Sports Gambling: Software Design

Sports gambling has been an attractive controversy for a long time. Fantasy sports, similar to most sports lotteries and gambling, allows customers to put bets of their choices of players and win certain rewards according to the real game data in each famous Sports League such as NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. Although Fantasy sports has always been at the forefront of legal issue discussions, it has become a popular activity of Americans. Even media are invading this grey industry to support data analysis and news for citizens’ pleasure. Despite the negative influence of sports gambling, there are several bright aspects of Fantasy Sports. It is a good activity between friends and families instead of letting vulnerable people such as kids be influenced by illegal sports gambling. In addition, in place of letting illegal sports gambling companies overseas, which will benefit the U.S. economy, to grab market share, it is better to create a legal and popular sports gambling application through PC or other mobile devices to draw public interests. This study attempts to design a Fantasy Sports application for those traditional prosperous gambling industries such as Casinos in Las Vegas or Casinos in Macau to support Fantasy Sports. A software development process and development tools are introduced in this paper and the prototype of the application are created as well in this proposal. Keywords: Sports Gambling, Fantasy Sports, Software Desig

Playing in the Fields of Desire: Hegemonic Masculinity in Live-Combat LARPs

Gender based research on Role Playing Games (RPG's) has long claimed that many males are attracted to RPG's due to the possibility of creating and performing hegemonic identities in-game. This paper presents a research study of males participating in Live-Action Role Play (LARPS), where we seek to better understand the institutional and social limits on identity generation in RPGs, the extent to which pre-existing masculine hierarchies follow gamers into the game context, and the meanings players make of their experiences in game

Managing software development information in global configuration management activities

Software Configuration Management (SCM) techniques have been considered the entry point to rigorous software engineering, where multiple organizations cooperate in a decentralized mode to save resources, ensure the quality of the diversity of software products, and manage corporate information to get a better return of investment. The incessant trend of Global Software Development (GSD) and the complexity of implementing a correct SCM solution grow not only because of the changing circumstances, but also because of the interactions and the forces related to GSD activities. This paper addresses the role SCM plays in the development of commercial products and systems, and introduces a SCM reference model to describe the relationships between the different technical, organizational, and product concerns any software development company should support in the global market

Autonomous Obstacle Collision Avoidance System for UAVs in rescue operations

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and its applications are growing for both civilian and military purposes. The operability of an UAV proved that some tasks and operations can be done easily and at a good cost-efficiency ratio. Nowadays, an UAV can perform autonomous tasks, by using waypoint mission navigation using a GPS sensor. These autonomous tasks are also called missions. It is very useful to certain UAV applications, such as meteorology, vigilance systems, agriculture, environment mapping and search and rescue operations. One of the biggest problems that an UAV faces is the possibility of collision with other objects in the flight area. This can cause damage to surrounding area structures, humans or the UAV itself. To avoid this, an algorithm was developed and implemented in order to prevent UAV collision with other objects. “Sense and Avoid” algorithm was developed as a system for UAVs to avoid objects in collision course. This algorithm uses a laser distance sensor called LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), to detect objects facing the UAV in mid-flights. This light sensor is connected to an on-board hardware, Pixhawk’s flight controller, which interfaces its communications with another hardware: Raspberry Pi. Communications between Ground Control Station or RC controller are made via Wi-Fi telemetry or Radio telemetry. “Sense and Avoid” algorithm has two different modes: “Brake” and “Avoid and Continue”. These modes operate in different controlling methods. “Brake” mode is used to prevent UAV collisions with objects when controlled by a human operator that is using a RC controller. “Avoid and Continue” mode works on UAV’s autonomous modes, avoiding collision with objects in sight and proceeding with the ongoing mission. In this dissertation, some tests were made in order to evaluate the “Sense and Avoid” algorithm’s overall performance. These tests were done in two different environments: A 3D simulated environment and a real outdoor environment. Both modes worked successfully on a simulated 3D environment, and “Brake” mode on a real outdoor, proving its concepts.Os veículos aéreos não tripulados (UAV) e as suas aplicações estão cada vez mais a ser utilizadas para fins civis e militares. A operacionalidade de um UAV provou que algumas tarefas e operações podem ser feitas facilmente e com uma boa relação de custo-benefício. Hoje em dia, um UAV pode executar tarefas autonomamente, usando navegação por waypoints e um sensor de GPS. Essas tarefas autónomas também são designadas de missões. As missões autónomas poderão ser usadas para diversos propósitos, tais como na meteorologia, sistemas de vigilância, agricultura, mapeamento de áreas e operações de busca e salvamento. Um dos maiores problemas que um UAV enfrenta é a possibilidade de colisão com outros objetos na área, podendo causar danos às estruturas envolventes, aos seres humanos ou ao próprio UAV. Para evitar tais ocorrências, foi desenvolvido e implementado um algoritmo para evitar a colisão de um UAV com outros objetos. O algoritmo "Sense and Avoid" foi desenvolvido como um sistema para UAVs de modo a evitar objetos em rota de colisão. Este algoritmo utiliza um sensor de distância a laser chamado LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), para detetar objetos que estão em frente do UAV. Este sensor é ligado a um hardware de bordo, a controladora de voo Pixhawk, que realiza as suas comunicações com outro hardware complementar: o Raspberry Pi. As comunicações entre a estação de controlo ou o operador de comando RC são feitas via telemetria Wi-Fi ou telemetria por rádio. O algoritmo "Sense and Avoid" tem dois modos diferentes: o modo "Brake" e modo "Avoid and Continue". Estes modos operam em diferentes métodos de controlo do UAV. O modo "Brake" é usado para evitar colisões com objetos quando controlado via controlador RC por um operador humano. O modo "Avoid and Continue" funciona nos modos de voo autónomos do UAV, evitando colisões com objetos à vista e prosseguindo com a missão em curso. Nesta dissertação, alguns testes foram realizados para avaliar o desempenho geral do algoritmo "Sense and Avoid". Estes testes foram realizados em dois ambientes diferentes: um ambiente de simulação em 3D e um ambiente ao ar livre. Ambos os modos obtiveram funcionaram com sucesso no ambiente de simulação 3D e o mode “Brake” no ambiente real, provando os seus conceitos

