Wireless Audio Interactive Knot

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-45).The Sound Transformer is a new type of musical instrument. It looks a little like a saxophone, but when you sing or "kazoo" into it, astonishing transforms and mutations come out. What actually happens is that the input sound is sent via 802.11 wireless link to a net server that transforms the sound and sends it back to the instrument's speaker. In other words, instead of a resonant acoustic body, or a local computer synthesizer, this architecture allows sound to be sourced or transformed by an infinite array of online services, and channeled through a gesturally expressive handheld. Emerging infrastructures (802.11, Bluetooth, 3G and 4G, etc) seem to aim at this new class of instrument. But can such an architecture really work? In particular, given the delays incurred by decoupling the sound transformation from the instrument over a wireless network, are interactive music applications feasible? My thesis is that they are. To prove this, I built a platform called WAI-KNOT (for Wireless Audio Interactive Knot) in order to examine the latency issues as well as other design elements, and test their viability and impact on real music making. The Sound Transformer is a WAI-KNOT application.Adam Douglas Smith.S.M

Role of Wireless technology in mobile augmented reality system (MARS)

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Generation of policy-rich websites from declarative models

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-93).Protecting sensitive data stored behind online websites is a major challenge, but existing techniques are inadequate. Automated website builders typically offer very limited options for specifying custom access policies. Manually adding access policy checks to website code is tedious and error-prone, and it is currently not. feasible to automatically verify that a website conforms to its required access policy. Furthermore, policies change over time, and it can be costly to modify an existing website to reflect the changes or to certify that the modified website still complies with the desired policy. This research presents a declarative modeling approach designed to address these issues, where the data model and the access policy are specified using Alloy, and tile Weballoy tool automatically generates a dynamic website that guarantees the access policy by construction.by Felix Sheng-Ho Chang.Ph.D

The sharing of wonderful ideas : influence and interaction in Online Communities of Creators

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 294-297).This thesis presents a new framework for understanding how communities of creators share work, influence one another's creative processes, and learn from one another. I introduce the concept of Online Communities of Creators (OCOCs), which are online communities where the core activity is sharing personal creations. These communities can play an important part in the development of the Creative Society by providing venues for people to encourage each other's creative processes and output. By fostering each other's desires to create and share, these communities help individuals to experience the joy of designing, creating, and sharing. Through these explorations, people develop skills important to their personal development and their ability to participate in the modern workplace. I analyze how ideas spread through OCOCs using the framework for diffusion of innovation developed by Everett Rogers. I map specific behaviors in OCOCs to Roger's five stages of adoption of innovation: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption. Within OCOCs each of these stages represent deepening understanding of other community members' work. Using a mixed-methods approach of ethnography and social network analysis, I study two specific OCOCs: the Computer Clubhouse Village and the Scratch online community. Both of these communities are designed to facilitate learning with computers. The Village enables members of network of socially-supported computer clubs to share their work, their concerns, and their selves. The Scratch site is a new web community for people sharing work created with the Scratch programming environment. The thesis focuses on four topics: forms of participation, network diffusion of ideas, individuals' adoption of ideas, and identifying influentials.(cont.) I report on how different social and project-related participation support the communities. I discuss how a particular technology I developed diffused through an OCOC. I analyze which community members' projects enter the "trial" stage of adoption. Finally I describe what creator and project factors predict influence in OCOCs. As I considered the various research topics this thesis addresses, I created technologies and developed some design guidelines for OCOCs. I introduce two of these technologies -the Village Profile Survey and the Village Visualizer- and describe the motivation, design, and impact of these tools. I also describe a design philosophy that motivates these and other projects I have worked on and outline both design principles and ethnical concerns for the development of OCOCs.Elisabeth Amy Sylvan.Ph.D

Services State of Play - Compliance Testing and Interoperability Checking

The document contains an inventory of existing solutions for compliance testing and interoperability checking of services, the assumption being that the services are web services. Even if the emphasis is on geographical information and therefore on Geographical Information Systems, the document describes applicable solutions outside the geographical Information System domain.JRC.H.6-Spatial data infrastructure

31th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems.The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstractionlevels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases arecontinuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas ofinformation modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

Statistical Parsing by Machine Learning from a Classical Arabic Treebank

Research into statistical parsing for English has enjoyed over a decade of successful results. However, adapting these models to other languages has met with difficulties. Previous comparative work has shown that Modern Arabic is one of the most difficult languages to parse due to rich morphology and free word order. Classical Arabic is the ancient form of Arabic, and is understudied in computational linguistics, relative to its worldwide reach as the language of the Quran. The thesis is based on seven publications that make significant contributions to knowledge relating to annotating and parsing Classical Arabic. Classical Arabic has been studied in depth by grammarians for over a thousand years using a traditional grammar known as i’rāb (إعغاة ). Using this grammar to develop a representation for parsing is challenging, as it describes syntax using a hybrid of phrase-structure and dependency relations. This work aims to advance the state-of-the-art for hybrid parsing by introducing a formal representation for annotation and a resource for machine learning. The main contributions are the first treebank for Classical Arabic and the first statistical dependency-based parser in any language for ellipsis, dropped pronouns and hybrid representations. A central argument of this thesis is that using a hybrid representation closely aligned to traditional grammar leads to improved parsing for Arabic. To test this hypothesis, two approaches are compared. As a reference, a pure dependency parser is adapted using graph transformations, resulting in an 87.47% F1-score. This is compared to an integrated parsing model with an F1-score of 89.03%, demonstrating that joint dependency-constituency parsing is better suited to Classical Arabic. The Quran was chosen for annotation as a large body of work exists providing detailed syntactic analysis. Volunteer crowdsourcing is used for annotation in combination with expert supervision. A practical result of the annotation effort is the corpus website: http://corpus.quran.com, an educational resource with over two million users per year