1,260 research outputs found

    Interactive Polymedia Pixel and Protocol for Collaborative creative content generation on urban digital media displays

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    This research is an investigation into a creative and technical 'pixel' element that may facilitate Urban Digital Media, a field that inhabits the intersection between architecture, information and culture in the arena of technology and building. It asks how contemporary requirements of public space in our everyday life, such as adaptability, new modes of communication and transformative environments that offer flexibility for future needs and uses, can be addressed by a new form of public display, assembled through the use of an advanced pixel, described as an interactive Polymedia Pixel with situated media device protocol. The weakness of many current media facades for building-scale interactive installation environments lies in the dearth of quality creative content and unresponsiveness in terms of potential human factors, richness of locative situation and contextual interaction (Sauer, 2004). Media facades have evolved from simple 2D visual displays to 3D voxel arrays for depicting static and moving images with a spatial depth dimension (Haeusler, 2009). As a subsequent step in this development, the research investigates a display that reacts to the need for empathetic and responsive urban digital media; integrates multiple modalities; smart energy-saving; and collaborative community engagement. The Polymedia Pixel, which is presented in its research and development in this paper, contributes to the evolution of building-scale interactive installation environments. The paper firstly discusses the attributes of the Polymedia Pixel in order to address the above mentioned weaknesses of public displays. In responding to these necessities, the prototype of the developed Polymedia Pixel with its technology is outlined. The Polymedia Pixel reserach aims to addres

    From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

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    This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

    Durham Zoo: powering a search-&-innovation engine with collective intelligence

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    Purpose – Durham Zoo (hereinafter – DZ) is a project to design and operate a concept search engine for science and technology. In DZ, a concept includes a solution to a problem in a particular context. Design – Concept searching is rendered complex by the fuzzy nature of a concept, the many possible implementations of the same concept, and the many more ways that the many implementations can be expressed in natural language. An additional complexity is the diversity of languages and formats, in which the concepts can be disclosed. Humans understand language, inference, implication and abstraction and, hence, concepts much better than computers, that in turn are much better at storing and processing vast amounts of data. We are 7 billion on the planet and we have the Internet as the backbone for Collective Intelligence. So, our concept search engine uses humans to store concepts via a shorthand that can be stored, processed and searched by computers: so, humans IN and computers OUT. The shorthand is classification: metadata in a structure that can define the content of a disclosure. The classification is designed to be powerful in terms of defining and searching concepts, whilst suited to a crowdsourcing effort. It is simple and intuitive to use. Most importantly, it is adapted to restrict ambiguity, which is the poison of classification, without imposing a restrictive centralised management. In the classification scheme, each entity is shown together in a graphical representation with related entities. The entities are arranged on a sliding scale of similarity. This sliding scale is effectively fuzzy classification. Findings – The authors of the paper have been developing a first classification scheme for the technology of traffic cones, this in preparation for a trial of a working system. The process has enabled the authors to further explore the practicalities of concept classification. The CmapTools knowledge modelling kit to develop the graphical representations has been used. Practical implications – Concept searching is seen as having two categories: prior art searching, which is searching for what already exists, and solution searching: a search for a novel solution to an existing problem. Prior art searching is not as efficient a process, as all encompassing in scope, or as accurate in result, as it could and probably should be. The prior art includes library collections, journals, conference proceedings and everything else that has been written, drawn, spoken or made public in any way. Much technical information is only published in patents. There is a good reason to improve prior art searching: research, industry, and indeed humanity faces the spectre of patent thickets: an impenetrable legal space that effectively hinders innovation rather than promotes it. Improved prior-art searching would help with the gardening and result in fewer and higher-quality patents. Poor-quality patents can reward patenting activity per se, which is not what the system was designed for. Improved prior-art searching could also result in less duplication in research, and/or lead to improved collaboration. As regards solution search, the authors of the paper believe that much better use could be made of the existing literature to find solutions from non-obvious areas of science and technology. The so-called cross industry innovation could be joined by biomimetics, the inspiration of solutions from nature. Crowdsourcing the concept shorthand could produce a system ‘by the people, for the people’, to quote Abraham Lincoln out of context. A Citizen Science and Technology initiative that developed a working search engine could generate revenue for academia. Any monies accruing could be invested in research for the common good, such as the development of climate change mitigation technologies, or the discovery of new antibiotics
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