COLEG: Collaborative Learning Environment within Grid

The principal function of the CSCL environments is to provide to the various users (students, teachers, tutors…), the best activities with the best tools at the best time according to their needs. If a CSCL system is a collection of activities or learning process, we can cut out its functionalities in a certain number of autonomous functions which can then be carried out separately in the form of autonomous applications by using the technology of the Web/Grid services. The emerging technologies based on the Grid are increasingly being adopted to improve education and provide better services for learning. These services are offered to students who, regardless of their computer systems, can collaborate to improve their cognitive and social skills. This article presents COLEG (COllaborative Learning Environment within Grid), which aims to employ the capacities offered by the Grid to give the various actors, all the power of learning, collaboration and communication in an adaptable, heterogeneous and dynamic sight

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Interactive public "art-chitecture": engaging the city and its inhabitants

The era of technology, media and consumerism that exists in contemporary cities has diminished the opportunities to offer society direct encounters and personal dialogues with the urban realm. This has caused the visual sense to predominate over the rest of our senses, turning society into pure spectators in the city. Taste, sight, smell, sounds, touch and balance are all senses that need to be ordered, translated and processed by perception at the time we confront a place. The architectural space should be perceived with all senses in the emotional experience of it. Architectural Categories, such as shadows, lights, colors, textures, and materials, that complement architectural form, should be combined in the space for the purpose of impacting the perceptual process in humans and transcending their memory. Supporting the idea of a tactile rather than a visual city, this thesis attempts to analyze form and architectural categories to materialize a temporal "Art-chitectural" urban object adaptable to a variety of public situations. The exploration seeks to offer citizens different ways to perceive and experience urban spaces, while encouraging social participation and interaction through sensations, contemplation and physical engagement. The "Art-chitectural" object has been developed and tested through digital imaging and physical models; these evaluations confirmed the endless applications and basis for actual materialization

Systematic survey on evolution of cloud architectures

Cloud architectures are becoming an active area of research. The quality and durability of a software system are defined by its architecture. The architecture approaches that are used to build cloud-based systems are not available in a blended fashion to achieve an effective universal architecture solution. The paper aims to contribute to the systematic literature review (SLR) to assist researchers who are striving to contribute in this area. The main objective of this review is to systematically identify and analyse the recently published research topics related to software architecture for cloud with regard to research activity, used tools and techniques, proposed approaches, domains. The applied method is SLR based on four selected electronic databases proposed by (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). Out of 400 classified publications, we regard 121 as relevant for our research domain. We outline taxonomy of their topics and domains, provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. At present, there is little research coverage on software architectures for cloud, while other disciplines have become more active. The future work is to develop a secure architecture to achieve quality of service and service level agreements

THE QUESTION OF THE CIRCULATION OF AGENCY IN TWO IN JUDICIAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES

The literature on information infrastructures (Ole Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010) has elaborated principles to be followed for their development. However, according to Aanestad and Jensen (2011), these principles do not emphasize the role of involved stakeholders specifically whether the infrastructures are the result of nation-wide government projects. So, the focus is posed on stakeholders’ mobilization and coordination as further factors to take into account. The analysis of two judicial information infrastructures suggests that a further factor contributes to the development of information infrastructures: the circulation of agency or those conditions that allow to online proceedings to acquire legal validity. The fact that online procedures do not determine legal effects is not fundamental in the business environment where the efficiency rationale prevails. Conversely, this is decisive in the judiciary and in other sectors of the public administration due to the risk to build well functioning online proceedings with no legal valu

Distant Operational Care Centre: Design Project Report

The goal of this project is to outline the design of the Distant Operational Care Centre (DOCC), a modular medical facility to maintain human health and performance in space, that is adaptable to a range of remote human habitats. The purpose of this project is to outline a design, not to go into a complete technical specification of a medical facility for space. This project involves a process to produce a concise set of requirements, addressing the fundamental problems and issues regarding all aspects of a space medical facility for the future. The ideas presented here are at a high level, based on existing, researched, and hypothetical technologies. Given the long development times for space exploration, the outlined concepts from this project embodies a collection of identified problems, and corresponding proposed solutions and ideas, ready to contribute to future space exploration efforts. In order to provide a solid extrapolation and speculation in the context of the future of space medicine, the extent of this project's vision is roughly within the next two decades. The Distant Operational Care Centre (DOCC) is a modular medical facility for space. That is, its function is to maintain human health and performance in space environments, through prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Furthermore, the DOCC must be adaptable to meet the environmental requirements of different remote human habitats, and support a high quality of human performance. To meet a diverse range of remote human habitats, the DOCC concentrates on a core medical capability that can then be adapted. Adaptation would make use of the DOCC's functional modularity, providing the ability to replace, add, and modify core functions of the DOCC by updating hardware, operations, and procedures. Some of the challenges to be addressed by this project include what constitutes the core medical capability in terms of hardware, operations, and procedures, and how DOCC can be adapted to different remote habitats

Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry

This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution