A Generic Alerting Service for Digital Libraries

Users of modern digital libraries (DLs) can keep themselves up-to-date by searching and browsing their favorite collections, or more conveniently by resorting to an alerting service. The alerting service notifies its clients about new or changed documents. Proprietary and mediating alerting services fail to fluidly integrate information from differing collections. This paper analyses the conceptual requirements of this much-sought after service for digital libraries. We demonstrate that the differing concepts of digital libraries and its underlying technical design has extensive influence (a) the expectations, needs and interests of users regarding an alerting service, and (b) on the technical possibilities of the implementation of the service. Our findings will show that the range of issues surrounding alerting services for digital libraries, their design and use is greater than one may anticipate. We also show that, conversely, the requirements for an alerting service have considerable impact on the concepts of DL design. Our findings should be of interest for librarians as well as system designers. We highlight and discuss the far-reaching implications for the design of, and interaction with, libraries. This paper discusses the lessons learned from building such a distributed alerting service. We present our prototype implementation as a proof-of-concept for an alerting service for open DL software

Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting.

Current awareness services are designed to keep users informed about recent developments based around user need profiles. In organisational settings, they may operate through both electronic and social interactions aimed at delivering information that is relevant, pertinent and current. Understanding these interactions can reveal the tensions in current awareness dissemination and help inform ways of making services more effective and efficient. We report an in-depth, observational study of electronic current awareness use within a large London law firm. The study found that selection, re-aggregation and forwarding of information by multiple actors gives rise to a complex sociotechnical distribution network. Knowledge management staff act as a layer of “intelligent filters” sensitive to complex, local information needs; their distribution decisions address multiple situational relevance factors in a situation fraught with information overload and restrictive time-pressures. Their decisions aim to optimise conflicting constraints of recall, precision and information quantity. Critical to this is the use of dynamic profile updates which propagate back through the network through formal and informal social interactions. This supports changes to situational relevance judgements and so allows the network to ‘self-tune’. These findings lead to design requirements, including that systems should support rapid assessment of information items against an individual’s interests; that it should be possible to organise information for different subsequent uses; and that there should be back-propagation from information consumers to providers, to tune the understanding of their information needs

Olfaction-enhanced multimedia: Perspectives and challenges

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagOlfaction—or smell—is one of the last challenges which multimedia and multimodal applications have to conquer. Enhancing such applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex—and richer—user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality and diversifying user interaction modalities. Nonetheless, olfaction-enhanced multimedia still remains a challenging research area. More recently, however, there have been initial signs of olfactory-enhanced applications in multimedia, with olfaction being used towards a variety of goals, including notification alerts, enhancing the sense of reality in immersive applications, and branding, to name but a few. However, as the goal of a multimedia application is to inform and/or entertain users, achieving quality olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications from the users’ perspective is vital to the success and continuity of these applications. Accordingly, in this paper we have focused on investigating the user perceived experience of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications, with the aim of discovering the quality evaluation factors that are important from a user’s perspective of these applications, and consequently ensure the continued advancement and success of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications

Library systems: the trends, the developments, the future

This article introduces some of the latest developments and trends taking place with respect to library systems, and makes some informed judgements on what the future holds

Specifying Single-user and Collaborative Profiles for Alerting Systems

The 21st century is the age of information overload. Often, humans are incapable of processing all of the information that surrounds them and determining its relevance. The impact of overlooking crucial information ranges from annoying to fatal. Alerting systems help users deal with this vast amount of information by employing a push-based rather than a pull-based approach to information delivery. In this way, users receive the information they require at the appropriate moment. Users specify their alerting needs in a profile that is subscribed to the alerting system. The alerting system is continuously fed with data, and filters this data against all subscribed profiles. Whenever incoming data matches a profile, the subscriber is alerted. Although alerting systems solve the problem of information overload, the potential of these systems has not been fully put into practice. Alerting systems are either realised as dedicated systems that, at best, offer a set of possible profiles to choose from or, at worst, offer a preset profile for one purpose only. Alternatively, they are application frameworks that offer no support for the average user; that is, the specification of profiles is realised using a programming interface. Collaboration between users when specifying profiles is not supported. This thesis verifies the described situation by considering the example application domain of health care. Within this context, a requirements analysis was undertaken involving a patient-based online survey and interviews with health care providers. This analysis revealed the utility of alerting systems but a need for support for profile specification by end-users. It also identified the need for such a system to support the collaborative nature of health care. The shortcomings of alerting systems identified for the health-care area also exist in other domains. Hence, a variety of application areas will benefit from providing universal solutions to eliminate these shortcomings. Based on these findings, this thesis proposes the graphical profile specification language GPDL and an interactive single-user software tool that supports its use (GPDL-UI). The thesis introduces a novel collaborative alerting model for Information Systems. A collaborative extension of GPDL is implemented in the software tool CoastEd, an editor for the graphical specification of collaborative profiles. The developed languages and software tools target average users who have no expertise in specifying profiles involving logics and temporal constraints. The efficacy of the proposed languages and software were evaluated through three user studies. The first study examined interpretation and specification with GPDL. Based on the results of this first study, the single-user system GPDL-UI was designed and implemented and then evaluated in a second study. In turn, the lessons learned from the implementation and user studies for the single-user system influenced the development of the collaborative approach CoastEd; this editor was evaluated in the third study. The studies have shown that GPDL and GPDL-UI are suitable means for average users to effectively specify profiles in single-user alerting systems. High levels of accuracy were reached for specification and interpretation in both studies. GPDL-UI turned out to be a usable and effective software tool. The collaborative approach and CoastEd succeed in conveying the idea of collaborative profile specification to average users. Most types of collaborative profiles were successfully specified by users. For the initiator of the collaborative profile specification process, two types of profiles call for further research. Overall, the approach, languages and software tools developed are shown to be effective and merit future research in that area

