A Framework for Smart Distribution of Bio-signal Processing Units in M-Health

This paper introduces the Bio-Signal Processing Unit (BSPU) as a functional component that hosts (part of ) the bio-signal information processing algorithms that are needed for an m-health application. With our approach, the BSPUs can be dynamically assigned to available nodes between the bio-signal source and the application to optimize the use of computation and communication resources. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) it presents the supporting architecture (e.g. components and interfaces) and the mechanism (sequence of interactions) for BSPU distribution; (2) it proposes a coordination mechanism to ensure the correctness of the BSPU distribution; (3) it elaborates the design of smooth transition during BSPU distribution in order to minimize the disturbance to the m-health streaming application

Enabling the Autonomic Management of Federated Identity Providers

The autonomic management of federated authorization infrastructures (federations) is seen as a means for improving the monitoring and use of a service provider’s resources. However, federations are comprised of independent management domains with varying scopes of control and data ownership. The focus of this paper is on the autonomic management of federated identity providers by service providers located in other domains, when the identity providers have been diagnosed as the source of abuse. In particular, we describe how an autonomic controller, external to the domain of the identity provider, exercises control over the issuing of privilege attributes. The paper presents a conceptual design and implementation of an effector for an identity provider that is capable of enabling cross-domain autonomic management. The implementation of an effector for a SimpleSAMLphp identity provider is evaluated by demonstrating how an autonomic controller, together with the effector, is capable of responding to malicious abuse

A Framework for Quality-Driven Delivery in Distributed Multimedia Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for Quality-Driven Delivery (QDD) in distributed multimedia environments. Quality-driven delivery refers to the capacity of a system to deliver documents, or more generally objects, while considering the users expectations in terms of non-functional requirements. For this QDD framework, we propose a model-driven approach where we focus on QoS information modeling and transformation. QoS information models and meta-models are used during different QoS activities for mapping requirements to system constraints, for exchanging QoS information, for checking compatibility between QoS information and more generally for making QoS decisions. We also investigate which model transformation operators have to be implemented in order to support some QoS activities such as QoS mapping

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

The organizational social context of mental health services and clinician attitudes toward evidence-based practice: a United States national study.

UnlabelledABSTBACKGROUND: Evidence-based practices have not been routinely adopted in community mental health organizations despite the support of scientific evidence and in some cases even legislative or regulatory action. We examined the association of clinician attitudes toward evidence-based practice with organizational culture, climate, and other characteristics in a nationally representative sample of mental health organizations in the United States.MethodsIn-person, group-administered surveys were conducted with a sample of 1,112 mental health service providers in a nationwide sample of 100 mental health service institutions in 26 states in the United States. The study examines these associations with a two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis of responses to the Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS) at the individual clinician level as a function of the Organizational Social Context (OSC) measure at the organizational level, controlling for other organization and clinician characteristics.ResultsWe found that more proficient organizational cultures and more engaged and less stressful organizational climates were associated with positive clinician attitudes toward adopting evidence-based practice.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that organizational intervention strategies for improving the organizational social context of mental health services may contribute to the success of evidence-based practice dissemination and implementation efforts by influencing clinician attitudes

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Improving perceptual multimedia quality with an adaptable communication protocol

Copyrights @ 2005 University Computing Centre ZagrebInnovations and developments in networking technology have been driven by technical considerations with little analysis of the benefit to the user. In this paper we argue that network parameters that define the network Quality of Service (QoS) must be driven by user-centric parameters such as user expectations and requirements for multimedia transmitted over a network. To this end a mechanism for mapping user-oriented parameters to network QoS parameters is outlined. The paper surveys existing methods for mapping user requirements to the network. An adaptable communication system is implemented to validate the mapping. The architecture adapts to varying network conditions caused by congestion so as to maintain user expectations and requirements. The paper also surveys research in the area of adaptable communications architectures and protocols. Our results show that such a user-biased approach to networking does bring tangible benefits to the user