Giving order to image queries

Users of image retrieval systems often find it frustrating that the image they are looking for is not ranked near the top of the results they are presented. This paper presents a computational approach for ranking keyworded images in order of relevance to a given keyword. Our approach uses machine learning to attempt to learn what visual features within an image are most related to the keywords, and then provide ranking based on similarity to a visual aggregate. To evaluate the technique, a Web 2.0 application has been developed to obtain a corpus of user-generated ranking information for a given image collection that can be used to evaluate the performance of the ranking algorithm

An Open-Source Web-Based Tool for Resource-Agnostic Interactive Translation Prediction

We present a web-based open-source tool for interactive translation prediction (ITP) and describe its underlying architecture. ITP systems assist human translators by making context-based computer-generated suggestions as they type. Most of the ITP systems in literature are strongly coupled with a statistical machine translation system that is conveniently adapted to provide the suggestions. Our system, however, follows a resource-agnostic approach and suggestions are obtained from any unmodified black-box bilingual resource. This paper reviews our ITP method and describes the architecture of Forecat, a web tool, partly based on the recent technology of web components, that eases the use of our ITP approach in any web application requiring this kind of translation assistance. We also evaluate the performance of our method when using an unmodified Moses-based statistical machine translation system as the bilingual resource.This work has been partly funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through project TIN2012-32615

Success Factors of European Syndromic Surveillance Systems: A Worked Example of Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Introduction: Syndromic surveillance aims at augmenting traditional public health surveillance with timely information. To gain a head start, it mainly analyses existing data such as from web searches or patient records. Despite the setup of many syndromic surveillance systems, there is still much doubt about the benefit of the approach. There are diverse interactions between performance indicators such as timeliness and various system characteristics. This makes the performance assessment of syndromic surveillance systems a complex endeavour. We assessed if the comparison of several syndromic surveillance systems through Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps to evaluate performance and identify key success factors. Materials and Methods: We compiled case-based, mixed data on performance and characteristics of 19 syndromic surveillance systems in Europe from scientific and grey literature and from site visits. We identified success factors by applying crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. We focused on two main areas of syndromic surveillance application: seasonal influenza surveillance and situational awareness during different types of potentially health threatening events. Results: We found that syndromic surveillance systems might detect the onset or peak of seasonal influenza earlier if they analyse non-clinical data sources. Timely situational awareness during different types of events is supported by an automated syndromic surveillance system capable of analysing multiple syndromes. To our surprise, the analysis of multiple data sources was no key success factor for situational awareness. Conclusions: We suggest to consider these key success factors when designing or further developing syndromic surveillance systems. Qualitative Comparative Analysis helped interpreting complex, mixed data on small-N cases and resulted in concrete and practically relevant findings

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND ASSURANCE MODELING (SEAM): A WEB-BASED SOLUTION FOR INTEGRATED MISSION ASSURANCE

We present an overview of the Systems Engineering and Assurance Modeling (SEAM) platform, a web-browser-based tool which is designed to help engineers evaluate the radiation vulnerabilities and develop an assurance approach for electronic parts in space systems. The SEAM framework consists of three interconnected modeling tools, a SysML compatible system description tool, a Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) visual argument tool, and Bayesian Net and Fault Tree extraction and export tools. The SysML and GSN sections also have a coverage check application that ensures that every radiation fault identified on the SysML side is also addressed in the assurance case in GSN. The SEAM platform works on space systems of any degree of radiation hardness but is especially helpful for assessing radiation performance in systems with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronic components

Integrated Dynamic Facade Control with an Agent-based Architecture for Commercial Buildings

