Using SIP Presence for Remote Service Awareness

Residential networks usually protect its devices and services behind firewalls and use private IP addresses. Therefore, appliances within a residential network cannot be discovered and utilized from external networks by standardized technologies as UPnP. In this paper, we present our concept of “Service Presence”, based on the 3GPP Presence Service that makes the service presence information remotely discoverable

The Importance of Environmental Interventions in Eliminating Trachoma Infection in Africa: The Case of Gashoho Health District, Burundi

Gashoho Health District, Burundi, has not achieved the World Health Organisation (WHO) target of elimination of the blinding infectious disease, trachoma, by 2020. The work in this thesis addresses this problem using three different approaches. Firstly, a cross-sectional study was undertaken to establish the current trachoma prevalence in Gashoho and whether poor sanitation was a risk factor for infection. 468 individuals from 117 households across four villages were clinically examined for signs of trachoma infection, and completed a questionnaire about environmental risk factors. The current prevalence of trachoma in Gashoho was 7.9% (95 % CI 5.0 - 10.6%). Children under 9 years old had an overall prevalence of 19.5% (95% CI 13.7-26.4%). Household access to a sanitary toilet almost halved the odds of trachoma infection (OR 0.437, 95 % CI 0.256 - 0.743). Then, mathematical models based on the SIS framework, but incorporating environmentally mediated transmission, were utilised to explore whether improved sanitation might eliminate trachoma in Gashoho. Stability analysis showed the existence of two basic reproductive numbers, R0H and R0E, governing human-to-human and environmentally mediated transmission. Persistence of trachoma was shown to depend on the sum of these quantities exceeding one. Numerical simulations suggested that the elimination of trachoma was possible in Gashoho, given environmental interventions that increased pathogen clearance from the environment. To complete the work in the thesis and allow rapid translation of the results into policy and practice, a new method of monitoring and evaluation of environmental interventions was proposed. Using computational and algebraic methods, Stratified Truncated Sequential Sampling was developed to link monitoring in individual villages to policy decisions at the Health District level. In conclusion, this thesis generates new knowledge and methods for improving trachoma control efforts in Gashoho Health District, Burundi

Global Monitoring for Security and Stability (GMOSS) - Integrated Scientific and Technological Research Supporting Security Aspects of the European Union

This report is a collection of scientific activities and achievements of members of the GMOSS Network of Excellence during the period March 2004 to November 2007. Exceeding the horizon of classical remote-sensing-focused projects, GMOSS is characterized by the integration of political and social aspects of security with the assessment of remote sensing capabilities and end-users support opportunities. The report layout reflects the work breakdown structure of GMOSS and is divided into four parts. Part I Concepts and Integration addresses the political background of European Security Policy and possibilities for Earth Observation technologies for a contribution. Besides it illustrates integration activities just as the GMOSS Gender Action Plan or a description of the GMOSS testcases. Part II of this book presents various Application activities conducted by the network partners. The contributions vary from pipeline sabotage analysis in Iraq to GIS studies about groundwater vulnerability in Gaza Strip, from Population Monitoring in Zimbabwe to Post-Conflict Urban Reconstruction Assessments and many more. Part III focuses on the research and development of image processing methods and Tools. The themes range from SAR interferometry for the measurement of Surface Displacement to Robust Satellite Techniques for monitoring natural hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes. Further subjects are the 3D detection of buildings in VHR imagery or texture analysis techniques on time series of satellite images with variable illumination and many other more. The report closes with Part IV. In the chapter ¿The Way Forward¿ a review on four years of integrated work is done. Challenges and achievements during this period are depicted. It ends with an outlook about a possible way forward for integrated European security research.JRC.G.2-Support to external securit

The social forest : landowners, development conflict and the state in Solomon Islands

This work develops an historically substantiated anthropological thesis about non-state local governance and its relations with the State in Solomon Islandsover time. Set in the context of the coup and subsequent crisis of the State in Solomon Islands, the thesis takes as an example Kolombangara, a forest resource rich Western Province island. The thesis argues that the consequences of successive local negotiations of world influences from early contact times through colonialism and on to the post Independence period are embedded in present-day social structures and political events at the local level. This process of local negotiation draws on cultural resources held within the local society but in so doing repositions actors in relation to those resources, creating social tensions that further drive politics at the local level. The form of these negotiations is specific to any one place in Solomon Islands. Nevertheless, the logic applied by actors in any one place is informative of processes more widespread across the country. For Kolombangara these processes begin with a reorganisation of frontier period (late C19) maritime exchange oriented 'house groups' into landoriented descent groups as a response to early colonialism. A process of social mobility follows this as the State is nationalised, resulting in stratification of local society (the 'Honiara elite'). This articulates with a fractionation of loca] society into groups competing for 'large scale' or 'small scale' forest resource development. The crosscutting social differentiation drives conflict between 'entrepreneurial landowners' and ' raditionalist smallholders' over forest resources and generates competing island-level political associations. Such island-level dynamics drive the Western Province 'statehood' agenda for control of resource management and revenue distribution. This development pathway competes at the national level against the interests of resource-poor provinces. The result has been one of the major political dynamics involved in the recent crisis of the State in Solomon Islands

