Networking and application interface technology for wireless sensor network surveillance and monitoring

Distributed unattended ground sensor (UGS) networks are commonly deployed to support wide area battlefield surveillance and monitoring missions. The information they generate has proven to be valuable in providing a necessary tactical information advantage for command and control, intelligence and reconnaissance field planning. Until recently, however, there has been greater emphasis within the defence research community for UGS networks to fulfil their mission objectives successfully, with minimal user interaction. For a distributed UGS scenario, this implies a network centric capability, where deployed UGS networks can self-manage their behaviour in response to dynamic environmental changes. In this thesis, we consider both the application interface and networking technologies required to achieve a network centric capability, within a distributed UGS surveillance setting. Three main areas of work are addressed towards achieving this. The first area of work focuses on a capability to support autonomous UGS network management for distributed surveillance operations. The network management aspect is framed in terms of how distributed sensors can collaborate to achieve their common mission objectives and at the same time, conserve their limited network resources. A situation awareness methodology is used, in order to enable sensors which have similar understanding towards a common objective to be utilised, for collaboration and to allow sensor resources to be managed as a direct relationship according to, the dynamics of a monitored threat. The second area of work focuses on the use of geographic routing to support distributed surveillance operations. Here we envisage the joint operation of unmanned air vehicles and UGS networks, working together to verify airborne threat observations. Aerial observations made in this way are typically restricted to a specific identified geographic area. Information queries sent to inquire about these observations can also be routed and restricted to using this geographic information. In this section, we present our bio-inspired geographic routing strategy, with an integrated topology control function to facilitate this. The third area of work focuses on channel aware packet forwarding. Distributed UGS networks typically operate in wireless environments, which can be unreliable for packet forwarding purposes. In this section, we develop a capability for UGS nodes to decide which packet forwarding links are reliable, in order to reduce packet transmission failures and improve overall distributed networking performance

Desafios pedagógicos, tecnológicos e informacionais da aprendizagem ubíqua: uma revisão integrativa

O desenvolvimento e a expansão das Tecnologias Digitais de Informação e Comunicação têm repercutido cada vez mais no cotidiano das pessoas. No contexto educacional, seu uso amplia as possibilidades de ensinar e de aprender. Contudo, cada possibilidade carrega consigo desafios pedagógicos, tecnológicos e informacionais, tornando necessário elucidá-los para que se possa buscar soluções para os mesmos. A aprendizagem ubíqua (u-learning) é uma modalidade de aprendizagem suportada pela computação ubíqua, e ainda pouco explorada no que concerne a compreensão da sua dinâmica no cotidiano dos docentes e, sobretudo, dos discentes. O principal objetivo da presente pesquisa é investigar os desafios pedagógicos, tecnológicos e informacionais para a promoção da aprendizagem ubíqua. Metodologicamente, optou-se por uma Revisão Integrativa de Literatura. Para tanto, foi utilizado Discovery Service da Universidade Aberta (UAb), com a intenção de coletar os artigos que fossem fruto de estudos experimentais ou quase-experimentais em u-learning, desenvolvidos em ambientes de educação formal, publicados em periódicos, no período de 2011-2020. Ao todo, após os filtros, 43 artigos compuseram essa Revisão. A principal contribuição dessa pesquisa concerne na concepção de um framework composto pelos desafios pedagógicos, tecnológicos e informacionais da aprendizagem ubíqua, um organismo vivo e potencialmente capaz de ser uma ferramenta de grande valia para a construção de experiências u-learning exitosas.The development and expansion of Digital Information and Communication Technologies have had an increasing impact on people's daily lives. In the educational context, its use expands the possibilities of teaching and learning. However, each possibility carries pedagogical, technological and informational challenges, making it necessary to elucidate them so that solutions can be sought. Ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is a learning modality supported by ubiquitous computing, and still little explored in terms of understanding its dynamics in the daily lives of teachers and, above all, students. The main objective of this research is to investigate the pedagogical, technological and informational challenges for an effective promotion of ubiquitous learning. Methodologically, an Integrative Literature Review was chosen. For that, the Discovery Service of Open University (UAb) was used, with the intention of collecting articles that were the result of experimental or semi-experimental studies in u-learning, developed in formal education environments, published in journals during the period of 2011-2020. In all, after the filters, 43 articles made up this Review. The main contribution of this research concerns the design of a framework composed of the pedagogical, technological and informational challenges of ubiquitous learning, a living organism and potentially capable of being a valuable tool for the construction of successful u-learning experiencesA investigação realizada no âmbito desta Tese está integrada nas linhas de investigação da Unidade de Investigação e Desenvolvimento - Laboratório de Educação a Distância e eLearning (UID 4372/FCT), da Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia do Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior

