Technical note: A mobile collaborative workspace to assist forensic experts in disaster victim identification scenarios

Integrated approaches to disaster victim identification (DVI) management have led to a need for technologies to improve interaction among parties involved in post-mortem (PM) and ante-mortem (AM) data collection through better communication and coordination. Mobile Forensic Workspace© (MFW) is a collaborative mobile system that not only facilitates the systematic collection of high-quality data, but also allows DVI professionals to coordinate activities and exchange data through secure real-time communication at major disaster scenarios in accordance with security, privacy and legal protocols. MFW is adaptable to any communication format (text, voice calls, photographs, etc.) and is dynamically self-reconfigurable when connectivity problems arise. It also allows data integration and backup through secure communication channels between local and remote servers. The feasibility of the system has been demonstrated through implementation of MFW on the iOS platform for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad terminals. A further strength of MFW is that it provides out-of-the-box support for INTERPOL DVI forms. The application of information and communication technologies for DVI was shown to be useful in improving DVI management by enhancing the quality of data collection and enabling non-Internet dependent real-time data sharing and communication

E- LEARNING IN BUSINESS ORGANISATIONS – NEW CONCEPTS, TECHNOLOGIES AND MODELS

E-learning systems (EL) have established themselves as a key management instrument in business strategies for human resource management, for the improvement of the efficiency of processes for professional staff development and for the development of corporate knowledge. The aim of this article is to present some of the new concepts for EL – an ecosystem for EL, collaborative learning, lifelong learning, ubiquitous learning, EL as a method for knowledge creation and the generation of collective intelligence.Furthermore, it aims to outline the potential of the key information technologies – mobile technologies, Web 2.0 and cloud services - for the development of efficient strategies and models for EL usage, its transition into an efficient and effective business practice and its establishment as a leading, electronically implemented activity (e-activity). To achieve the objective of the research article the following methods have been used – logical methods such as analysis, synthesis and comparison, and theoretical research methods such as abstracting and summarizing. The main empirical method applied is that of modelling

Digital curation and the cloud

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

Interactive Visualization Lenses:: Natural Magic Lens Interaction for Graph Visualization

Information visualization is an important research field concerned with making sense and inferring knowledge from data collections. Graph visualizations are specific techniques for data representation relevant in diverse application domains among them biology, software-engineering, and business finance. These data visualizations benefit from the display space provided by novel interactive large display environments. However, these environments also cause new challenges and result in new requirements regarding the need for interaction beyond the desktop and according redesign of analysis tools. This thesis focuses on interactive magic lenses, specialized locally applied tools that temporarily manipulate the visualization. These may include magnification of focus regions but also more graph-specific functions such as pulling in neighboring nodes or locally reducing edge clutter. Up to now, these lenses have mostly been used as single-user, single-purpose tools operated by mouse and keyboard. This dissertation presents the extension of magic lenses both in terms of function as well as interaction for large vertical displays. In particular, this thesis contributes several natural interaction designs with magic lenses for the exploration of graph data in node-link visualizations using diverse interaction modalities. This development incorporates flexible switches between lens functions, adjustment of individual lens properties and function parameters, as well as the combination of lenses. It proposes interaction techniques for fluent multi-touch manipulation of lenses, controlling lenses using mobile devices in front of large displays, and a novel concept of body-controlled magic lenses. Functional extensions in addition to these interaction techniques convert the lenses to user-configurable, personal territories with use of alternative interaction styles. To create the foundation for this extension, the dissertation incorporates a comprehensive design space of magic lenses, their function, parameters, and interactions. Additionally, it provides a discussion on increased embodiment in tool and controller design, contributing insights into user position and movement in front of large vertical displays as a result of empirical investigations and evaluations.Informationsvisualisierung ist ein wichtiges Forschungsfeld, das das Analysieren von Daten unterstützt. Graph-Visualisierungen sind dabei eine spezielle Variante der Datenrepräsentation, deren Nutzen in vielerlei Anwendungsfällen zum Einsatz kommt, u.a. in der Biologie, Softwareentwicklung und Finanzwirtschaft. Diese Datendarstellungen profitieren besonders von großen Displays in neuen Displayumgebungen. Jedoch bringen diese Umgebungen auch neue Herausforderungen mit sich und stellen Anforderungen an Nutzerschnittstellen jenseits der traditionellen Ansätze, die dadurch auch Anpassungen von Analysewerkzeugen erfordern. Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit interaktiven „Magischen Linsen“, spezielle lokal-angewandte Werkzeuge, die temporär die Visualisierung zur Analyse manipulieren. Dabei existieren zum Beispiel Vergrößerungslinsen, aber auch Graph-spezifische Manipulationen, wie das Anziehen von Nachbarknoten oder das Reduzieren von Kantenüberlappungen im lokalen Bereich. Bisher wurden diese Linsen vor allem als Werkzeug für einzelne Nutzer mit sehr spezialisiertem Effekt eingesetzt und per Maus und Tastatur bedient. Die vorliegende Doktorarbeit präsentiert die Erweiterung dieser magischen Linsen, sowohl in Bezug auf die Funktionalität als auch für die Interaktion an großen, vertikalen Displays. Insbesondere trägt diese Dissertation dazu bei, die Exploration von Graphen mit magischen Linsen durch natürliche Interaktion mit unterschiedlichen Modalitäten zu unterstützen. Dabei werden flexible Änderungen der Linsenfunktion, Anpassungen von individuellen Linseneigenschaften und Funktionsparametern, sowie die Kombination unterschiedlicher Linsen ermöglicht. Es werden Interaktionstechniken für die natürliche Manipulation der Linsen durch Multitouch-Interaktion, sowie das Kontrollieren von Linsen durch Mobilgeräte vor einer Displaywand vorgestellt. Außerdem wurde ein neuartiges Konzept körpergesteuerter magischer Linsen entwickelt. Funktionale Erweiterungen in Kombination mit diesen Interaktionskonzepten machen die Linse zu einem vom Nutzer einstellbaren, persönlichen Arbeitsbereich, der zudem alternative Interaktionsstile erlaubt. Als Grundlage für diese Erweiterungen stellt die Dissertation eine umfangreiche analytische Kategorisierung bisheriger Forschungsarbeiten zu magischen Linsen vor, in der Funktionen, Parameter und Interaktion mit Linsen eingeordnet werden. Zusätzlich macht die Arbeit Vor- und Nachteile körpernaher Interaktion für Werkzeuge bzw. ihre Steuerung zum Thema und diskutiert dabei Nutzerposition und -bewegung an großen Displaywänden belegt durch empirische Nutzerstudien

