Satellite-enabled educational services specification and requirements analysis based on user feedback

Advanced tele-education services provision in remote geographically dispersed user communities (such as agriculture and maritime), based on the specific needs and requirements of such communities, implies significant infrastructural and broadband connectivity requirements for rich media, timely and quality-assured content delivery and interactivity. The solution to broadband access anywhere is provided by satellite-enabled communication infrastructures. This paper aims to present such satellite-based infrastructures that are capable of addressing the core requirements of rich media educational services in remote areas. The paper proceeds to examine a set of services that will realise such satellite-based distance learning systems and to assess the targeted users’ interest in such services. The presented work is undertaken within the framework of the EU-funded Broadband Access Satellite Enabled Education (BASE2) project. Furthermore, requirements analysis, based on the Volere template (Robertson) and on user feedback, is undertaken

Empowering geographically isolated communities with instant access to learning and training through satellite

Enabling learning for members of geographically isolated communities such as agrarian, or maritime communities presents benefits in terms of promoting regional development and cost savings for governments and companies. We present a methodology for designing a satellite and wireless based network infrastructure and learning services to support distance learning for such isolated communities. This methodology entails (a) the involvement of community members in the development of targeted learning services from an early stage and (b) a service-oriented approach to learning solution deployment. Here this methodology is applied in the context of the European research project BASE2 (BASE2 2006), in which the following two types of geographically isolated communities are considered: agrarian and maritime

DecVi: Adaptive Video Conferencing on Open Peer-to-Peer Networks

Video conferencing has become the preferred way of interacting virtually. Current video conferencing applications, like Zoom, Teams or WebEx, are centralized, cloud-based platforms whose performance crucially depends on the proximity of clients to their data centers. Clients from low-income countries are particularly affected as most data centers from major cloud providers are located in economically advanced nations. Centralized conferencing applications also suffer from occasional outages and are embattled by serious privacy violation allegations. In recent years, decentralized video conferencing applications built over p2p networks and incentivized through blockchain are becoming popular. A key characteristic of these networks is their openness: anyone can host a media server on the network and gain reward for providing service. Strong economic incentives combined with lower entry barrier to join the network, makes increasing server coverage to even remote regions of the world. These reasons, however, also lead to a security problem: a server may obfuscate its true location in order to gain an unfair business advantage. In this paper, we consider the problem of multicast tree construction for video conferencing sessions in open p2p conferencing applications. We propose DecVi, a decentralized multicast tree construction protocol that adaptively discovers efficient tree structures based on an exploration-exploitation framework. DecVi is motivated by the combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem and uses a succinct learning model to compute effective actions. Despite operating in a multi-agent setting with each server having only limited knowledge of the global network and without cooperation among servers, experimentally we show DecVi achieves similar quality-of-experience compared to a centralized globally optimal algorithm while achieving higher reliability and flexibility

Network Security - Is IP Telephony helping the cause?

The major players in the Public Branch Exchange (PBX) market are moving rapidly towards the implementation of IP Telephony. What will be the effect on network security overall? Will the push to IP Telephony damage the good work already devoted to security networks? As more doorways open up on our networks there is an increased chance we have opened another unseen vector for hackers and other malicious organisation or individuals to access the data stored on server and users workstations, corrupting that data or destroying it. Is it better from a security perspective to have IP telephony only between PBX equipment – a significant saving in itself or is it imperative that an organisation have IP telephony to the desktop? Is there any real difference, once IP Telephony is past the network boundary does it matter if it also appears at the desktop? What about the future with collaboration and unified collaboration? This paper will discuss a number of implementations and attempt to understand the pros and cons of each. No one solution is going to fit all networks but hopefully this paper will be able to increase our understanding of the dangers and therefore allow for the development of robust solutions

BIBS: A Lecture Webcasting System

The Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS) is a lecture webcasting system developed and operated by the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center. The system offers live remote viewing and on-demand replay of course lectures using streaming audio and video over the Internet. During the Fall 2000 semester 14 classes were webcast, including several large lower division classes, with a total enrollment of over 4,000 students. Lectures were played over 15,000 times per month during the semester. The primary use of the webcasts is to study for examinations. Students report they watch BIBS lectures because they did not understand material presented in lecture, because they wanted to review what the instructor said about selected topics, because they missed a lecture, and/or because they had difficulty understanding the speaker (e.g., non-native English speakers). Analysis of various survey data suggests that more than 50% of the students enrolled in some large classes view lectures and that as many as 75% of the lectures are played by members of the Berkeley community. Faculty attitudes vary about the virtues of lecture webcasting. Some question the use of this technology while others believe it is a valuable aid to education. Further study is required to accurately assess the pedagogical impact that lecture webcasts have on student learning

InfoTech Update, Volume 15, Number 1, January/February 2006

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/5014/thumbnail.jp

Design, implementation and evaluation of unified communications on-premises and over the Cloud

Unified Communication (UC) is the integration of two or more real time communication systems into one platform. Integrating core communication systems into one overall enterprise level system delivers more than just cost saving. These real-time interactive communication services and applications over Internet Protocol (IP) have become critical in boosting employee accessibility and efficiency, improving customer support and fostering business agility. However, some small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are far from implementing this solution due to the high cost of initial deployment and ongoing support. Cloud based UC solution, UC as a Service (UCaaS), is now itself a maturing technology in the marketplace and it has revolutionized the IT industry, being the powerful platform that many businesses are choosing to migrate their on-premises UC solution onto. UCaaS solution has the potential to reduce the capital and operational expenses associated with deploying UC on their own. In this paper, we will discuss and demonstrate an open source on-premises UC solution, viz. “Asterisk” for use by businesses, and report on some performance tests using SIPp. This paper also discusses and demonstrates an open source UCaaS solution. The contribution from this research is the provision of technical advice to businesses in deploying UC and UCaaS, which is manageable in terms of cost, ease of deployment and support