Water level monitoring and controlling of water treatment plants using wireless sensors in LabVIEW

Monitoring and controlling systems are taken as the main entity of any field which can ensure for the effective performance, hence its importance is rising exponentially in industry field. There can be many factors which can bring variations in those systems. This may cease the efficiency of the industry and destruction of industrial equipment. Therefore, monitoring, evaluation and controlling of the variables of any system is significantly important. The main objective of this research is to investigate the process of combining monitoring and controlling of the water level in the distribution tanks of water treatment plants by using wireless sensors network. The design and developed prototype of remote monitoring and controlling system of water levels in various tanks can be used in different parts of the water treatment plants. We have proposed, developed and tested hardware module based on two Arduino Mega2560 boards linked wirelessly by using two NRF transceivers. Remote Arduino is designed to monitor the water flow and the level of the distribution tank besides controlling the water level whenever is necessary. The real time sensors readings obtained are observed by specially designed LabVIEW application using graphical user interface running on a PC connected directly to the local Arduino. The application displays and analyses sensors reading on the front panel. Water level is controlled based on preset values entered by the user. The experimental result and percentage error curve endorse the reliability and feasibility of the proposed system to provide a solution for similar problems in industrial liquids treatment process applications

Sir epidemic and predator - prey models of fractional-order

Recently, many deterministic mathematical models such as ordinary differential equations have been extended to fractional models, which are transformed using fractional differential equations. It was believed that these fractional models are more realistic to represent the daily life phenomena. The main focus of this report is to extend the model of a predator-prey and the SIR epidemic models to fractional model. More specifically, the fractional predator-prey model which depend on the availability of a biotic resources was discussed. On the other hand, fractional SIR epidemic model with sub-optimal immunity, nonlinear incidence and saturated recovery rate was also discussed. The fractional ordinary differential equations were defined in the sense of the Caputo derivative. Stability analysis of the equilibrium points of the models for the fractional models were analyzed. Furthermore, the Hopf bifurcation analysis of each model was investigated . The result obtained showed that the model undergo Hopf bifurcation for some values. Throughout the project, the Adams-type predictor-corrector method to obtain the numerical solutions of the fractional models was applied. All computations were done by using mathematical software, Maple 18

Web Portal for Professional Financial Services

The financial services industry offers great opportunities both for the investors and for the companies providing services to the investors. Most of the existing Web sites offer similar services such as stock/index/options quotes, markets overview, most active issues, etc. On other side, there are various tools for technical analysis, charting, and stocks screening. The paper presents a newly developed Web portal for Professional Financial Services called MFinance that offers for the retail investors the services mentioned over. It provides a detailed explanation of the business cases and the essential functionalities of the portal and the way of their realization based on Java server-side technologies. Special attention is dedicated to the definition and evaluation of trading strategies and to stock screening based on these trading strategies

Ontology-driven monitoring of patient's vital signs enabling personalized medical detection and alert

A major challenge related to caring for patients with chronic conditions is the early detection of exacerbations of the disease. Medical personnel should be contacted immediately in order to intervene in time before an acute state is reached, ensuring patient safety. This paper proposes an approach to an ambient intelligence (AmI) framework supporting real-time remote monitoring of patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF). Its novelty is the integration of: (i) personalized monitoring of the patients health status and risk stage; (ii) intelligent alerting of the dedicated physician through the construction of medical workflows on-the-fly; and (iii) dynamic adaptation of the vital signs' monitoring environment on any available device or smart phone located in close proximity to the physician depending on new medical measurements, additional disease specifications or the failure of the infrastructure. The intelligence lies in the adoption of semantics providing for a personalized and automated emergency alerting that smoothly interacts with the physician, regardless of his location, ensuring timely intervention during an emergency. It is evaluated on a medical emergency scenario, where in the case of exceeded patient thresholds, medical personnel are localized and contacted, presenting ad hoc information on the patient's condition on the most suited device within the physician's reach