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Pedagogies of production: Re-imagining literacies for the digital age

This chapter reflects on the relationships between film, digital media, and new literacy and learning practices and explores the ways in which the study and production of audiovisual texts can be integrated into school settings. The chapter also considers the attendant new pedagogies to which film and media-making give rise, including the development of fluid and less hierarchical teaching practices that speak better to the everyday digital lives of children and young people in relation to the sociopolitical barriers to progressive education. Arguing in favor of more collaborative, social, and dynamic literacies inclusive of the moving image, the authors support the view that film is one of the foremost art forms of the last and the current century

Distributed Technology-Sustained Pervasive Applications

Technology-sustained pervasive games, contrary to technology-supported pervasive games, can be understood as computer games interfacing with the physical world. Pervasive games are known to make use of 'non-standard input devices' and with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), pervasive applications can be expected to move beyond games. This dissertation is requirements- and development-focused Design Science research for distributed technology-sustained pervasive applications, incorporating knowledge from the domains of Distributed Computing, Mixed Reality, Context-Aware Computing, Geographical Information Systems and IoT. Computer video games have existed for decades, with a reusable game engine to drive them. If pervasive games can be understood as computer games interfacing with the physical world, can computer game engines be used to stage pervasive games? Considering the use of non-standard input devices in pervasive games and the rise of IoT, how will this affect the architectures supporting the broader set of pervasive applications? The use of a game engine can be found in some existing pervasive game projects, but general research into how the domain of pervasive games overlaps with that of video games is lacking. When an engine is used, a discussion of, what type of engine is most suitable and what properties are being fulfilled by the engine, is often not part of the discourse. This dissertation uses multiple iterations of the method framework for Design Science for the design and development of three software system architectures. In the face of IoT, the problem of extending pervasive games into a fourth software architecture, accommodating a broader set of pervasive applications, is explicated. The requirements, for technology-sustained pervasive games, are verified through the design, development and demonstration of the three software system architectures. The ...Comment: 64 pages, 13 figure

JuxtaLearn D3.2 Performance Framework

This deliverable, D3.2, for Work Package 3 incorporating the pedagogy from WP2 and orchestration factors mapped in D3.1 reviews aspects of performance in the context of participative video making. It reviews literature on curiosity and engagement characteristics of interaction mechanisms for public displays and anticipates requirements for social network analysis of relevant public videos from WP6 task 6.3. Thus, to support JuxtaLearn performance it proposes a reflective performance framework that encompasses the material environment and objects required, the participants, and the knowledge needed