Interaction

RoboJam is a machine-learning system for generating music that assists users of a touchscreen music app by performing responses to their short improvisations. This system uses a recurrent artificial neural network to generate sequences of touchscreen interactions and absolute timings, rather than high-level musical notes. To accomplish this, RoboJam's network uses a mixture density layer to predict appropriate touch interaction locations in space and time. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of RoboJam's network and how it has been integrated into a touchscreen music app. A preliminary evaluation analyses the system in terms of training, musical generation and user interaction

Systems for the Nineties - Distributed Multimedia Systems

We live at the dawn of the information age. The capabilities of computers to store and look up information are only just beginning to be exploited. As little as ten years ago, practically all the information stored in computers was entered and retrieved in the form of text. Today, we are just starting to use other means of communicating information between people and machines -- computers can now scan images, they can record sound, they can produce synthesized speech, and they can show two- and three-dimensional images of spatial data. The realization that we are still at the beginning of the information age comes when we notice the vast difference between the way in which people interact with each other and the way in which people can interact with (or through) machines. When people communicate, they tend to use speech, gestures, touch, even smell; they draw pictures on the white board, they use text, pictures, photos, graphs, sometimes even video presentations. nterpersonal communication is truly multimedia communication in that it makes use of all our senses

Interoperability in the OpenDreamKit Project: The Math-in-the-Middle Approach

OpenDreamKit --- "Open Digital Research Environment Toolkit for the Advancement of Mathematics" --- is an H2020 EU Research Infrastructure project that aims at supporting, over the period 2015--2019, the ecosystem of open-source mathematical software systems. From that, OpenDreamKit will deliver a flexible toolkit enabling research groups to set up Virtual Research Environments, customised to meet the varied needs of research projects in pure mathematics and applications. An important step in the OpenDreamKit endeavor is to foster the interoperability between a variety of systems, ranging from computer algebra systems over mathematical databases to front-ends. This is the mission of the integration work package (WP6). We report on experiments and future plans with the \emph{Math-in-the-Middle} approach. This information architecture consists in a central mathematical ontology that documents the domain and fixes a joint vocabulary, combined with specifications of the functionalities of the various systems. Interaction between systems can then be enriched by pivoting off this information architecture.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure