Architecture of participation : the realization of the Semantic Web, and Internet OS

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-68).The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming an integral part of our daily life and touching every part of the society around the world including both well-developed and developing countries. The simple technology and genuine intention of the original WWW, which is to help researchers share and exchange information and data across incompatible platforms and systems, have evolved into something larger and beyond what one could conceive. While WWW has reached the critical mass, many limitations are uncovered. To address the limitations, the development of its extension, the Semantic Web, has been underway for more than five years by the inventor of WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the technical community. Yet, no significant impact has been made. Its awareness by the public is surprisingly and unfortunately low. This thesis will review the development effort of the Semantic Web, examine its progress which appears lagging compared to WWW, and propose a promising business model to accelerate its adoption path.by Shelley Lau.S.M

Libro de jAUTI 2014

El III WORKSHOP DE TV DIGITAL INTERACTIVA (WTVDI) en conjunto con las jAUTI 2014 III Jornadas Iberoamericanas de difusión y capacitación sobre Aplicaciones y Usabilidad de la TVDI se realizaron durante Webmedia 2014 XX Simpósio Brasilero de Sistemas Multimedia y Web e ntre el 18 y 21 de noviembre de 2014 en la ciudad de João Pessoa (Paraíba, Brasil). El Workshop de TV Digital Interativa (WTVDI) tuvo su primera edición en 2005 en XVIII SIBGRAPI y su segunda edición en 2010 en XVI Webmedia. En esta última edición se realizó junto a jAUTI 2014, el tercer encuentro de investigadores latinoamericanos que formam a REDAUTI Red temática en Aplicaciones y Usabilidad de la Televisión digital Interactiva financiada por el PROGRAMA IBEROAMERICANO DE CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGÍA PARA EL DESARROLLO (CYTED), formada por 225 investigadores de 36 grupos (29 universidades y 7 empresas) de 12 países iberoamericanos. Este libro reúne los trabajos presentados por investigadores de la academia y de la industria en el desarrollo e implementación de tecnologías relacionadas a aplicaciones y usabilidad en TV Digital Interactiva

Higher education stimulating creative enterprise

This report summarises the research undertaken by the Business & Community School at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), analysing ways that higher ediucation (HEIs) can support, and indeed stimulate, the creative economy. The research, in collaboration with the Arts University College Bournemouth (AUCB) and the University of Winchester, serves as a mere snapshot of the numerous ways that Universities engage with the diverse industries under the 'creative' nomenclature and of the very real and poistive ways that the higher education sector contributes to the growth of the creative economy in thhe UK