Trust and Reputation in Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent systems (MAS) are artificial societies populated with distributed autonomous agents that are intelligent and rational. These self-independent agents are capable of independent decision making towards their predefined goals. These goals might be common between agents or unique for an agent. Agents may cooperate with one another to facilitate their progresses. One of the fundamental challenges in such settings is that agents do not have a full knowledge over the environment and regarding their decision making processes, they might need to request other agents for a piece of information or service. The crucial issues are then how to rely on the information provided by other agents, how to consider the collected data, and how to select appropriate agents to ask for the required information. There are some proposals addressing how an agent can rely on other agents and how an agent can compute the overall opinion about a particular agent. In this context, the trust value reflects the extent to which agents can rely on other agents and the reputation value represents public opinion about a particular agent. Existing approaches for reliable information propagation fail to capture the dynamic relationships between agents and their influence on further decision making process. Therefore, these models fail to adapt agents to frequent environment changes. In general, a well-founded trust and reputation system that prevents malicious acts that are emerged by selfish agents is required for multi-agent systems. We propose a trust mechanism that measures and analyzes the reliability of agents cooperating with one another. This mechanism concentrates on the key attributes of the related agents and their relationships. We also measure and analyze the public reputation of agents in large-scale environments utilizing a sound reputation mechanism. In this mechanism, we aim at maintaining a public reputation assessment in which the public actions of agents are accurately under analysis. On top of the theoretical analysis, we experimentally validate our trust and reputation approaches through different simulations. Our preliminary results show that our approach outperforms current frameworks in providing accurate credibility measurements and maintaining accurate trust and reputation mechanisms

Multimedia computer networks quality of service techniques evaluation and development.

The growth in the transmission of time-sensitive applications over computer networks means that Quality of Service (QoS) needs to be managed in an efficient manner. Network QoS management in this thesis refers to evaluation and improvement of QoS provided by integrated wired and wireless computer networks. Evaluation of QoS aims to analyse and quantify network performance with respect of meeting multimedia applications' transmission requirements. QoS improvement involves the ability to take actions to change network performance toward improved operation. Therefore, the main aims of this thesis are: (i) to develop techniques for evaluation QoS in multimedia computer networks, (ii) to develop techniques that uses the information from (i) to manage and improve network performance. Multimedia traffic generates a large amount of data. Collecting this information poses a challenge as it needs to be sufficiently fast and accurate. A contribution of this thesis is that adaptive statistical sampling techniques to sample multimedia traffic were developed and their effectiveness was evaluated. Three different adjustment mechanisms were incorporated into statistical sampling techniques to adjust the traffic sampling rate: simple linear adjustment, quarter adjustment, and Fuzzy Inference System (FIS). The findings indicated that the developed methods outperformed the conventional non-adaptive sampling methods of systematic, stratified and random. The data collected included important QoS parameters, i.e. delay, jitter, throughput, and packet loss that indicated network performance in delivering real-time applications. An issue is that QoS needs evaluation in an informative manner. Therefore, the second contribution of this thesis is that statistical and Artificial Intelligent (AI) techniques were developed to evaluate QoS for multimedia applications. The application's QoS parameters were initially analysed either by Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm or by Kohonen neural network. The analysed QoS parameters were then used as inputs to a regression model or Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network in order to quantify the overall QoS. The proposed QoS evaluation system differentiated the network's QoS into a number of levels (Poor to Good QoS) and based on this information, the overall network's QoS was successfully quantified. In order to facilitate QoS assessment, a portable hand-held device for assessing the QoS in multimedia networks was designed, regression model was implemented on the microcontroller board and its performance was successfully demonstrated.Multimedia applications transmitted over computer networks require a large bandwidth that is a critical issue especially in wireless networks. The challenge is to enable end-to-end QoS by providing different treatments for different classes of traffic and efficient use of network resources. In this thesis, a new QoS enhancement scheme for wireless-wired networks is developed. This scheme consisted of an adaptive traffic allocation algorithm that is incorporated into the network's wireless side to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol, and a Weighted Round Robin (WRR) queuing scheduling mechanism that was incorporated into the wired side. The proposed scheme improved the QoS for Multimedia applications. The average QoS for voice, and video applications were increased from their original values by 72.5%, and 70.3% respectively

Service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments.

