149,460 research outputs found
Framework for the Analysis of the Adaptability, Extensibility, and Scalability of Semantic Information Integration and the Context Mediation Approach
Technological advances such as Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) have increased the feasibility and
importance of effectively integrating information from
an ever widening number of systems within and across
enterprises. A key difficulty of achieving this goal
comes from the pervasive heterogeneity in all levels of
information systems. A robust solution to this problem
needs to be adaptable, extensible, and scalable. In this
paper, we identify the deficiencies of traditional
semantic integration approaches. The COntext
INterchange (COIN) approach overcomes these
deficiencies by declaratively representing data
semantics and using a mediator to create the necessary
conversion programs from a small number of
conversion rules. The capabilities of COIN is
demonstrated using an example with 150 data sources,
where COIN can automatically generate the over
22,000 conversion programs needed to enable
semantic interoperability using only six parametizable
conversion rules. This paper presents a framework for
evaluating adaptability, extensibility, and scalability of
semantic integration approaches. The application of
the framework is demonstrated with a systematic
evaluation of COIN and other commonly practiced
approaches.This work has been supported, in part, by MITRE Corp., the MIT-MUST project, the Singapore-MIT Alliance, and Suruga Bank
Inertial Sensor Based Modelling of Human Activity Classes: Feature Extraction and Multi-sensor Data Fusion Using Machine Learning Algorithms
Wearable inertial sensors are currently receiving pronounced interest due to applications in unconstrained daily life settings, ambulatory monitoring and pervasive computing systems. This research focuses on human activity recognition problem, in which inputs are multichannel time series signals acquired from a set of body-worn inertial sensors and outputs are automatically classified human activities. A general-purpose framework has been presented for designing and evaluating activity recognition system with six different activities using machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural networks (ANN). Several feature selection methods were explored to make the recognition process faster by experimenting on the features extracted from the accelerometer and gyroscope time series data collected from a number of volunteers. In addition, a detailed discussion is presented to explore how different design parameters, for example, the number of features and data fusion from multiple sensor locations - impact on overall recognition performance
Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications
Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a
challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This
challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the
intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture
for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test
the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design
language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive
computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of
area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This
language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application,
following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing
domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing
separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design
artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming
framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely
implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a
wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach
through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity
Designing and evaluating mobile multimedia user experiences in public urban places: Making sense of the field
The majority of the worldâs population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2008) resulting in an urban densification requiring people to live in closer proximity and share urban infrastructure such as streets, public transport, and parks within cities. However, âphysical closeness does not mean social closenessâ (Wellman, 2001, p. 234). Whereas it is a common practice to greet and chat with people you cross paths with in smaller villages, urban life is mainly anonymous and does not automatically come with a sense of community per se. Wellman (2001, p. 228) defines community âas networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.â While on the move or during leisure time, urban dwellers use their interactive information communication technology (ICT) devices to connect to their spatially distributed community while in an anonymous space. Putnam (1995) argues that available technology privatises and individualises the leisure time of urban dwellers. Furthermore, ICT is sometimes used to build a âcocoonâ while in public to avoid direct contact with collocated people (Mainwaring et al., 2005; Bassoli et al., 2007; Crawford, 2008). Instead of using ICT devices to seclude oneself from the surrounding urban environment and the collocated people within, such devices could also be utilised to engage urban dwellers more with the urban environment and the urban dwellers within. Urban sociologists found that âwhat attracts people most, it would appear, is other peopleâ (Whyte, 1980, p. 19) and âpeople and human activity are the greatest object of attention and interestâ (Gehl, 1987, p. 31). On the other hand, sociologist Erving Goffman describes the concept of civil inattention, acknowledging strangersâ presence while in public but not interacting with them (Goffman, 1966). With this in mind, it appears that there is a contradiction between how people are using ICT in urban public places and for what reasons and how people use public urban places and how they behave and react to other collocated people. On the other hand there is an opportunity to employ ICT to create and influence experiences of people collocated in public urban places. The widespread use of location aware mobile devices equipped with Internet access is creating networked localities, a digital layer of geo-coded information on top of the physical world (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011). Foursquare.com is an example of a location based 118 Mobile Multimedia â User and Technology Perspectives social network (LBSN) that enables urban dwellers to virtually check-in into places at which they are physically present in an urban space. Users compete over âmayorshipsâ of places with Foursquare friends as well as strangers and can share recommendations about the space. The research field of Urban Informatics is interested in these kinds of digital urban multimedia augmentations and how such augmentations, mediated through technology, can create or influence the UX of public urban places. âUrban informatics is the study, design, and practice of urban experiences across different urban contexts that are created by new opportunities of real-time, ubiquitous technology and the augmentation that mediates the physical and digital layers of people networks and urban infrastructuresâ (Foth et al., 2011, p. 4). One possibility to augment the urban space is to enable citizens to digitally interact with spaces and urban dwellers collocated in the past, present, and future. âAdding digital layer to the existing physical and social layers could facilitate new forms of interaction that reshape urban lifeâ (Kjeldskov & Paay, 2006, p. 60). This methodological chapter investigates how the design of UX through such digital placebased mobile multimedia augmentations can be guided and evaluated. First, we describe three different applications that aim to create and influence the urban UX through mobile mediated interactions. Based on a review of literature, we describe how our integrated framework for designing and evaluating urban informatics experiences has been constructed. We conclude the chapter with a reflective discussion on the proposed framework
Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention
Public evaluations are popular because some research
questions can only be answered by turning âto the wild.â
Different approaches place experimenters in different roles
during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of
data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced
by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding
of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and
provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation
approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful
gesture-controlled display â not to understand interaction at
the display but to compare different evaluation approaches.
The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles,
steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to
measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the
strengths and weaknesses of each approach
A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments
The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments
Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?
Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany
Heuristic Evaluation for Serious Immersive Games and M-instruction
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Two fast growing areas for technology-enhanced learning are serious games and mobile instruction (M-instruction or M-Learning). Serious games are ones that are meant to be more than just entertainment. They have a serious use to educate or promote other types of activity. Immersive Games frequently involve many players interacting in a shared rich and complex-perhaps web-based-mixed reality world, where their circumstances will be multi and varied. Their reality may be augmented and often self-composed, as in a user-defined avatar in a virtual world. M-instruction and M-Learning is learning on the move; much of modern computer use is via smart devices, pads, and laptops. People use these devices all over the place and thus it is a natural extension to want to use these devices where they are to learn. This presents a problem if we wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogic media they are using. We have no way of knowing their situation, circumstance, education background and motivation, or potentially of the customisation of the final software they are using. Getting to the end user itself may also be problematic; these are learning environments that people will dip into at opportune moments. If access to the end user is hard because of location and user self-personalisation, then one solution is to look at the software before it goes out. Heuristic Evaluation allows us to get User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) experts to reflect on the software before it is deployed. The effective use of heuristic evaluation with pedagogical software [1] is extended here, with existing Heuristics Evaluation Methods that make the technique applicable to Serious Immersive Games and mobile instruction (M-instruction). We also consider how existing Heuristic Methods may be adopted. The result represents a new way of making this methodology applicable to this new developing area of learning technology
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