Research on open source e-learning tools and agricultural applications

Within the NODES European e-Learning project (Creation of a European network of multimedia resource centres for adult training) we have done research and developments based on open source tools. One of the aims was to select those open source components which are suitable for creating the network for using multimedia knowledge to improve competitiveness employability and mobility of different target groups, such as rural people and farmers. In creating the architecture of the NODES project there were more tasks which were coordinated and carried out by our expert group. The selection criteria of open source LMS was set up by the consortium. Our studies’ Survey on the existing systems consisted of the following parts: The basic elements of e-Learning Systems, The complements and integration of the e-Learning Systems, The specification of interface. The result of our research work was that we selected the Moodle LMS. The Moodle provides a reliable platform that supports social and collaborative learning. It is highly configurable and extensible. It implements new features and fixes rapidly, it is free of licensing costs. The members of the project (from France, Spain, Ireland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Romania) implemented the Moodle system creating the LMS. To integrate the different contents we had to develop the EU-index, which is the central, common and shared index database (a metadatabase). Another important function is the multimedia content management. One of these parts is the AutoView Presenter from the about 200 modules which allows putting video on-line with synchronised slides. The NODES system is used in graduate, postgraduate PhD, adult trainings programmes and it is a very successful system as an educational portal system for our faculty too

Realization of Semantic Atom Blog

Web blog is used as a collaborative platform to publish and share information. The information accumulated in the blog intrinsically contains the knowledge. The knowledge shared by the community of people has intangible value proposition. The blog is viewed as a multimedia information resource available on the Internet. In a blog, information in the form of text, image, audio and video builds up exponentially. The multimedia information contained in an Atom blog does not have the capability, which is required by the software processes so that Atom blog content can be accessed, processed and reused over the Internet. This shortcoming is addressed by exploring OWL knowledge modeling, semantic annotation and semantic categorization techniques in an Atom blog sphere. By adopting these techniques, futuristic Atom blogs can be created and deployed over the Internet

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Improving the Power Electronics Laboratory teaching/learning process: an interactive web tool

European Higher Education Area; Power Electronics Laboratory; educational methods Resumen: The forthcoming European Higher Education Area implies an important change in the teaching/learning process: it is necessary to get students more involved as well as to promote their independence and active participation. To achieve this objective, the new teaching methodologies aimed at more effective and appropriate learning for professional practice involve the use of audiovisual, computer and multimedia tools on the part of lecturers. Therefore, a web tool, based on a content management system, has been developed for the teaching in Power Electronics Laboratory. Moreover, the use of these multimedia tools makes possible to promote the students independence. Finally, the use of this web tool results in a very significant increase in the motivation students.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE