3,887 research outputs found

    TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2006

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    TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

    Designing for designers: Towards the development of accessible ICT products and services using the VERITAS framework

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    Among key design practices which contribute to the development of inclusive ICT products and services is user testing with people with disabilities. Traditionally, this involves partial or minimal user testing through the usage of standard heuristics, employing external assisting devices, and the direct feedback of impaired users. However, efficiency could be improved if designers could readily analyse the needs of their target audience. The VERITAS framework simulates and systematically analyses how users with various impairments interact with the use of ICT products and services. Findings show that the VERITAS framework is useful to designers, offering an intuitive approach to inclusive design.The work presented in this article forms part of VERITAS, which is funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme (FP7) (grant agreement # 247765 FP7-ICT-2009.7.2)

    Status Report of the MAMI Control System

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    Visual IT-infrastructure Management

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    IT-infrastruktuur hõlmab IT-süsteemi ressursse: füüsilised arvutid, virtuaalmasinad ja nende vahelised ühendused, samuti tarkvara, protsessorid, mälu, kettaruum ja võrguliidesed. IT-süsteemi haldamiseks on vajalik tarkvara, mis võimaldaks ressursside olekut jälgida ning läbi viia ressurssidega seotud tegevusi. Jälgida saab näiteks mälu kasutust, kettaruumi kasutust, protsessori koormust või süsteemi veateateid. Ressurssidega seotud tegevused on näiteks mälu või kettaruumi jaotamine, virtuaalmasina käivitamine või peatamine, virtuaalmasina üleviimine ühest asukohast teise jms. Samuti on oluline haldamise võimalus kaugarvutist üle võrgu. Tüüpiline stsenaarium on privaatpilv teadusasutustes, kus hulk arvuteid vajavad koostöö koordineerimist. Eeskätt keskendub töö eelkirjeldatud tarkvara graafilise kasutajaliidese (GUI) kavandamisele. Oluline on sealjuures tarkvara lihtsus, intuitiivsus ja efektiivsus. Süsteemiadministraatoritel on paljusid süsteemihalduse tegevusi harjumuspärasem teha käsurea kaudu. Seetõttu tuleb arvestada, et kõiki tegevusi ei pruugi olla mõtet GUI-sse sisse ehitada. Uuringutes on välja toodud, et GUI-d peetakse süsteemihalduse valdkonnas vähem usaldusväärseks ning vähem efektiivseks. Küll aga pakub GUI võimaluse IT-süsteemi paremaks visualiseerimiseks. Näiteks saab kasutatud kettaruumi kuvada mitte ainult andmeühikutes tekstina, vaid ka graafilise ribana selliselt, et suuremale andmemahule vastab suurem osa ribast. Nii on info paremini hoomatav. Üks töö osa on olemasolevate lahenduste uurimine. Virtuaalmasinate halduslahendusi pakuvad näiteks VMware, Citrix, Cloudkick, OpenNode jt. Üks juhendajatest, Ilja Livenson, on OpenNode’i arendaja. Lisaks funktsionaalsetele nõuetele võiksid lahendused vastata ka nõuetele, mis puudutavad turvalisust, skaleeritavust, tõrkekindlust ning standardite sobivust. Standardite puhul on oluline, et need oleks avatud ja laialt levinud. Samuti peaks lahendus olema kasutatav mobiiltelefonides, ka siis, kui tegemist on veebipõhise liidesega. Töö praktiline osa toimub OpenNode’i projektis. OpenNode on avatud lähtekoodiga tarkvara virtualiseeritud serverite haldamiseks. See koosneb kesksest haldusserverist (OpenNode Management Server) ning veebipõhisest halduskonsoolist (OpenNode Management Console). Halduskonsoolil on seni puudu olnud paindlik graafilise visualiseerimise võimalus. Töö raames luuakse komponent nimega VM-map (VM-kaart), mille eesmärk on muu hulgas kuvada füüsilisi masinaid koos nendes olevate virtuaalmasinatega, näidata masinate kohta vajadustele vastavat infot ning luua uusi võimalusi haldustegevuste läbiviimiseks. Näiteks on süsteemi graafilises vaates võimalik ühe hiireliigutusega tõsta virtuaalmasin ühest füüsilisest masinast teise.IT-infrastructure is comprised of the resources of an IT-system: physical and virtual machines (VMs), network connections, software, processors, memory, storage space and network interfaces. In order to manage IT-infrastructure, special software is needed to monitor and perform actions on these resources. Actions related to resources are, for example, allocating storage, starting and stopping VMs, migrating VMs, etc. It is also important to be able to do management tasks from one remote computer. A typical scenario is a private cloud dedicated to running simulations for scientific research where many computers in a network need to be managed. This thesis looks at how to create an intuitive and efficient graphical user interface (GUI) for this type of software. Some features that system administrators typically use from the command line may not be worth implementing in the GUI. Studies have shown that system administrators tend to consider the GUI as less reliable and less efficient, but still better for the visualization of infrastructure. For example, used disk space can be represented as a graphical bar instead of text for better comprehensibility. A part of the thesis analyses existing management software: VMware, Citrix, Cloudkick and OpenNode. One of the supervisors, Ilja Livenson, is a developer of OpenNode. In addition to functional requirements, the software should meet requirements for security, scalability, fault tolerance and standards compliance. The standards should preferably be open and commonly used. Also, the solutions should work on mobile devices. The practical part of the thesis is done for the open-source server virtualization project called OpenNode. OpenNode consists of a central management server and a frontend for it called OpenNode Management Console (ONC). The frontend has so far lacked a flexible infrastucture visualization component. As part of the thesis, a component called VM-map is implemented, which is used to view physical machines and the VMs within them, to see information about them and to perform actions such as VM resizing and migration

