3,510 research outputs found

    Santa Fe Traffic Operation Center

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    The New Mexico Department of Transportation is expanding the District 5 Traffic Operations Center (TOC). We assessed the current communication methods and technologies used within the District 5 TOC. From various interviews and research we recommended that the TOC increase operational efficiency and interagency communications by implementing the following technologies and systems: Dashboard systems, NMRoads access expansion, automatic vehicle location, jurisdictional boundaries and infrastructure map, and interagency conferences, notification systems and contact lists

    Post-pandemic Recommendations: COVID-19 Continuity of Court Operations During a Public Health Emergency Workgroup

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    In this report, the COVID-19 Continuity of Court Operations During a Public Health Emergency Workgroup (Plan B Workgroup) makes recommendations about best practices and technologies that should be retained or adapted post-pandemic. The recommendations in this final Plan B Workgroup whitepaper are based on experience and feedback from Arizona’s courts addressing pandemic and post-pandemic practices. Although the original report, issued on June 2, 2021, included a May 2021 Survey of Arizona’s Courts, this updated report also includes information from a July 2021 State Bar of Arizona Survey and a September 2021 State of Arizona Public Opinion Survey addressing those practices. The workgroup’s findings and recommendations, which remain unchanged, can be summarized in five major categories: (1) Increasing Access to Justice, (2) Expanding Use of Technology, (3) Jury and Trial Management, (4) Communication Strategies and Disaster Preparedness, and (5) Health, Safety, and Security Protocols

    4th International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2013)

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    Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a recent paradigm emerging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), where computers are used as proactive tools assisting people with their day-to-day activities, making everyone’s life more comfortable. Another main concern of AmI originates from the human computer interaction domain and focuses on offering ways to interact with systems in a more natural way by means user friendly interfaces. This field is evolving quickly as can be witnessed by the emerging natural language and gesture based types of interaction. The inclusion of computational power and communication technologies in everyday objects is growing and their embedding into our environments should be as invisible as possible. In order for AmI to be successful, human interaction with computing power and embedded systems in the surroundings should be smooth and happen without people actually noticing it. The only awareness people should have arises from AmI: more safety, comfort and wellbeing, emerging in a natural and inherent way. ISAmI is the International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence and aiming to bring together researchers from various disciplines that constitute the scientific field of Ambient Intelligence to present and discuss the latest results, new ideas, projects and lessons learned, namely in terms of software and applications, and aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines that are interested in all aspects of this area

    Evaluating the impacts of urban freight traffic: application of micro-simulation at a large establishment

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    Heavy Goods Vehicles, HGV, and Light Goods Vehicles, LGV, are a significant contributor to air pollution problems in urban areas. This paper quantifies the contribution to the environment of the deliveries to a single, large city employer addressing a research gap in the literature. Analysis of data from comprehensive surveys carried out over two years demonstrated that freight delivery traffic generated by an urban establishment with multiple properties in a compact urban setting, is characterised by a high proportion of LGV consistent with recent national and international trends. Also, despite freight traffic is only 10% of local traffic, more than 50% serves the single establishment, suggesting a different approach to policy making driven by the employer should be explored. The modelling results showed, relatively, the largest contribution to total emissions comes from HGVs in the AM peak, 13.8%, 43.7%, 9.2% for CO2, NOx and PM respectively. LGV contribute less, with 5.5%, 3.8%, 6% for CO2, NOx and PM respectively but more responsible for local congestion due to their numbers. This research is the first known study of its type and with the unique combination of measurement and traffic microsimulation allowed consideration of more effective traffic management strategies as well as providing evidence to support a consolidation centre for deliveries outside the city with fewer electric or low emissions last mile vehicles reducing substantially the environmental impact. The research outputs are relevant to many other similar cases in UK and Europe. The paper contributes to the ongoing development of research and policy looking to achieve sustainable urban logistics through receiver and purchasing led initiatives

    Collaborative Work Enabled by Immersive Environments

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    An Activity-Centric Approach to Configuration Work in Distributed Interaction

