Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

The MaggLite Post-WIMP Toolkit: Draw It, Connect It and Run It

International audienceThis article presents MaggLite, a toolkit and sketch-based interface builder allowing fast and interactive design of post-WIMP user interfaces. MaggLite improves design of advanced UIs thanks to its novel mixed-graph architecture that dynamically combines scene-graphs with interaction- graphs. Scene-graphs provide mechanisms to describe and produce rich graphical effects, whereas interaction-graphs allow expressive and fine-grained description of advanced interaction techniques and behaviors such as multiple pointers management, toolglasses, bimanual interaction, gesture, and speech recognition. Both graphs can be built interactively by sketching the UI and specifying the interaction using a dataflow visual language. Communication between the two graphs is managed at runtime by components we call Interaction Access Points. While developers can extend the toolkit by refining built-in generic mechanisms, UI designers can quickly and interactively design, prototype and test advanced user interfaces by applying the MaggLite principle: "draw it, connect it and run it"

Software Tools and Analysis Methods for the Use of Electromagnetic Articulography Data in Speech Research

Recent work with Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) has shown it to be an excellent tool for characterizing speech kinematics. By tracking the position and orientation of sensors placed on the jaws, lips, teeth and tongue as they move in an electromagnetic field, information about movement and coordination of the articulators can be obtained with great time resolution. This technique has far-reaching applications for advancing fields related to speech articulation, including recognition, synthesis, motor learning, and clinical assessments. As more EMA data becomes widely available, a growing need exists for software that performs basic processing and analysis functions. The objective of this work is to create and demonstrate the use of new software tools that make full use of the information provided in EMA datasets, with a goal of maximizing the impact of EMA research. A new method for biteplate-correcting orientation data is presented, allowing orientation data to be used for articulatory analysis. Two examples of applications using orientation data are presented: a tool for jaw-angle measurement using a single EMA sensor, and a tongue interpolation tool based on three EMA sensors attached to the tongue. The results demonstrate that combined position and orientation data give a more complete picture of articulation than position data alone, and that orientation data should be incorporated in future work with EMA. A new standalone, GUI-based software tool is also presented for visualization of EMA data. It includes simultaneous real-time playback of kinematic and acoustic data, as well as basic analysis capabilities for both types of data. A comparison of the visualization tool to existing EMA software shows that it provides superior visualization and comparable analysis features to existing software. The tool will be included with the Marquette University EMA-MAE database to aid researchers working with this dataset

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Technology (Hons) (Information System)

Up until recently the whole area of video conferencing has proved to be an expensive and tricky technology to be working with. Most of the video conferencing technologies can be found in a large room video conferencing system with sophisticated and expensive conferencing equipments. And in other hand, teaching and learning process is still limited by physical boundaries. The main idea of this project is to improve communication and correlation among students, lecturers and tutors. The methodology chosen for the development of this project is Prototyping system development methodology. It consists of Requirement Analysis, Design Prototype, Evaluate Prototype and Project completion. In Requirement Analysis Phase, the requirements of the application and the functional specification are determined followed by Design Prototype Phase where all the critical part of this project is developed. These include the Graphical User Interface (GUI) development and the coding of this application. The third phase is Evaluate Prototype Phase where the testing phase took place. Each subcomponent is tested to make sure it met all requirements. Once all components of the application is tested and all requirements are satisfied, the last phase, that is Project Completion Phase are considered completed whereby final documentation are to be developed before the final presentation. As a conclusion, this project aims to improve current communication style. It consumes communication technology effectively whereby the processing power of desktop computers has almost reached a level to become comfortable with processing the multimedia data. In addition, advances in the bandwidth availability on the internet and on LAN's/ WAN's has given the networks the ability to handle the real time streaming media data