    Lost in Translation? compromises and assumptions in lighting programming syntaxes

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    This paper introduces the programming styles commonly found in performance lighting practice and discusses the impact that digital programming practice has on the creative visualisation and realisation of the lighting designers work. Facilitating creativity in digital programming practice, which demands a logical and numerical structure to its input language, is a challenge that has only relatively recently been taken up by manufacturers. In the profession lighting designers and programmers are often two separate people, each with a particular skill set. The designer will sit with the programmer and together they translate the creative intention into numbers and code that then seeks to render the design through lighting systems. This paper investigates the impact of this need for the translation of the creative idea into the language of lighting control, what is lost, what may be compromised. It seeks to suggest what may be gained by further development of creative and graphical user interfaces in lighting control. Through a discussion of philosophical notions such as Borgmann’s ‘technological device’ and Dasgupta’s assertions regarding the nature of the relationship between craft and engineering, the challenges facing lighting designers and programmers are presented and the mechanisms of performance lighting laid bare

    Akson, an Audio-Visual Environment for Networked Interaction and Performance

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    In this article, we present Akson, a web-based audio-visual (AV) environment for networked interaction and performance. It is demonstrated as an emerging artefact of an investigation in computer music and media art from collaborative interfaces exploring the cloud. Akson allows both the generation of content in a customized network and the structuring of agents connected in different interaction models. There are detailed experiments carried out during the development process, their existence taking advantage of the Internet and the way in which the software works technically is detailed extensively. As an interface that extends the artistic gesture, it is presented as a result of research in the context of Braga Media Arts, a creative city of UNESCO (UCCN)

    Design and evaluation of the FAMILIAR tool

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    2014 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims to efficiently produce multiple software products, on a large scale, that share a common set of core development features. Feature Modeling is a popular SPLE technique used to describe variability in a product family. FAMILIAR (FeAture Model scrIpt Language for manipulation and Automatic Reasoning) is a Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) for manipulating Feature Models (FMs). One of the strengths of the FAMILIAR language is that it provides rich semantics for FM composition operators (aggregate, merge, insert) as well as decomposition operators (slice). The main contribution of this thesis is to provide an integrated graphical modeling environment that significantly improves upon the initial FAMILIAR framework that was text-based and consisted of loosely coupled parts. As part of this thesis we designed and implemented a new FAMILIAR Tool that provides (1) a fast rendering framework for the graphically representing feature models, (2) a configuration editor and (3) persistence of feature models. Furthermore, we evaluated the usability of our new FAMILIAR Tool by performing a small experiment primarily focusing on assessing quality aspects of newly authored FMs as well as user effectiveness and efficiency

    APPLICATION FOR FUNCTIONALITY AND REGISTRATION IN THE CLOUD OF A MICROCONTROLLER DEVELOPMENT BOARD FOR IOT IN AWS

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    The use of the Amazon Web Services cloud enables new functionalities that are not possible with traditional solutions: low latency, local data processing and storage, and direct connectivity to other cloud services. Reimagining the way IoT connectivity services are presented by combining AWS cloud technology with mobile connectivity offers rapid prototyping to help connect devices natively over Wi-Fi. For this, the MQTT communication protocol is used to interact with the IoT device and exchange data, which allows controlling the basic functions of a sensor node. The installation is realized through a software development kit (SDK), which allows the creation of an application for Android devices. This solution gives the option to integrate together, improving the connectivity of the IoT system. The results enable board logging and network configuration, and can also be used to control the IoT device. The embedded firmware provides the required security functions
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