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    The widespread introduction of new types of computing devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, large interactive displays or even wearable devices, has led to setups in which users are interacting with a rich ecology of devices. These new device ecologies have the potential to introduce a whole new set of cross-device and cross-user interactions as well as to support seamless distributed workspaces that facilitate coordination and communication with other users. Because of the distributed nature of this paradigm, there is an intrinsic difficulty and overhead in managing and using these kind of complex device ecologies, which I refer to as configuration work. It is the effort required to set up, manage, communicate, understand and use information, applications and services that are distributed over all devices in use and people involved. Because current devices and their containing software are still document- and application-centric, they fail to capture and support the rich activities and context in which they are being used. This leaves users without a stable concept for cross-device information management, forcing them to perform a large amount of manual configuration work. In this dissertation, I explore an activity-centric approach to configuration work in distributed interaction. The central goal of this dissertation is to develop and apply concepts and ideas from Activity-Centric Computing to distributed interaction. Using the triangulation approach, I explore these concepts on a conceptual, empirical and technological level and present a framework and use cases for designing activitycentric configurations in multi-device information systems. The dissertation presents two major contributions: First, I introduce the term configuration work as an abstract analytical unit that describes and captures the problems and challenges of distributed interaction. Using both empirical data and related work, I argue that configuration work is composed of: curation work, task resumption lag, mobility work, physical handling and articulation work. Using configuration work as a problem description, I operationalize Activity Theory and Activity-Centric Computing to mitigate and reduce configuration work in distributed interaction. By allowing users to interact with computational representations of their real-world activities, creating complex multi-user device ecologies and switching between cross-device information configurations will be more efficient, more effective and provide better support for users’ mental model about a multi-user and multi-device environment. Using activity configuration as a central concept, I introduce a framework that describes how digital representations of human activity can be distributed, fragmented and used across multiple devices and users. Second, I present a technical infrastructure and four applications that apply the concepts of activity configuration. The infrastructure is a general purpose platform for the design, development and deployment of distributed activitycentric systems. The infrastructure simplifies the development of activity-centric systems as it presents complex distributed computing processes and services into high level activity system abstractions. Using this infrastructure and conceptual framework, I describe four fully working applications that explore multi-device interactions in two specific domains: office work and hospital work. The systems are evaluated and tested with end-users in a number of lab and field studies

    Contextual memory in group workspaces

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    Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-129).This thesis presents the design and implementation of MemTable, an interactive touch table that supports co-located group meetings by capturing both digital and physical interactions in its memory. The goal of the project is to demonstrate hardware and software design principles that integrate recording, recalling, and reflection during the life cycle of a project in one tabletop system. MemTable's hardware design prioritizes ergonomics, social interaction, structural integrity, and streamlined implementation. Its software supports heterogeneous input modalities for a variety of contexts: brainstorming, decision making, event planning, and story-boarding. The user interface introduces personal menus, capture elements, and tagging to help identify the context of meeting interactions. It records the history of the implicit and explicit events during meetings. A preliminary evaluation is presented of user feedback on the capture and recall features. A longitudinal design plan outlines a framework for future work that integrates review and reflection functions into a comprehensive system. Additional features are presented for browsing and searching prior meeting data, visualizing long term work patterns, and integrating meeting data with external web services.by Seth E. Hunter.S.M

    Study of DataOps as a concept for Aker BP to enable data-driven assets.

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    The oil and gas industry have faced many obstacles over the decades and in recent years the industry has had to endure increased pressure from the market, a global crisis caused by the coronavirus and oil prices reaching an all time low. Low oil prices stimulate a reaction from the industry having to do more with less, finding new ways of working and exploring previously untapped opportunities for improvement through digitalization. Aker BP aim to be at the forefront of digitizing the exploration and production (E&P) industry and their digital transformation is more than just technology. Aker BP aim to build digital capabilities, develop digital mind sets and implement new ways of working where decisions are driven by data. The company show a willingness to experiment with and develop new technologies, however data management efforts are increasing as digitalization projects are realised from Aker BP’s digital lab. An investment into data management is therefore required to allow for automation over time and ensure the right competence within Aker BP. In collaboration with Aker BP, this thesis investigates the importance of an organization wide data management and data governance strategy aligned with business objectives and how the emerging concept of DataOps can enable Aker BP’s ambitions of becoming a data-driven company. DataOps is an emerging approach advocated by data practitioners to cater to the challenges in data analytics projects. The thesis examine how Aker BP work with data in their organization today through interviews and discussions with different parts of the organization and assess how the principles and concepts of DataOps can be applied. To answer this, a DataOps maturity model has been developed and Aker BP’s ways of working evaluated by using the model. The principles and concepts of DataOps have then been considered and an implementation plan and critical success factors for succeeding with DataOps or maturing data management and data governance efforts are presented. The thesis focuses on the principle that DataOps’ goal is to liberate data from its sources to its consumers and proposes the necessary steps to embark on the DataOps journey and maturing data management within the company. The research show that data management efforts are limited and based on ad-hoc needs and fast changing priorities. The pressure on the data management function to verify, clean, liberate, analyse and advise on data is growing and the participants in the research emphasize the need for change. Based on the DataOps maturity model developed, the steps required to increase Aker BP’s DataOps maturity are identified. Further research should include implementation of the identified steps and investigate the efforts to further automating business processes and maturing Aker BP’s ability to work with data
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