Coordinated adaptation for adaptive context-aware applications

The ability to adapt to change is critical to both mobile and context-aware applications. This thesis argues that providing sufficient support for adaptive context-aware applications requires support for coordinated adaptation. Specifically, the main argument of this thesis is that coordinated adaptation requires applications to delegate adaptation control to an entity that can receive state information from multiple applications and trigger adaptation in multiple applications. Furthermore, coordination requires support for reconfiguration of the adaptive behaviour and user involvement. Failure to support coordinated adaptation is shown to lead to poor system and application performance and insufficient support for user requirements. An investigation of the existing state-of-the-art in the areas of adaptive and context- aware systems and an analysis of the limitations of existing systems leads to the establishment of a set of design requirements for the support of coordinated adaptation. Specifically, adaptation control should be decoupled from the mechanisms implementing the adaptive behaviour of the applications, applications should externalise both state information and the adaptive mechanisms they support and the adaptation control mechanism should allow modifications without the need for re-implementation of either the application or the support platform. This thesis presents the design of a platform derived from the aforementioned re- quirements. This platform utilises a policy based mechanism for controlling adaptation. Based on the particular requirements of adaptive context-aware applications a new pol- icy language is defined derived from Kowalsky’s Event Calculus logic programming formalism. This policy language allows the specification of policy rules where condi- tions are defined through the expression of temporal relationships between events and entities that represent duration (i.e. fluents). A prototype implementation of this design allowed the evaluation of the features offered by this platform. This evaluation reveals that the platform can support coordinated adaptation with acceptable performance cost.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Examination of existing facilities management approaches to climate change and future directions

It is widely accepted that human activities have contributed to changing the world’s climate and that the pace of this change is ever increasing. Two approaches are being promoted by the international community to address the issue of climate change (1) Mitigation, seeking to reduce the amount of CO2; (2) Adaptation, which seeks to alter the way humankind live and work in response to the changing climate. Whilst facilities managers and their organisations have prioritised mitigation action, there is less evidence to suggest that they are addressing the implications that a changing climate may have on the demands being placed on their organisation’s hard and soft facilities (adaptation). This paper reports findings from a case study and questionnaire survey to ascertain the present approach taken by facilities managers to address mitigation and adaptation, their respective drivers, their view on climate change and their environmental inclination. It concludes that the facilities manager's approach to climate change is derived by a combination of factors; namely a) Organisation approach to climate change b) Legislation and c) the facilities mangers perception of the risks posed by future climate change and of the use of risk assessment methods and climate change projection data. The study concludes that the prevailing measure for addressing climate change impacts is reactive in nature, taking the form of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning. The practical implication of the work is in the realization that mitigation, being quantifiable and legislative driven, is viewed as a strategic issue and of importance to an organisations Corporate Social Responsibility agenda which can be planned over the longer term (10-20 yrs). Adaptation on the other hand is measured through successful survival, increased resilience and adaptive capacity (absence of quantitative performance target), each of which are viewed as short term operational issues and as such adaptation struggles to find strategic importance. If organisations are to adapt to inevitable climate change then this situation needs to change

Supporting awareness in heterogeneous collaboration environments

Rapid technological advancements have made it possible for humans to collaborate as never before. However demands of group work necessitate distributed collaboration in very heterogeneous environments. Heterogeneity as in various applications, platforms, hardware and communication infrastructure. User mobility, lack of availability and cost often make imposing a common collaboration environment infeasible. Awareness is essential for successful collaboration. Awareness is a key design criterion in groupware but often collaboration occurs with applications not designed to support useful awareness. This dissertation deals with the issue of effective group awareness support in heterogeneous environments.;Awareness propagation is effective if the appropriate amount of information, relevant to the user\u27s sphere of activity is delivered in a timely, unobtrusive fashion. Thus issues such as information overload, and distraction have to be addressed. Furthermore ability to establish the appropriate balance between awareness and privacy is essential. Enhanced forms of awareness such as intersubjectivity and historical awareness are often invaluable. Heterogeneous environments significantly impact the above quality factors impeding effective awareness propagation. Users are unable to tailor the quality of awareness received.;Heterogeneity issues that affect awareness quality are identified. An awareness framework is proposed that binds various sources of awareness information. However for effective awareness support, physical integration must be augmented by information integration. As a solution, an awareness model is proposed. Specification of the awareness model and framework\u27s architecture and features is the key contribution. The proposed model has been validated through simulations of realistic collaboration involving human participation. Scenarios created, have tested the model\u27s usefulness in enhancing the quality of group work by propagating effective awareness among users. To accomplish the same, an Awareness Simulator application has been created. In the validation process, efforts made to create an experimental methodology revealed some techniques related to awareness evaluation in CSCW, which are proposed. Various issues required to successfully engineer such awareness frameworks are identified and their impact on requirements such as security and performance, discussed. With various standards and technologies that can be harnessed to create awareness frameworks, there is great promise that barriers in heterogeneous collaboration environments can be overcome