Reliable communication across ad hoc networks

This paper presents a fully decentralised peer-topeer voice communication tool intended for use across mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) by distributed groups who desired collaboration. We examined the synergy between MANETs and peer-to-peer virtual overlay networks which allowed the creation of ad hoc applications. One style of communication considered suitable for task oriented distributed group collaboration was push-to-talk. This research was focused on providing a push-to-talk communication platform suitable for deployment across MANETs. The research methodology employed was a proof of concept approach within a classical experimental computer science paradigm. We developed a prototype which used JXTA, a peer-to-peer virtual overlay network, to provide push-to-talk functionality across MANETs. Guaranteed delivery of messages was provided via a peer-to-peer voicemail delivery system. While the system did what intended we show that JXTA had a problem with the efficient delivery of voice samples.Telkom, Cisco, THRI

Control Synchronous Web-Based Training Using Web Services

With the rapidly advancing technologies, training has been vital to keep companies competitive. Web-based training grows rapidly and attracts more attention for its most flexible manner. Virtual classroom is a form of synchronous web-based training. It provides real-time interactivity in learning process. I have developed a virtual classroom that uses Web services to control the audio/video transmission, chat box, whiteboard, and synchronous HTML presentation. Compared to an early implementation of the virtual classroom based on the Jini network, my Web-service based implementation has a significantly different control structure. My implementation has better interoperability

Recommendations on the Internet of Things: Requirements, Challenges, and Directions

© 1997-2012 IEEE. The Internet of Things (IoT) is accelerating the growth of data available on the Internet, which makes the traditional search paradigms incapable of digging the information that people need from massive and deep resources. Furthermore, given the dynamic nature of organizations, social structures, and devices involved in IoT environments, intelligent and automated approaches become critical to support decision makers with the knowledge derived from the vast amount of information available through IoT networks. Indeed, IoT is more desirable of an effective and efficient paradigm of proactive discovering rather than postactive searching. This paper discusses some of the important requirements and key challenges to enable effective and efficient thing-of-interest recommendation and provides an array of new perspectives on IoT recommendation

Multi-party holomeetings: toward a new era of low-cost volumetric holographic meetings in virtual reality

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Fueled by advances in multi-party communications, increasingly mature immersive technologies being adopted, and the COVID-19 pandemic, a new wave of social virtual reality (VR) platforms have emerged to support socialization, interaction, and collaboration among multiple remote users who are integrated into shared virtual environments. Social VR aims to increase levels of (co-)presence and interaction quality by overcoming the limitations of 2D windowed representations in traditional multi-party video conferencing tools, although most existing solutions rely on 3D avatars to represent users. This article presents a social VR platform that supports real-time volumetric holographic representations of users that are based on point clouds captured by off-the-shelf RGB-D sensors, and it analyzes the platform’s potential for conducting interactive holomeetings (i.e., holoconferencing scenarios). This work evaluates such a platform’s performance and readiness for conducting meetings with up to four users, and it provides insights into aspects of the user experience when using single-camera and low-cost capture systems in scenarios with both frontal and side viewpoints. Overall, the obtained results confirm the platform’s maturity and the potential of holographic communications for conducting interactive multi-party meetings, even when using low-cost systems and single-camera capture systems in scenarios where users are sitting or have a limited translational movement along the X, Y, and Z axes within the 3D virtual environment (commonly known as 3 Degrees of Freedom plus, 3DoF+).The authors would like to thank the members of the EU H2020 VR-Together consortium for their valuable contributions, especially Marc Martos and Mohamad Hjeij for their support in developing and evaluating tasks. This work has been partially funded by: the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, under agreement nº 762111 (VR-Together project); by ACCIÓ (Generalitat de Catalunya), under agreement COMRDI18-1-0008 (ViVIM project); and by Cisco Research and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, under the grant Extended Reality Multipoint Control Unit (ID: 1779376). The work by Mario Montagud has been additionally funded by Spain’s Agencia Estatal de Investigación under grant RYC2020-030679-I (AEI / 10.13039/501100011033) and by Fondo Social Europeo. The work of David Rincón was supported by Spain’s Agencia Estatal de Investigación within the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under Project PID2019-108713RB-C51 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Cloud technology options towards Free Flow of Data

This whitepaper collects the technology solutions that the projects in the Data Protection, Security and Privacy Cluster propose to address the challenges raised by the working areas of the Free Flow of Data initiative. The document describes the technologies, methodologies, models, and tools researched and developed by the clustered projects mapped to the ten areas of work of the Free Flow of Data initiative. The aim is to facilitate the identification of the state-of-the-art of technology options towards solving the data security and privacy challenges posed by the Free Flow of Data initiative in Europe. The document gives reference to the Cluster, the individual projects and the technologies produced by them