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-

Individualisation avancée des services IPTV

Le monde de la TV est en cours de transformation de la télévision analogique à la télévision numérique, qui est capable de diffuser du contenu de haute qualité, offrir aux consommateurs davantage de choix, et rendre l'expérience de visualisation plus interactive. IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) présente une révolution dans la télévision numérique dans lequel les services de télévision numérique sont fournis aux utilisateurs en utilisant le protocole Internet (IP) au dessus d une connexion haut débit. Les progrès de la technologie IPTV permettra donc un nouveau modèle de fourniture de services. Les fonctions offertes aux utilisateurs leur permettent de plus en plus d autonomie et de plus en plus de choix. Il en est notamment ainsi de services de type nTS (pour network Time Shifting en anglais) qui permettent à un utilisateur de visionner un programme de télévision en décalage par rapport à sa programmation de diffusion, ou encore des services de type nPVR (pour network Personal Video Recorder en anglais) qui permettent d enregistrer au niveau du réseau un contenu numérique pour un utilisateur. D'autre part, l'architecture IMS proposée dans NGN fournit une architecture commune pour les services IPTV. Malgré les progrès rapides de la technologie de télévision interactive (comprenant notamment les technologies IPTV et NGN), la personnalisation de services IPTV en est encore à ses débuts. De nos jours, la personnalisation des services IPTV se limite principalement à la recommandation de contenus et à la publicité ciblée. Ces services ne sont donc pas complètement centrés sur l utilisateur, alors que choisir manuellement les canaux de diffusion et les publicités désirées peut représenter une gêne pour l utilisateur. L adaptation des contenus numériques en fonction de la capacité des réseaux et des dispositifs utilisés n est pas encore prise en compte dans les implémentations actuelles. Avec le développement des technologies numériques, les utilisateurs sont amenés à regarder la télévision non seulement sur des postes de télévision, mais également sur des smart phones, des tablettes digitales, ou encore des PCs. En conséquence, personnaliser les contenus IPTV en fonction de l appareil utilisé pour regarder la télévision, en fonction des capacités du réseau et du contexte de l utilisateur représente un défi important. Cette thèse présente des solutions visant à améliorer la personnalisation de services IPTV à partir de trois aspects: 1) Nouvelle identification et authentification pour services IPTV. 2) Nouvelle architecture IPTV intégrée et comportant un système de sensibilité au contexte pour le service de personnalisation. 3) Nouveau service de recommandation de contenu en fonction des préférences de l utilisateur et aussi des informations contextesInternet Protocol TV (IPTV) delivers television content to users over IP-based network. Different from the traditional TV services, IPTV platforms provide users with large amount of multimedia contents with interactive and personalized services, including the targeted advertisement, on-demand content, personal video recorder, and so on. IPTV is promising since it allows to satisfy users experience and presents advanced entertainment services. On the other hand, the Next Generation Network (NGN) approach in allowing services convergence (through for instance coupling IPTV with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture or NGN Non-IMS architecture) enhances users experience and allows for more services personalization. Although the rapid advancement in interactive TV technology (including IPTV and NGN technologies), services personalization is still in its infancy, lacking the real distinguish of each user in a unique manner, the consideration of the context of the user (who is this user, what is his preferences, his regional area, location, ..) and his environment (characteristics of the users devices screen types, size, supported resolution, and networks available network types to be used by the user, available bandwidth, .. ) as well as the context of the service itself (content type and description, available format HD/SD , available language, ..) in order to provide the adequate personalized content for each user. This advanced IPTV services allows services providers to promote new services and open new business opportunities and allows network operators to make better utilization of network resources through adapting the delivered content according to the available bandwidth and to better meet the QoE (Quality of Experience) of clients. This thesis focuses on enhanced personalization for IPTV services following a user-centric context-aware approach through providing solutions for: i) Users identification during IPTV service access through a unique and fine-grained manner (different from the identification of the subscription which is the usual current case) based on employing a personal identifier for each user which is a part of the user context information. ii) Context-Aware IPTV service through proposing a context-aware system on top of the IPTV architecture for gathering in a dynamic and real-time manner the different context information related to the user, devices, network and service. The context information is gathered throughout the whole IPTV delivery chain considering the user domain, network provider domain, and service/content provider domain. The proposed context-aware system allows monitoring user s environment (devices and networks status), interpreting user s requirements and making the user s interaction with the TV system dynamic and transparent. iii) Personalized recommendation and selection of IPTV content based on the different context information gathered and the personalization decision taken by the context-aware system (different from the current recommendation approach mainly based on matching content to users preferences) which in turn highly improves the users Quality of Experience (QoE) and enriching the offers of IPTV servicesEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

Wiki-health: from quantified self to self-understanding

Today, healthcare providers are experiencing explosive growth in data, and medical imaging represents a significant portion of that data. Meanwhile, the pervasive use of mobile phones and the rising adoption of sensing devices, enabling people to collect data independently at any time or place is leading to a torrent of sensor data. The scale and richness of the sensor data currently being collected and analysed is rapidly growing. The key challenges that we will be facing are how to effectively manage and make use of this abundance of easily-generated and diverse health data. This thesis investigates the challenges posed by the explosive growth of available healthcare data and proposes a number of potential solutions to the problem. As a result, a big data service platform, named Wiki-Health, is presented to provide a unified solution for collecting, storing, tagging, retrieving, searching and analysing personal health sensor data. Additionally, it allows users to reuse and remix data, along with analysis results and analysis models, to make health-related knowledge discovery more available to individual users on a massive scale. To tackle the challenge of efficiently managing the high volume and diversity of big data, Wiki-Health introduces a hybrid data storage approach capable of storing structured, semi-structured and unstructured sensor data and sensor metadata separately. A multi-tier cloud storage system—CACSS has been developed and serves as a component for the Wiki-Health platform, allowing it to manage the storage of unstructured data and semi-structured data, such as medical imaging files. CACSS has enabled comprehensive features such as global data de-duplication, performance-awareness and data caching services. The design of such a hybrid approach allows Wiki-Health to potentially handle heterogeneous formats of sensor data. To evaluate the proposed approach, we have developed an ECG-based health monitoring service and a virtual sensing service on top of the Wiki-Health platform. The two services demonstrate the feasibility and potential of using the Wiki-Health framework to enable better utilisation and comprehension of the vast amounts of sensor data available from different sources, and both show significant potential for real-world applications.Open Acces

Open educational resources for all? Comparing user motivations and characteristics across The Open University’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform.

