Towards Self-evolving Context-aware Services

The introduction of new communication infrastructures such as Beyond 3rd Generation (B3G) and the widespread usage of small computing devices are rapidly changing the way we use and interact with technology to perform everyday tasks. Ubiquitous networking empowered by B3G networking makes it possible for mobile users to access networked software services across continuously changing heterogeneous infrastructures by resource-constrained devices. Heterogeneity and devices' limitedness, create serious problems for the development and dynamic deployment of mobile applications that are able to run properly on the execution context and consume services matching with the users' expectations. Furthermore, the everchanging B3G environment calls for applications that self-evolve according to context changes. Out of these problems, self-evolving adaptable applications are increasingly emerging in the software community. In this paper we describe how CHAMELEON, a declarative framework for tailoring adaptable applications, is being used for tackling adaptation and self-evolution within the IST PLASTIC project

Engagement Media - The Fusion of Journalism and Museum Experience Design

News organizations struggle to find the balance between audience and content, but there are large amounts of untapped research in a field that would not often be compared to journalism — museum exhibit design. Museums specifically study how to best engage an audience, to make them willing to leave their homes, buy tickets and return multiple times to see exhibits. What journalism can learn from museum engagement design may alter how newsrooms plan interaction and even their content. Western iMedia, a student news operation at Western Kentucky University, gathered and formatted content based on these lessons from museum design. The story, “Inside Confucius,” documents multiple aspects about the Confucius Institute and its branches around the world in large news panels designed for maximum engagement. In a mixture of technology, storytelling and engagement design, the project was turned into a museum exhibit to explore the lessons learned from research and interviews. The first part of this thesis is an article intended for the journalistic community. The second describes the process and findings for an academic audience

Engaging educators in the ideation of scenarios for cross-reality game-based learning experiences

Cross-reality media technology creates alternate reality experiences in which the physical and the virtual world are interconnected and influence each other through a network of sensors and actuators. Despite technological advances, the landscape of cross-reality technology as an enabler of alternate reality educational experiences has not been explored yet. The technical expertise required to set up and program such mixed environments is too high to engage the problem owners (i.e. educational experts) in the design process and, hence, user-driven innovation remains challenging. In this paper we explore the co-creation of cross-reality experiences for educational games. We created a no-programming toolkit that provides a visual language and interface abstractions to quickly build prototypes of cross-reality interactions. The toolkit supports experience prototyping and allows designers to coproduce, with educational experts, meaningful scenarios while they create, try out and reconfigure their prototypes. We report on a workshop with 36 educators where the toolkit was used to ideate cross-reality games for education. We discuss use cases of game-based learning applications developed by the participants that follow different pedagogical strategies and combine different physical and virtual spaces and times. We outline implications for the design of cross-reality interactions in educational settings that trigger further research and technological developments.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature (Funding for APC: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid - Read & Publish Agreement CRUE-CSIC 2022). This work is supported by the projects CROSS-COLAB (PGC2018–101884-B-I00) and Sense2makeSense (PID2019-109388GB-I00) funded by the Spanish State Research Agency

Towards smart style : combining RDF semantics with XML document transformations

The 'Document Web' has established itself through the creation of an impressive family of XML and related languages. In addition to this, the 'Semantic Web' is developing its own family of languages based primarily on RDF. Although these families were both developed specifically for 'the Web', each language family has been developed from different premises with specific goals in mind. The result is that combining both families in a single application is surprisingly difficult. This is unfortunate, since the combination of semantic processing with document processing provides advantages in both directions --- namely using semantic inferencing for more intelligent document processing and using document processing tools for presenting semantic representations to an end-user. In this paper, we investigate this integration problem, focusing on the role of (RDF) semantics in selecting, structuring and styling (XML) content. We analyze the approaches taken by two example architectures and use our analysis to derive a more integrated alternative

A software reference architecture for journalistic knowledge platforms

Newsrooms and journalists today rely on many different artificial-intelligence, big-data and knowledge-based systems to support efficient and high-quality journalism. However, making the different systems work together remains a challenge, calling for new unified journalistic knowledge platforms. A software reference architecture for journalistic knowledge platforms could help news organisations by capturing tried-and-tested best practices and providing a generic blueprint for how their IT infrastructure should evolve. To the best of our knowledge, no suitable architecture has been proposed in the literature. Therefore, this article proposes a software reference architecture for integrating artificial intelligence and knowledge bases to support journalists and newsrooms. The design of the proposed architecture is grounded on the research literature and on our experiences with developing a series of prototypes in collaboration with industry. Our aim is to make it easier for news organisations to evolve their existing independent systems for news production towards integrated knowledge platforms and to direct further research. Because journalists and newsrooms are early adopters of integrated knowledge platforms, our proposal can hopefully also inform architectures in other domains with similar needs.publishedVersio