Social retrieval of music content in multi-user performance

An emerging trend in interactive music performance consists of the audience directly participating in the performance by means of mobile devices. This is a step forward with respect to concepts like active listening and collaborative music making: non-expert members of an audience are enabled to directly participate in a creative activity such as the performance. This requires the availability of technologies for capturing and analysing in real-time the natural behaviour of the users/performers, with particular reference to non- verbal expressive and social behaviour. This paper presents a prototype of a non-verbal expressive and social search engine and active listening system, enabling two teams of non-expert users to act as performers. The performance consists of real-time sonic manipulation and mixing of music pieces selected according to features characterising performers\u2019 movements captured by mobile devices. The system is described with specific reference to the SIEMPRE Podium Performance, a non-verbal socio-mobile music performance presented at the Art & ICT Exhibition that took place in Vilnius (LI) in November 2013

Using Distributed Techology to Make Music in the Time of the Attention Economy

Sounds Aware is a mobile web app that allows users to record soundwalks and share them so that other people can experience them. The creator of the soundwalk records their perceptions of the restorativeness of a specific place on the walk, these answers are then sonified for whoever experiences the walk later to hear. Sounds Aware aims to be a social app that is restorative to our attention. It does this by encouraging experience of nature and by using decentralized technology that exists outside of the attention economy. The attention economy is discussed as a force that exists within much of our current technology. The economic incentives setup by the attention economy are having negative effects on our attention. Attention Restoration Theory is discussed as a possible solution to this problem that finds that nature is restorative to our attention. Sounds Aware is an app that addresses both the nature based solution and the technical solution to the problem of the attention economy

An ant-inspired, deniable routing approach in ad hoc question & answer networks

The ubiquity of the Internet facilitates electronic question and answering (Q&A) between real people with ease via community portals and social networking websites. It is a useful service which allows users to appeal to a broad range of answerers. In most cases however, Q&A services produce answers by presenting questions to the general public or associated digital community with little regard for the amount of time users spend examining and answering them. Ultimately, a question may receive large amounts of attention but still not be answered adequately. Several existing pieces of research investigate the reasons why questions do not receive answers on Q&A services and suggest that it may be associated with users being afraid of expressing themselves. Q&A works well for solving information needs, however, it rarely takes into account the privacy requirements of the users who form the service. This thesis was motivated by the need for a more targeted approach towards Q&A by distributing the service across ad hoc networks. The main contribution of this thesis is a novel routing technique and networking environment (distributed Q&A) which balances answer quality and user attention while protecting privacy through plausible deniability. Routing approaches are evaluated experimentally by statistics gained from peer-to-peer network simulations, composed of Q&A users modelled via features extracted from the analysis of a large Yahoo! Answers dataset. Suggestions for future directions to this work are presented from the knowledge gained from our results and conclusion

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Creation of value with open source software in the telecommunications field

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Mass participation user trials

This thesis investigates how researchers can take advantage of the rapid adoption of mobile technology that has brought with it transformations in social and cultural practice; the expectations of what computers are, what they can do, and the role of digital objects in everyday life. In particular this thesis presents and discuses the use of new App Store style software distribution methods to reduce the cost, in terms of researcher time and hardware, of recruiting a large group of participants for a trial ‘in the wild’ while increasing the potential diversity of users is becoming an attractive option for researchers pursuing the ubicomp vision. It examines the procedures for running large scale trials with the deployment of three applications released to a combined user base of over 135,000 in such a way as to keep the qualitative detail necessary to inform design while gain- ing the diversity of users for claims of generalisability. More generally, it discusses the results that can be expected from this ‘mass participation’ approach, and the ethical responsibilities they place upon researchers. The contributions of this thesis for mobile HCI show that in large-scale trials, relatively rich qualitative data can be collected along with substantial quantitative data, and that a hybrid trial methodology combining a large- scale deployment with a local trial can be a powerful tool in addressing shortcomings of trials that are either solely local or solely global. This thesis also contributes guidelines for researchers running large-scale user trials that give consideration to the established research norms and practices, in an attempt to strike a new balance between invasiveness and utility

Use case scenarios and preliminary reference model

This document provides the starting point for the development of dependability solutions in the HIDENETS project with the following contents: (1) A conceptual framework is defined that contains the relevant terminology, threats and general requirements. This framework is a HIDENETS relevant subset of existing state-of-the-art views in the scientific dependability community. Furthermore, the dependability framework contains a first list of relevant functionalities in the communication and middleware level, which will act as input for the architectural discussions in HIDENETS work packages (WPs) 2 and 3. (2) A set of 17 applications with HIDENETS relevance is identified and their corresponding dependability requirements are derived. These applications belong mostly to the class of car-tocar and car-to-infrastructure services and have been selected due to their different types of dependability needs. (3) The applications have been grouped in six HIDENETS use cases, each consisting of a set of applications. The use cases will be the basis for the development of the dependability solutions in all other WPs. Together with a description of each use-case, application-specific architectural aspects are identified and corresponding failure modes and challenges are listed. (4) The business impact of dependability solutions for these use cases is analysed. (5) A preliminary definition of a HIDENETS reference model is provided, which contains highlevel architectural assumptions. This HIDENETS reference model will be further developed in the course of the HIDENETS projects in close cooperation with the other WPs, which is the reason why the preliminary version also contains a collection of potential contributions from other WPs that shall be developed and investigated in the course of the HIDENETS project. In summary, the identified use-cases and their requirements clearly show the large number of dependability related challenges. First steps towards technical solutions have been made in this report in the preliminary reference model, whereas the other work-packages have started in the meanwhile to develop such solutions further based on 'middleware technology' (WP2), 'communication protocols' (WP3), 'quantitative analysis methodology' (WP4), and 'design and testing methodology' (WP5