64,379 research outputs found

    Second Set of Spaces

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    This document describes the Gloss infrastructure supporting implementation of location-aware services. The document is in two parts. The first part describes software architecture for the smart space. As described in D8, a local architecture provides a framework for constructing Gloss applications, termed assemblies, that run on individual physical nodes, whereas a global architecture defines an overlay network for linking individual assemblies. The second part outlines the hardware installation for local sensing. This describes the first phase of the installation in Strathclyde University

    Fully-Coupled Two-Stream Spatiotemporal Networks for Extremely Low Resolution Action Recognition

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    A major emerging challenge is how to protect people's privacy as cameras and computer vision are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, including in smart devices inside homes. A potential solution is to capture and record just the minimum amount of information needed to perform a task of interest. In this paper, we propose a fully-coupled two-stream spatiotemporal architecture for reliable human action recognition on extremely low resolution (e.g., 12x16 pixel) videos. We provide an efficient method to extract spatial and temporal features and to aggregate them into a robust feature representation for an entire action video sequence. We also consider how to incorporate high resolution videos during training in order to build better low resolution action recognition models. We evaluate on two publicly-available datasets, showing significant improvements over the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 pagers, 5 figures, published in WACV 201

    SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments

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    The emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur

    Part 1: a process view of nature. Multifunctional integration and the role of the construction agent

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    This is the first of two linked articles which draw s on emerging understanding in the field of biology and seeks to communicate it to those of construction, engineering and design. Its insight is that nature 'works' at the process level, where neither function nor form are distinctions, and materialisation is both the act of negotiating limited resource and encoding matter as 'memory', to sustain and integrate processes through time. It explores how biological agents derive work by creating 'interfaces' between adjacent locations as membranes, through feedback. Through the tension between simultaneous aggregation and disaggregation of matter by agents with opposing objectives, many functions are integrated into an interface as it unfolds. Significantly, biological agents induce flow and counterflow conditions within biological interfaces, by inducing phase transition responses in the matte r or energy passing through them, driving steep gradients from weak potentials (i.e. shorter distances and larger surfaces). As with biological agents, computing, programming and, increasingly digital sensor and effector technologies share the same 'agency' and are thus convergent

    Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

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    This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

    Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape

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    Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know. This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.  This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies

    Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape

    Get PDF
    Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know. This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.  This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies
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