MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application

Sandooq: improving the communication cost and service latency for a multi-user erasure-coded geo-distributed cloud environment

Modern data centers have to accommodate the storage of an increasing amount of data with multiple users accessing that data from all over the world. Most of these data centers are geo-distributed to improve availability and protect against the loss of data in the case of outages and disasters. They are also increasingly using erasure codes to improve the reliability at a much lower storage cost. In addition to reliability, the clients and applications also demand storage solutions with better performance and cost-effectiveness. For a geo-distributed data center, a major part of the cost is associated with sending the data between the data centers. This paper builds on previous work to minimize the latency and cost in a data center and applies it to a multi-user geo-distributed environment. We develop a mathematical model for service latency and communication cost for a multi-user geo-distributed cloud environment. We also provide an algorithm to jointly optimize the service latency and communication cost by controlling the placement of the erasure-coded file chunks and scheduling the requests for these chunks. Through simulations, we show that our algorithm converges quickly and outperforms other heuristics in optimizing service latency and communication cost