Recommender systems for players of online video games

The content in this project is the approach, exploration, analysis and use of recommender systems to integrate an implementation of one system that learns the players’ behavior and recommends them to other players, to show recommender systems as a way of enhancing the player experience

Designing for experience - a requirements framework for enrolment based and public facing e-government services

User-centricity is a pre-requisite for a truly transformational e-government strategy. This goes beyond visual design and appeal, and ties down to a rudimentary measure of how far people are willing to go to enrol for and use e-government services. Enrolment can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different enrolment processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen's perspective these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, producing hurdles that affect user acceptance and ultimately service adoption. When enrolling to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Despite existing work on the impact of security and identity processes on end users there has been little work on how these contributions could be operationalised and adopted by practitioners and policy makers as part of the requirements development process. Research in HCI provides techniques to help practitioners design systems that are within general human capabilities, however such techniques are too generic to approximate use-time behaviour across user groups and within different contexts of use. This thesis proposes Calibrated Personas, a user modelling technique that accumulates knowledge on user behaviour to model and fine-tune tolerance levels for workload and its impact on e-government service adoption (1) across user groups, (2) e-service types and (3) contexts of use. A user group calibration protocol was devised to facilitate data collection and model generation for user behaviour in enrolment-specific use cases. These models are in turn used to approximate user reactions towards design alternatives, reducing the gap between design-time knowledge (upon which decisions are made) and use-time knowledge. To facilitate this activity this work presents Sentire ('to listen'), a requirements and design framework that combines industry-strength practices with user feedback simulations (referred to as UX-analytics). These simulations in turn inform the requirements development process with actionable feedback as part of an iterative design process. This thesis considers tool support for Sentire as central to the investigation in order to facilitate adoption by practitioners and to encourage knowledge sharing and re-use within the e-government domain. For this reason, an online collaborative computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool was developed and evaluated throughout the various real-world interventions carried out for this thesis. Sentire was applied to two new national e-services and also in the evaluation of an existing one. User-studies and expert evaluation were instrumental to the evolution and validation of the main contributions and deliverables arising from this thesis

Enhancing choice? The role of technology in the career support market

This report explores the role that technology has played in the development of the career support market. This market is conceived broadly to include all possible resources that individuals might draw upon to support them in their career development. A key element is the role that is played by public-sector career services and by careers professionals; though these resources are supplemented by services paid for in a wide range of ways and delivered by a range of professionals and non-professionals.UKCE

Governing open source software through coordination processes

Governance provides the authoritative framework for coordinating activities in open source development. Prior studies of open source governance have largely focused on its changing nature over time. In this work, we argue that the nature of governance varies across open source communities, and, in its evolution, multiple traces of authority may co-exist. We propose that such multiplicity can be understood by close examination of the authoritative structures embedded in coordination processes. We collected eight years of data on the coordination related to version control of the Linux kernel. Drawing on in-depth qualitative analysis, we investigate how coordination processes with different authoritative structures come together in the governance of open source software. We trace four coordination processes (autocratic clearing, oligarchic recursion, federated self-governance, and meritocratic idea-testing), each grounded in different authoritative structures (autocracy, oligarchy, federation, meritocracy) with their own form of legitimation. We offer a two-fold contribution in this paper. First, we enhance the open source governance literature by advancing a new theoretical perspective in which governance is seen as a configuration of coordination processes. Configurations give complementary support and are a source of tension and renewal. Second, we articulate a view on the conceptual relationship between governance and coordination where these concepts are understood as a duality, both working together to give rise to efficient and dynamic organizing in open source