With the increasing use of web services in everyday tasks we are entering an era of Internet of Services (IoS). Service discovery and selection in both centralized and decentralized environments have become a critical issue in the area of web services, in particular when services having similar functionality but different Quality of Service (QoS). As a result, selecting a high quality service that best suits consumer requirements from a large list of functionally equivalent services is a challenging task. In response to increasing numbers of services in the discovery and selection process, there is a corresponding increase of service consumers and a consequent diversity in Quality of Service (QoS) available. Increases in both sides leads to a diversity in the demand and supply of services, which would result in the partial match of the requirements and offers. Furthermore, it is challenging for customers to select suitable services from a large number of services that satisfy consumer functional requirements. Therefore, web service recommendation becomes an attractive solution to provide recommended services to consumers which can satisfy their requirements.In this thesis, first a service ranking and selection algorithm is proposed by considering multiple QoS requirements and allowing partially matched services to be counted as a candidate for the selection process. With the initial list of available services the approach considers those services with a partial match of consumer requirements and ranks them based on the QoS parameters, this allows the consumer to select suitable service. In addition, providing weight value for QoS parameters might not be an easy and understandable task for consumers, as a result an automatic weight calculation method has been included for consumer requirements by utilizing distance correlation between QoS parameters. The second aspect of the work in the thesis is the process of QoS based web service recommendation. With an increasing number of web services having similar functionality, it is challenging for service consumers to find out suitable web services that meet their requirements. We propose a personalised service recommendation method using the LDA topic model, which extracts latent interests of consumers and latent topics of services in the form of probability distribution. In addition, the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy of prediction of QoS properties by considering the correlation between neighbouring services and return a list of recommended services that best satisfy consumer requirements. The third part of the thesis concerns providing service discovery and selection in a decentralized environment. Service discovery approaches are often supported by centralized repositories that could suffer from single point failure, performance bottleneck, and scalability issues in large scale systems. To address these issues, we propose a context-aware service discovery and selection approach in a decentralized peer-to-peer environment. In the approach homophily similarity was used for bootstrapping and distribution of nodes. The discovery process is based on the similarity of nodes and previous interaction and behaviour of the nodes, which will help the discovery process in a dynamic environment. Our approach is not only considering service discovery, but also the selection of suitable web service by taking into account the QoS properties of the web services. The major contribution of the thesis is providing a comprehensive QoS based service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments. With the proposed approach consumers will be able to select suitable service based on their requirements. Experimental results on real world service datasets showed that proposed approaches achieved better performance and efficiency in recommendation and selection process.N/

A framework for QoS driven user-side cloud service management

This thesis presents a comprehensive framework that assists the cloud service user in making cloud service management decisions, such as service selection and migration. The proposed framework utilizes the QoS history of the available services for QoS forecasting and multi-criteria decision making. It then integrates all the inherent necessary processes, such as QoS monitoring, forecasting, service comparison and ranking to recommend the best and optimal decision to the user

Entwerfen Entwickeln Erleben 2016 - Beiträge zum Industrial Design: Dresden, 31. Juni – 1. Juli 2016