With the rise in access to mobile multimedia devices, educational institutions have exploited the iTunes U platform as an additional channel to provide free educational resources with the aim of profile-raising and breaking down barriers to education. For those prepared to invest in content preparation, it is possible to produce interactive, portable material that can be made available globally. Commentators have questioned both the financial implications for platform-specific content production, and the availability of devices for learners to access it (Osborne, 2012). The Open University (OU) makes its free educational resources available on iTunes U and via its web-based open educational resources (OER) platform, OpenLearn. The OU’s OER on iTunes U reached the 60 million download mark in 2013; its OpenLearn platform boasts 27 million unique visitors since 2006. This paper reports the results of a large-scale study of users of the OU’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform. A survey of several thousand users revealed key differences in demographics between those accessing OER via the web and via iTunes U. In addition, the data allowed comparison between three groups: formal learners, informal learners and educators. The study raises questions about whether university-provided OER meet the needs of users and makes recommendations for how content can be modified to suit their needs. As the publishing of OER becomes core to business, we reflect on reasons why understanding users’ motivations and demographics is vital, allowing for needs-led resource provision and content that is adapted to best achieve learner satisfaction, and to deliver institutions’ social mission

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience

Build your own closed loop: Graph-based proof of concept in closed loop for autonomous networks

Next Generation Networks (NGNs) are expected to handle heterogeneous technologies, services, verticals and devices of increasing complexity. It is essential to fathom an innovative approach to automatically and efficiently manage NGNs to deliver an adequate end-to-end Quality of Experience (QoE) while reducing operational expenses. An Autonomous Network (AN) using a closed loop can self-monitor, self-evaluate and self-heal, making it a potential solution for managing the NGN dynamically. This study describes the major results of building a closed-loop Proof of Concept (PoC) for various AN use cases organized by the International Telecommunication Union Focus Group on Autonomous Networks (ITU FG-AN). The scope of this PoC includes the representation of closed-loop use cases in a graph format, the development of evolution/exploration mechanisms to create new closed loops based on the graph representations, and the implementation of a reference orchestrator to demonstrate the parsing and validation of the closed loops. The main conclusions and future directions are summarized here, including observations and limitations of the PoC

Screen real estate ownership based mechanism for negotiating advertisement display

As popularity of online video grows, a number of models of advertising are emerging. It is typically the brokers – usually the operators of websites – who maintain the balance between content and advertising. Existing approaches focus primarily on personalizing advertisements for viewer segments, with minimal decision-making capacity for individual viewers. We take a resource ownership view on this problem. We view consumers’ attention space, which can be abstracted as a display screen for an engaged viewer, as precious resource owned by the viewer. Viewers pay for the content they wish to view in dollars, as well as in terms of their attention. Specifically, advertisers may make partial payment for a viewer’s content, in return for receiving the viewer’s attention to their advertising. Our approach, named “FlexAdSense”, is based on CyberOrgs model, which encapsulates distributed owned resources for multi-agent computations. We build a market of viewers’ attention space in which advertisers can trade, just as viewers can trade in a market of content. We have developed key mechanisms to give viewers flexible control over the display of advertisements in real time. Specific policies needed for automated negotiations can be plugged-in. This approach relaxes the exclusivity of the relationship between advertisers and brokers, and empowers viewers, enhancing their viewing experience. This thesis presents the rationale, design, implementation, and evaluation of FlexAdSense. Feature comparison with existing advertising mechanisms shows how FlexAdSense enables viewers to control with fine-grained flexibility. Experimental results demonstrate the scalability of the approach, as the number of viewers increases. A preliminary analysis of user overhead illustrates minimal attention overhead for viewers as they customize their policies