Dynamic façades have significant technical potential to minimize heating, cooling, and lighting energy use and peak electric demand in the perimeter zone of commercial buildings, but the performance of these systems is reliant on being able to balance complex trade-offs between solar control, daylight admission, comfort, and view over the life of the installation. As the context for controllable energy-efficiency technologies grows more complex with the increased use of intermittent renewable energy resources on the grid, it has become increasingly important to look ahead towards more advanced approaches to integrated systems control in order to achieve optimum life-cycle performance at a lower cost. This study examines the feasibility of a model predictive control system for low-cost autonomous dynamic façades. A system architecture designed around lightweight, simple agents is proposed. The architecture accommodates whole building and grid level demands through its modular, hierarchical approach. Automatically-generated models for computing window heat gains, daylight illuminance, and discomfort glare are described. The open source Modelica and JModelica software tools were used to determine the optimum state of control given inputs of window heat gains and lighting loads for a 24-hour optimization horizon. Penalty functions for glare and view/ daylight quality were implemented as constraints. The control system was tested on a low-power controller (1.4 GHz single core with 2 GB of RAM) to evaluate feasibility. The target platform is a low-cost ($35/unit) embedded controller with 1.2 GHz dual-core cpu and 1 GB of RAM. Configuration and commissioning of the curtainwall unit was designed to be largely plug and play with minimal inputs required by the manufacturer through a web-based user interface. An example application was used to demonstrate optimal control of a three-zone electrochromic window for a south-facing zone. The overall approach was deemed to be promising. Further engineering is required to enable scalable, turnkey solutions

THE ACCESSIBLE USER INTERACTION FRAMEWORK FOR ANDROID APPLICATIONS

As mobile technologies advance, accessibility features of smartphones are continu- ously improving and becoming more prevalent. It is essential that the user interaction design of mobile applications provides equal access and equal service to all our com- munity, especially for people with disabilities. However, there are no general mobile accessibility design guidelines publicly available. This paper reviews the web acces- sibility development guidelines as a reference, and the current accessibility features provided by modern mobile operating systems. It is proposed in this paper to use interactive spoken dialogues as the user interac- tion framework for accessible mobile applications. The idea is realized by the design and implementation of an Android application, AccessibleToolKit. AccessibleToolKit is developed to help visually impaired users to dial a phone number, manage alarms and the calendar. A usability study of AccessibleToolKit is conducted to evaluate the user experi- ence. Based on the feedback from the study, the design of AccessibleToolKit is refined to provide a more user-friendly experience. The performance of AccessibleToolKit is measured and compared with the performance of native apps. The comparison shows that AccessibleToolKit allow a user to perform commonly used tasks more efficiently. This study shows that using interactive spoken dialogues as the user interaction frame- work is a promising approach to develop accessible mobile applications

Design and implementation of web-based keystroke analytics for user verification

Keystroke analytics is the study of the way in which a user types rather than simply what they are typing. Through the application of statistical or machine learning methods the gathered biometric data may be used to verify the identity of a user, based on their typing style. This project aims to explore the field of keystroke analytics to gain an understanding of the methods involved and as such detail the implementation process for such a system’s design and implementation in a web-based context. Details regarding the technical design and implementation are specifically highlighted as current literature often does not describe how the systems shown were developed by rather the theory and methods used by them. The use of JavaScript to gather typing characteristic data is explored and the process of extracting useful features illustrated. Additionally both PHP and MySQL and used to create the backbone infrastructure to process and store the typing data. A phased development approach has been employed, with the overall system being separated into a collection of subsystems which are designed, implemented and tested before combining them to form the overall system. The supplementary software system requirements are presented, including the process of setting up a system capable of both being used to perform research on a local system as well as expand to online users for the data collection process. Method of testing the performance of a keystroke analytics system are discussed with potential changes to improve performance and minimise problems encountered outlined. The project was successful in that a working proof-of-concept web-based keystroke verification system was designed and implemented which yielded promising results for the data tested (FAR: 0%, FRR: 3.33%). Although to fully evaluate the system’s performance further testing needs to take place for a larger sample size of participants. The results obtained show that a keystroke analytics system may be implemented in a web-based environment, with relatively simple statistical methods, and provide reasonable performance results with only minor additional interaction required by the end-user. This has shown that keystroke analytics is a valid and well-performing method of providing non-intrusive multifactor authentication to traditional login systems

Webcoder Mobile Application for Learning Web Programming for Primary School Children

