Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Integrating big data into a sustainable mobility policy 2.0 planning support system

It is estimated that each of us, on a daily basis, produces a bit more than 1 GB of digital content through our mobile phone and social networks activities, bank card payments, location-based positioning information, online activities, etc. However, the implementation of these large data amounts in city assets planning systems still remains a rather abstract idea for several reasons, including the fact that practical examples are still very strongly services-oriented, and are a largely unexplored and interdisciplinary field; hence, missing the cross-cutting dimension. In this paper, we describe the Policy 2.0 concept and integrate user generated content into Policy 2.0 platform for sustainable mobility planning. By means of a real-life example, we demonstrate the applicability of such a big data integration approach to smart cities planning process. Observed benefits range from improved timeliness of the data and reduced duration of the planning cycle to more informed and agile decision making, on both the citizens and the city planners end. The integration of big data into the planning process, at this stage, does not have uniform impact across all levels of decision making and planning process, therefore it should be performed gradually and with full awareness of existing limitations

Urban management revolution: intelligent management systems for ubiquitous cities

A successful urban management support system requires an integrated approach. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated transparent and open decision making mechanism. The paper emphasises the importance of integrated urban management to better tackle the climate change, and to achieve sustainable urban development and sound urban growth management. This paper introduces recent approaches on urban management systems, such as intelligent urban management systems, that are suitable for ubiquitous cities. The paper discusses the essential role of online collaborative decision making in urban and infrastructure planning, development and management, and advocates transparent, fully democratic and participatory mechanisms for an effective urban management system that is particularly suitable for ubiquitous cities. This paper also sheds light on some of the unclear processes of urban management of ubiquitous cities and online collaborative decision making, and reveals the key benefits of integrated and participatory mechanisms in successfully constructing sustainable ubiquitous cities

The Potential for Public-Private Partnerships: Philanthropic Leaders Considering Housing as a Platform

Explores foundation leaders' approaches to housing as a platform for layering programs and services to improve quality of life, views on funding partnerships with the federal government, and suggestions for targeted collaborations. Includes case studies

Web Service Testing and Usability for Mobile Learning

Based on the summary of recent renowned publications, Mobile Learning (ML) has become an emerging technology, as well as a new technique that can enhance the quality of learning. Due to the increasing importance of ML, the investigation of such impacts on the e-Science community is amongst the hot topics, which also relate to part of these research areas: Grid Infrastructure, Wireless Communication, Virtual Research Organization and Semantic Web. The above examples contribute to the demonstrations of how Mobile Learning can be applied into e-Science applications, including usability. However, there are few papers addressing testing and quality engineering issues – the core component for software engineering. Therefore, the major purpose of this paper is to present how Web Service Testing for Mobile Learning can be carried out, in addition to re-investigating the influences of the usability issue with both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Out of many mobile technologies available, the Pocket PC and Tablet PC have been chosen as the equipment; and the OMII Web Service, the 64-bit .NET e-portal and the GPS-PDA are the software tools to be used for Web Service testing

Measuring Developer Experience of a Digital Platform

Smart city and smart transportation are concepts that have emerged as an enabling solution which facilitates the grassroots social innovations to mitigate the problems generated by rapid urbanization and population growth. The digital service platform has fostered a new paradigm of transportation by involving all key players to create a novel environment. It is concerned developer are also the user of the platform as they are using the system development tools and methods for further development, that is why developer experience over the platform plays a vital role. Delightful developer experience not only improving the platform performance but also invokes to introduce new innovations. In this research we off to measure developer experience and answering the research questions “how to measure developer experience on top of the digital service platform” and “how to analyse the developer experience”. In the state of measuring developer experience, an application has been developed over the digital service platform and a measurement procedure has been introduced by modifying System Usability Scale (SUS) to more suit the context of the developer. The SUS has been borrowed from UX measurement tools as developers are the user of system, system development tools and methods as well as SUS is a widely accepted tool by the usability researchers for measuring usability. The result of the proposed method showed superior experience from the developer’s perspective to develop the application over the living lab bus platform. The result is almost same when it is compared with another method, but it is arguable as it showed small discrepancy. Furthermore, it can be said that, this research provides a straight forward way to measure developer experience on a digital service platform. The answer of the research questions provides a detail guideline of the measurement process and analysing criteria of developer experience. Moreover, it comes out with few recommendations that can be helpful for the developers of the platform to improve the platform in future, so that it could ensure the delightful experience for the developers

A novel hybrid engineering methodology to enhance collaboration during the design and development of meta product services

Since the Product-Service System (PSS) is accompanied by a paradigm shift towards the sustainability of the production process, it demands an advanced level of collaboration throughout the design and development process. This poses new challenges to enhance collaboration among cross-sectional, multi-disciplinary design teams in order to incorporate a variety of interdisciplinary services in a complex service-oriented system. Therefore, a new collaboration methodology is needed to reduce barriers to collaboration in a cross- organizational structure domain. This research work aims at highlighting the collaboration challenges that Meta-Product design teams face and also proposes a novel methodology to enhance collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams. The proposed methodology is a hybrid engineering model designed by integrating an Information Delivery Manual approach with a traditional software development process along with three interlinked collaboration services

Agricultural information dissemination using ICTs: a review and analysis of information dissemination models in China

Open Access funded by China Agricultural UniversityOver the last three decades, China’s agriculture sector has been transformed from the traditional to modern practice through the effective deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Information processing and dissemination have played a critical role in this transformation process. Many studies in relation to agriculture information services have been conducted in China, but few of them have attempted to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of different information dissemination models and their applications. This paper aims to review and identify the ICT based information dissemination models in China and to share the knowledge and experience in applying emerging ICTs in disseminating agriculture information to farmers and farm communities to improve productivity and economic, social and environmental sustainability. The paper reviews and analyzes the development stages of China’s agricultural information dissemination systems and different mechanisms for agricultural information service development and operations. Seven ICT-based information dissemination models are identified and discussed. Success cases are presented. The findings provide a useful direction for researchers and practitioners in developing future ICT based information dissemination systems. It is hoped that this paper will also help other developing countries to learn from China’s experience and best practice in their endeavor of applying emerging ICTs in agriculture information dissemination and knowledge transfer

Autonomous resource-aware scheduling of large-scale media workflows

The media processing and distribution industry generally requires considerable resources to be able to execute the various tasks and workflows that constitute their business processes. The latter processes are often tied to critical constraints such as strict deadlines. A key issue herein is how to efficiently use the available computational, storage and network resources to be able to cope with the high work load. Optimizing resource usage is not only vital to scalability, but also to the level of QoS (e.g. responsiveness or prioritization) that can be provided. We designed an autonomous platform for scheduling and workflow-to-resource assignment, taking into account the different requirements and constraints. This paper presents the workflow scheduling algorithms, which consider the state and characteristics of the resources (computational, network and storage). The performance of these algorithms is presented in detail in the context of a European media processing and distribution use-case