Utilizing a 3D game engine to develop a virtual design review system

A design review process is where information is exchanged between the designers and design reviewers to resolve any potential design related issues, and to ensure that the interests and goals of the owner are met. The effective execution of design review will minimize potential errors or conflicts, reduce the time for review, shorten the project life-cycle, allow for earlier occupancy, and ultimately translate into significant total project savings to the owner. However, the current methods of design review are still heavily relying on 2D paper-based format, sequential and lack central and integrated information base for efficient exchange and flow of information. There is thus a need for the use of a new medium that allow for 3D visualization of designs, collaboration among designers and design reviewers, and early and easy access to design review information. This paper documents the innovative utilization of a 3D game engine, the Torque Game Engine as the underlying tool and enabling technology for a design review system, the Virtual Design Review System for architectural designs. Two major elements are incorporated; 1) a 3D game engine as the driving tool for the development and implementation of design review processes, and 2) a virtual environment as the medium for design review, where visualization of design and design review information is based on sound principles of GUI design. The development of the VDRS involves two major phases; firstly, the creation of the assets and the assembly of the virtual environment, and secondly, the modification of existing functions or introducing new functionality through programming of the 3D game engine in order to support design review in a virtual environment. The features that are included in the VDRS are support for database, real-time collaboration across network, viewing and navigation modes, 3D object manipulation, parametric input, GUI, and organization for 3D objects

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

The Alaska experience

The management responsibilities of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources are summarized and the establishment of a geoprocessor system is described. Specific capabilities were defined based on surveys of potential users and pre-existing systems. The procurement process, the initially purchased equipment, and system upgrading are described. Cost, installation and maintenance, site location, training, and staffing of the system are examined

Enabling stream processing for people-centric IoT based on the fog computing paradigm

The world of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is gradually moving from vertical single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organizations and people - A world of Internet of Things (IoT). The dominant approach for delivering IoT applications relies on the development of cloud-based IoT platforms that collect all the data generated by the sensing elements and centrally process the information to create real business value. In this paper, we present a system that follows the Fog Computing paradigm where the sensor resources, as well as the intermediate layers between embedded devices and cloud computing datacenters, participate by providing computational, storage, and control. We discuss the design aspects of our system and present a pilot deployment for the evaluating the performance in a real-world environment. Our findings indicate that Fog Computing can address the ever-increasing amount of data that is inherent in an IoT world by effective communication among all elements of the architecture

BlogForever D5.1: Design and Specification of Case Studies

This document presents the specification and design of six case studies for testing the BlogForever platform implementation process. The report explains the data collection plan where users of the repository will provide usability feedback through questionnaires as well as details of scalability analysis through the creation of specific log files analytics. The case studies will investigate the sustainability of the platform, that it meets potential users’ needs and that is has an important long term impact

Term-Specific Eigenvector-Centrality in Multi-Relation Networks

Fuzzy matching and ranking are two information retrieval techniques widely used in web search. Their application to structured data, however, remains an open problem. This article investigates how eigenvector-centrality can be used for approximate matching in multi-relation graphs, that is, graphs where connections of many different types may exist. Based on an extension of the PageRank matrix, eigenvectors representing the distribution of a term after propagating term weights between related data items are computed. The result is an index which takes the document structure into account and can be used with standard document retrieval techniques. As the scheme takes the shape of an index transformation, all necessary calculations are performed during index tim

A Program for the Collection, Storage, and Analysis of Baseline Environmental Data for Cook Inlet, Alaska

The scope of this report is to provide a general, yet comprehensive, description of the Cook Inlet System which will serve as a basis for understanding the interrelated natural and man-made factors governing its future; to present a program of field research studies for the estuarine environment that will describe the existing state of the Inlet with respect to the water quality and biota; to provide a framework whereby the program of studies can be evaluated and redirected in light of the preliminary results; and, to provide a method of storing and analyzing the data from the investigations so that it can be made available to interested parties in the most efficient manner possible.This report was prepared by the Institute of Water Resources of the University of Alaska for the Alaska Water Laboratory, Federal Water Pollution Control Administration under Contract No. 14-12-449

D3.1 Validation of technical specifications of ECO modules

The objective of this document is to list the most important technical specifications of each MOOC platform that will be integrated in the overall ECO architecture. The objective of this particular task is to carry out analysis of all the technical specifications of each of the modules/platforms that are to be integrated in the global ECO platform. Once integration will be done, an Open Data exposure solution will be implemented by means of integrating an Open Data Catalog platform such as CKAN.ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP) - grant number 62112