A multimodal conversation analytic study of word-searches in L2 interaction

PhD ThesisStudies on face-to-face interactions have demonstrated how spoken language involves not only verbal but also a mutual collaboration with embodied actions. Embodied actions, such as gaze, gestures, body posture and physical movement are part and parcel of the details of ordered social interaction, and they can be significant resources in interaction (Hazel et al., 2014). This study has investigated the embodied actions displayed in word search phenomenon in L2 interaction. Word search is regarded as a type of self-initiation repair in which the progressivity of the speaker’s turn is momentarily ceased due to an item (i.e. word) is not available to the speaker when due (Schegloff et al., 1977). The context of the study is a non-educational context (Firth and Wagner, 1997; Firth and Wagner, 2007; Gardner and Wagner, 2004) where casual conversation among international university students having dinner at a cafe is recorded. Furthermore, the study is a multiactivity setting in which multiparty participants are engaged in talking, eating and drinking. The L2 speakers are from different countries, and most of them have a different first language background. This study examines conversations between L2-L2 speakers communicating in English as it is the most common language that international students resort to when speaking with someone who has a different language background. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), this study aims to explore how participants with different language proficiency exploit embodied actions as resources in word search sequences. The analyses start with investigating how participants get into a word search and then moves to enquiring how participants use embodied actions for constructing a joint solution. The final analysis focuses on how embodied actions are used as a resource to resolve a word search when the targeted word is not attained. The findings from the investigation suggest that there is a relationship between talk and embodied actions in word search sequences among L2-L2 speakers. Based on the findings, six salient themes will be discussed; (1) the interactional phenomenon of a ‘word search’, (2) resources that are recognised as opportunities for co-participation, (3) joint solutions by non-speaking participants, (4) meaning-making through embodied interaction, (5) achieving mutual understanding through embodied negotiation, and ii (6) language use or learning in the wild. Overall, this study advocates the need for an in-depth exploration of multimodal resources in word search sequences, which can have significant implications to understand that language use is fundamentally multimodal (Seyfeddinipur and Gullberg, 2014).Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysi

Money & Trust in Digital Society, Bitcoin and Stablecoins in ML enabled Metaverse Telecollaboration

We present a state of the art and positioning book, about Digital society tools, namely; Web3, Bitcoin, Metaverse, AI/ML, accessibility, safeguarding and telecollaboration. A high level overview of Web3 technologies leads to a description of blockchain, and the Bitcoin network is specifically selected for detailed examination. Suitable components of the extended Bitcoin ecosystem are described in more depth. Other mechanisms for native digital value transfer are described, with a focus on `money'. Metaverse technology is over-viewed, primarily from the perspective of Bitcoin and extended reality. Bitcoin is selected as the best contender for value transfer in metaverses because of it's free and open source nature, and network effect. Challenges and risks of this approach are identified. A cloud deployable virtual machine based technology stack deployment guide with a focus on cybersecurity best practice can be downloaded from GitHub to experiment with the technologies. This deployable lab is designed to inform development of secure value transaction, for small and medium sized companies

Technical Research Priorities for Big Data

To drive innovation and competitiveness, organisations need to foster the development and broad adoption of data technologies, value-adding use cases and sustainable business models. Enabling an effective data ecosystem requires overcoming several technical challenges associated with the cost and complexity of management, processing, analysis and utilisation of data. This chapter details a community-driven initiative to identify and characterise the key technical research priorities for research and development in data technologies. The chapter examines the systemic and structured methodology used to gather inputs from over 200 stakeholder organisations. The result of the process identified five key technical research priorities in the areas of data management, data processing, data analytics, data visualisation and user interactions, and data protection, together with 28 sub-level challenges. The process also highlighted the important role of data standardisation, data engineering and DevOps for Big Data

Multiparty/Multimedia Conferencing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks for Improving Communications between Firefighters

In current practice, firefighters’ communications systems are verbal, using a simplex Radio Frequency (RF) system (walkie-talkie). They use a push-to-talk mechanism in which only one person can talk at any time and all other firefighters will hear the messages. They use special codes (e.g. 1008, 1009, etc.) to express their current situation. Firefighters of the same team need to be in visual contact with each other at all times. This RF system does not support other functionalities (e.g. video communications, conference calls). In addition, because communication between firefighters is a flat structure, private communications is not possible. Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-less and self-organized wireless networks of mobile devices, which are not based on any centralized control. MANETs are suitable for the hosting of a wide range of applications in emergency situations, such as natural or human-induced disasters, and military and commercial settings. Multimedia conferencing is an important category of application that can be deployed in MANETs. This includes well-known sets of applications, such as audio/video conferencing, data communications, and multiplayer games. Conferencing can be defined as the conversational exchange of data content between several parties. Conferencing requires, at the very least, the opening of two sessions: a call signaling session, and a media handling session. Call signaling is used to set up, modify, and terminate the conference. Media handling is used to cover the transportation of the media, and to control/manage the media mixers and media connections. So far, very little attention has been devoted to the firefighters’ communication system. In the present work, we focus on building a new communication system for firefighters using multimedia conferencing/sub-conferencing in MANETs. The background information for the firefighters’ current communications system and MANETs, along with the multimedia conferencing, is provided. The limitations of this system are determined, and the requirements are derived to determine the functionalities of a better communication system that will overcome current limitations. We have proposed a cluster-based signaling architecture that meets our requirements. We have also identified a state-of-the-art media handling and mixing system that meets most of our requirements, and have adapted it to inter-work with our signaling system. We have implemented the proposed architecture using SIP signaling protocol. Performance measurements have been performed on the prototype. Through experiments, we have found that the new multimedia communication system is a very promising approach to solve the current firefighters’ communication problems