59,547 research outputs found
Towards Multi-Modal Interactions in Virtual Environments: A Case Study
We present research on visualization and interaction in a realistic model of an existing theatre. This existing âMuziekÂŹcentrumâ offers its visitors information about performances by means of a yearly brochure. In addition, it is possible to get information at an information desk in the theatre (during office hours), to get information by phone (by talking to a human or by using IVR). The database of the theater holds the information that is available at the beginning of the âtheatre seasonâ. Our aim is to make this information more accessible by using multi-modal accessible multi-media web pages. A more general aim is to do research in the area of web-based services, in particuÂŹlar interactions in virtual environments
User Applications Driven by the Community Contribution Framework MPContribs in the Materials Project
This work discusses how the MPContribs framework in the Materials Project
(MP) allows user-contributed data to be shown and analyzed alongside the core
MP database. The Materials Project is a searchable database of electronic
structure properties of over 65,000 bulk solid materials that is accessible
through a web-based science-gateway. We describe the motivation for enabling
user contributions to the materials data and present the framework's features
and challenges in the context of two real applications. These use-cases
illustrate how scientific collaborations can build applications with their own
"user-contributed" data using MPContribs. The Nanoporous Materials Explorer
application provides a unique search interface to a novel dataset of hundreds
of thousands of materials, each with tables of user-contributed values related
to material adsorption and density at varying temperature and pressure. The
Unified Theoretical and Experimental x-ray Spectroscopy application discusses a
full workflow for the association, dissemination and combined analyses of
experimental data from the Advanced Light Source with MP's theoretical core
data, using MPContribs tools for data formatting, management and exploration.
The capabilities being developed for these collaborations are serving as the
model for how new materials data can be incorporated into the Materials Project
website with minimal staff overhead while giving powerful tools for data search
and display to the user community.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of 10th Gateway Computing
Environments Workshop (2015), to be published in "Concurrency in Computation:
Practice and Experience
Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations
Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified
GeNN: a code generation framework for accelerated brain simulations
Large-scale numerical simulations of detailed brain circuit models are important for identifying hypotheses on brain functions and testing their consistency and plausibility. An ongoing challenge for simulating realistic models is, however, computational speed. In this paper, we present the GeNN (GPU-enhanced Neuronal Networks) framework, which aims to facilitate the use of graphics accelerators for computational models of large-scale neuronal networks to address this challenge. GeNN is an open source library that generates code to accelerate the execution of network simulations on NVIDIA GPUs, through a flexible and extensible interface, which does not require in-depth technical knowledge from the users. We present performance benchmarks showing that 200-fold speedup compared to a single core of a CPU can be achieved for a network of one million conductance based Hodgkin-Huxley neurons but that for other models the speedup can differ.
GeNN is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms. The source code, user manual, tutorials,
Wiki, in-depth example projects and all other related information can be found on the project website http://genn-team.github.io/genn/
Drag it together with Groupie: making RDF data authoring easy and fun for anyone
One of the foremost challenges towards realizing a âRead-write Web of Dataâ [3] is making it possible for everyday computer users to easily find, manipulate, create, and publish data back to the Web so that it can be made available for others to use. However, many aspects of Linked Data make authoring and manipulation difficult for ânormalâ (ie non-coder) end-users. First, data can be high-dimensional, having arbitrary many properties per âinstanceâ, and interlinked to arbitrary many other instances in a many different ways. Second, collections of Linked Data tend to be vastly more heterogeneous than in typical structured databases, where instances are kept in uniform collections (e.g., database tables). Third, while highly flexible, the problem of having all structures reduced as a graph is verbosity: even simple structures can appear complex. Finally, many of the concepts involved in linked data authoring - for example, terms used to define ontologies are highly abstract and foreign to regular citizen-users.To counter this complexity we have devised a drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface that makes authoring Linked Data easy, fun, and accessible to a wide audience. Groupie allows users to author data simply by dragging blobs representing entities into other entities to compose relationships, establishing one relational link at a time. Since the underlying representation is RDF, Groupie facilitates the inclusion of references to entities and properties defined elsewhere on the Web through integration with popular Linked Data indexing services. Finally, to make it easy for new users to build upon othersâ work, Groupie provides a communal space where all data sets created by users can be shared, cloned and modified, allowing individual users to help each other model complex domains thereby leveraging collective intelligence
Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems
The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments
Shingle 2.0: generalising self-consistent and automated domain discretisation for multi-scale geophysical models
The approaches taken to describe and develop spatial discretisations of the
domains required for geophysical simulation models are commonly ad hoc, model
or application specific and under-documented. This is particularly acute for
simulation models that are flexible in their use of multi-scale, anisotropic,
fully unstructured meshes where a relatively large number of heterogeneous
parameters are required to constrain their full description. As a consequence,
it can be difficult to reproduce simulations, ensure a provenance in model data
handling and initialisation, and a challenge to conduct model intercomparisons
rigorously. This paper takes a novel approach to spatial discretisation,
considering it much like a numerical simulation model problem of its own. It
introduces a generalised, extensible, self-documenting approach to carefully
describe, and necessarily fully, the constraints over the heterogeneous
parameter space that determine how a domain is spatially discretised. This
additionally provides a method to accurately record these constraints, using
high-level natural language based abstractions, that enables full accounts of
provenance, sharing and distribution. Together with this description, a
generalised consistent approach to unstructured mesh generation for geophysical
models is developed, that is automated, robust and repeatable, quick-to-draft,
rigorously verified and consistent to the source data throughout. This
interprets the description above to execute a self-consistent spatial
discretisation process, which is automatically validated to expected discrete
characteristics and metrics.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted for publication and under
revie
- âŠ