WebCoder mobile application is to be used on smartphones with Android operating systems. This mobile application is aimed to teach children range from 8 to 12 years old to learn HTML codes. The problems identified behind this project are difficulties faced by tertiary education students in learning programming and to fulfill the important need of programming in today’s world. This project is aimed to design an instructional design model for teaching web programming to school children, to develop and android-based application that comprises the designed instructional design model and to evaluate the project in terms of user acceptance. The development of this project is using ADDIE lifecycle which is an approach to Instructional Design Model consisting analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. On top of that, this project has developed an instructional design model that covers the relevant elements for a teaching application. The development is done by using Phonegap cross platform tool. The flow of the application is designed and presented in a flowchart, and the graphical user interface (GUI) is designed according to suitability. Functionality test carried out shows a good result which means this project has nearly met success. From the User acceptance testing (UAT) performed, most of the feedbacks reflect good results in all three aspects which are performance and presentation of the application, as well as its effectiveness towards users. These results show positive feedbacks from potential end users. With a total of 28 weeks of development; starting from selection of project topic up to the testing and implementation, it is believed that the usage of mobile phones will be more beneficial especially among children, in terms of educational purposes. It will also put Malaysia on the same level with other developed countries in terms of education where programming is taught in early ages

Enhancing product sustainability with Life Cycle Assessment and relevant technologies

Promoting sustainable products and resource efficiency have become two major policy objectives in Europe, and resource efficiency has become an important political objective on the agenda of the European Commission. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) acts as an efficient framework to evaluate product environmental performances and improve resource efficiency. An integrated approach implemented by three ICT systems are developed to support sustainable production. A sustainable production support toolbox has been developed that contains state-of-art tools regarding LCA software and database tools, environmental management schemes, the EU regulations and directives and stands associated with sustainable production. The applicable requirements, scope and advantages have been examined to develop the tools selection considerations. Compared with the existing toolbox, the distinguished novelty of the developed toolbox is that it can integrate into the product development process, the feasibility and utility of which has been demonstrated by reporting a sustainable flooring product development process. A framework for converting the existing ecoinvent database into a SQL supported database has also been developed, in order to use the ecoinvent database to serve web applications. The data format (i.e. EcoSpold) of the ecoinvent database is a custom XML format, and Python XML processing library has been applied to employ SAX approach to extract the massive data values and information from the EcoSpold files. The demonstrated framework iii and adopted approaches successfully convert the ecoinvent database into a SQL database management tool. Moreover, a Java GUI application has been developed to invoke the SQL based LCI database and the aggregated LCI datasets from the web-based product environmental assessment system. A web-based product environmental performance assessment system has been developed to achieve powerful, flexible and efficient online LCA calculations, by converting a desktop LCA software and applying a High-Performance Calculation Library. Moreover, a mobile client application has been developed to help consumers to evaluate purchased products sustainability performance and implement sustainable consumption. This developed tool is a novel web system that can perform powerful web and mobile based LCA calculations. The performance of the web system has been examined by applying a LCA on the shampoo product. A dedicated LCA on shampoo product has been conducted by using the SimaPro. The LCI datasets are provided by its manufacturer, a UK based company, and also fulfilled by applying ecoinvent database. This case study presents an in-depth modelling and analysis on shampoo product lifecycle with the aid of real manufacturing data. The analytical results also show that the lifecycle stage of major environmental impacts is in the shampoo utilisation stages

Evaluation of e-learning web sites using fuzzy axiomatic design based approach

High quality web site has been generally recognized as a critical enabler to conduct online business. Numerous studies exist in the literature to measure the business performance in relation to web site quality. In this paper, an axiomatic design based approach for fuzzy group decision making is adopted to evaluate the quality of e-learning web sites. Another multi-criteria decision making technique, namely fuzzy TOPSIS, is applied in order to validate the outcome. The methodology proposed in this paper has the advantage of incorporating requirements and enabling reductions in the problem size, as compared to fuzzy TOPSIS. A case study focusing on Turkish e-learning websites is presented, and based on the empirical findings, managerial implications and recommendations for future research are offered