Die Konferenz »Entwerfen – Entwickeln – Erleben« bietet ein besonderes Podium zum Austausch von Wissenschaft und Praxis entlang des Produktentwicklungsprozess mit einem Schwerpunkt Industrial Design. Der vorliegende Band enthält Beiträge der Sessions zum Industrial Design sowie ausgewählte Posterveröffentlichungen der Konferenz 2016. Darin werden Themen und Ansätze von der Anwenderintegration, neuen Prototypen, Service Design, User Experience und der Gestaltung von Emotion über Design in der Digitalen Revolution und für eine nachhaltige Zukunft, Design in mobilen und für Sicherheitsanwendungen bis hin zu Designmanagement, Feasibilitydesign und Reengineering vorgestellt und diskutiert. Die Technische Universität Dresden und technischesdesign.org ermöglichten in Kooperation mit der Gruppe Virtuelle Produktentwicklung der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Produktentwicklung (WiGeP) und dem Rat für Formgebung die fachübergreifende Diskussion des Schwerpunkt-Themas inmitten der interdisziplinären Dresdner Wissenschaftslandschaft. Ein zweiter Band »Entwerfen Entwickeln Erleben 2016« (ISBN 978-3-95908-062-0, herausgegeben von Ralph Stelzer) fasst die Beiträge zur Konstruktionstechnik und zur Virtuellen Produktentwicklung zusammen.:Hybride Prototypen im Design Sebastian Lorenz · Maria Klemm · Jens Krzywinski 11 Anwenderintegration in strategische Designprozesse von Industriegütern Frank Thomas Gärtner 23 Die Relevanz semiotischer Dimensionen als „System der möglichen Fehler“ für die Usability Klaus Schwarzfischer 37 Service Design = Kognitives Design – Über die Gestaltung von Berührungspunkten und Perzeption in analogen und digitalen Benutzungskontexten Oliver Gerstheimer 51 Design und User Experience in der Flugsicherung – Assistenzsystem zur Fernüberwachung im Multi-Airport-Betrieb Rodney Leitner · Astrid Oehme 63 Die Gestaltung in Zeiten der Digitalen Revolution Gerhard Glatzel 79 Designing a Sustainable Future with Mental Models Anke Bernotat · Jürgen Bertling · Christiane English · Judith Schanz 91 Design in globalen Industrien – Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen von Dräger Herbert Glass · Matthias Willner 105 Untersuchung von emotionalen Wirkungsmechanismen im Produktdesign Mareike Roth · Oliver Saiz 115 Strak als Schnittstelle zwischen Design und Konstruktion – Ergebnisse einer Prozessberatung bei Miele Norbert Hentsch · Matthias Knoke 127 Feasibility Design – „Designqualität in Serie bringen“ Knut Lender 139 Experimenteller Ansatz zu Effekten subjektiven Erlebens in VR-basierter Risikobeurteilung Patrick Puschmann · Tina Horlitz · Volker Wittstock · Astrid Schütz 153 Simulation komplexer Arbeitsabläufe im Bereich der digitalen Fabrik Thomas Kronfeld · Guido Brunnett 169 Vom Wert der designerischen Perspektive des Erlebens beim Re-Engineering von Produkten: ein Best-Practice-Project Philip Zerweck 183 Vorgehensweisen zum Einsatz universitärer Produktentwicklung als Innovationstreiber Bernd Neutschel · Martin Wiesner · Michael Schabacker · Sandor Vajna 197 Considering emotional impressions in product design: Taking on the challenges ahead Susan Gretchen Kett · Sandro Wartzack 215 Methode zur Verbesserung der Usability durch gezielte Förderung mentaler Modelle Marcus Jenke · Karoline Binder · Thomas Maier 23

The dismantling of the rule of law in the United States: systematisation of executive impunity, dispensation from non-derogable norms, and perpetualisation of a permanent state of emergency

Scholars of human rights and constitutional law have described in great detail the abuses perpetrated by the armed forces and secret services of the United States in the context of the ‘war on terror’. There is copious literature explaining why these violations of fundamental human rights are not justifiable, and why they are not consistent with international treaties or that nation’s constitution. This thesis builds upon this research, but strikes out in a new direction. It does so by asking whether these abuses, combined with the changes to the legal order of the United States that made them possible, have produced a qualitative transformation of its constitutional structure. In particular, this thesis tracks the empowering of the executive. Increasingly, whenever it purports to act in the interests of national security, the executive claims the authority to act unilaterally in a manner that overrides even non-derogable rights. These novel constitutional reserve powers, which this thesis demonstrates were derived from President Nixon’s theory of the executive, were used to justify indefinite arbitrary detention, torture, mass surveillance without warrants, and extra-judicial execution. This thesis seeks to determine if the constitutional crisis inaugurated by this theory of executive supremacy over the laws has been terminated, or whether it has continued into the Obama Administration. If this theory is current within the executive branch, and especially if the violations of jus cogens norms has continued, it signifies a cross-party consensus about a paradigm shift in American constitutionalism. Accordingly, given the fact that the abuse of executive supremacy is what led to the development of the rule of law, this thesis will ask the question of whether the United States is being governed in accordance with its basic minimum norms. This thesis explores whether the executive is still subject to checks and balances from the legislature and the judiciary, such that it cannot violate non-derogable rights at will and with impunity. If the contrary proposition is true, it demonstrates that the crisis of the rule of law in the United States is ongoing, and this permanent state of exception demands significantly more scholarly attention.Public, Constitutional, and International LawLL