Semi-automated creation of converged iTV services: From macromedia director simulations to services ready for broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers’ attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services

A study on the factors affecting job satisfaction amongst employees in construction industry workplace (Case Study Saudi Arabia)

This study examines the factors that effect on job satisfaction among employee’s in construction industry in Saudi Arabia. The aims of this study also to identify the relationship between factors of job satisfaction and job/employees performance in construction project. The factors of job satisfaction that examine in this study were salary and compensation, working conditions and workplaces safety, equipment or materials are used, safety condition of the work and attitude toward each other in construction industry, administration and supervision, the expertise of supervisors, the support from supervisors and supervisors‟ communication skills, environment and communication, work and achievement, responsibility, recognition and feedback, the timing of feedback and the chance to be recognised when you done well and lastly the advancement. Employees in construction industry or in any organizations need to be motivated to facilitate their input towards the attainment of their organizational goals. Therefore, to fulfil the gap of previous researchers, the questionnaire of this study asked employees to give their suggestion as well to improve their satisfaction of work. In this research out of 265 surveys were distributed, 117 viable questionnaires were returned. Quantitative method is used in this study and the collected data was analysed by the use of SPSS 20 software with the method of analysed that being used in this research are crosstabs, frequency, percentages, mean and rank. The findings form the study show that Construction Company should pay attention to their employee’s needs and wants to motivate them in order to increase their level of job satisfaction. The concentrates for improvement job satisfaction must focus on the important factors were suggested by responses in this survey

Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless

A converged broadcast and telecommunication service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption on three different terminal types. The motivations of service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication between them. The key features of tools required for creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular interest to those organizations currently conducting trials and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides them with an insight of the various additional functions required in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive services to a range of different mobile terminal types

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Technical pre-study for the ExMS project

This report aims to give an overview of software and hardware platforms available now or in the near future for building a prototype of an ExMS application (for an overview of the ExMS project, see Appendix). The report also gives an overview of the different technologies for building third-party mobile client software applications that are in use today. The report is composed of three sections. The first section is a general discussion on mobile client software and the different technologies that can be used to develop third-party mobile client software. The next section continues with a specific discussion on ExMS and answers the following questions: What is the general architecture of the ExMS application? What alternatives exist for implementing the ExMS prototype? The final section of the report is a recommendation of hardware and software platform for building the ExMS prototype

CREATING TOUCHPANEL GRAPHICS FOR CONTROL SYSTEMS

More often than system designers would like to admit, a discrepancy lies between the implementation of audiovisual control systems and their apparent ease of use to a novice or casual user. System designers and programmers are often hampered by the software tools provided by industry manufacturers and cannot reliably create desirable graphical interfaces that match the level of systems they are asked to program and install. Popular consumer trends in portable touchscreen devices, pioneered on devices such as the Apple iPhone, light a way forward into a new era of elegantly solving the audiovisual control system graphical user interface problem. Since expensive specialized hardware can be replaced by readily available consumer devices and a wide variety of tools exists with which to create content, possible alternatives to the current methods of designing the graphical user interface for the audiovisual system are ripe for discovery. Using the latest release of Autodesk Maya 2011, with features such as Python and Pymel, we have developed scripts to generate graphical user interface content for use with audiovisual control systems hardware. Also explored is the potential for a standalone development environment such that audiovisual designers and programmers are not required to operate Maya or adjust scripts to generate content. Given this new level of control over the graphical user interface, coupled with the flexibility of the control system central processor programming, a truly powerful, intuitive, and groundbreaking control interface can finally be realized

Interactive digital art

In this paper, we present DNArt in general, our work in DNArt’s lab including a detailed presentation of the first artwork that has come out of our lab in September 2011, entitled “ENCOUNTERS #3”, and the use of DNArt for digital art conservation. Research into the use of DNArt for digital art conservation is currently conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Media art (Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, NIMk). The paper describes this research and presents preliminary results. At the end, it will offer the reader the possibility to participate in DNArt’s development

A programmable microsystem using system-on-chip for real-time biotelemetry

A telemetry microsystem, including multiple sensors, integrated instrumentation and a wireless interface has been implemented. We have employed a methodology akin to that for System-on-Chip microelectronics to design an integrated circuit instrument containing several "intellectual property" blocks that will enable convenient reuse of modules in future projects. The present system was optimized for low-power and included mixed-signal sensor circuits, a programmable digital system, a feedback clock control loop and RF circuits integrated on a 5 mm × 5 mm silicon chip using a 0.6 μm, 3.3 V CMOS process. Undesirable signal coupling between circuit components has been investigated and current injection into sensitive instrumentation nodes was minimized by careful floor-planning. The chip, the sensors, a magnetic induction-based transmitter and two silver oxide cells were packaged into a 36 mm × 12 mm capsule format. A base station was built in order to retrieve the data from the microsystem in real-time. The base station was designed to be adaptive and timing tolerant since the microsystem design was simplified to reduce power consumption and size. The telemetry system was found to have a packet error rate of 10<sup>-</sup><sup>3</sup> using an asynchronous simplex link. Trials in animal carcasses were carried out to show that the transmitter was as effective as a conventional RF device whilst consuming less power