Computer Science's Digest Volume 2

This series of textbooks was created for the students of the Systems Engineering Program at the University of Nariño. They have been intentionally written in English to promote reading in a foreign language. The textbooks are a collection of reflections and workshops on specific situations in the field of computer science, based on the authors’ experiences. The main purpose of these textbooks is essentially academic. The way in which the reflections and workshops were constructed follows a didactic structure, to facilitate teaching and learning, making use of English as a second language. This book covers Internet and Multimedia Technology, System Analysis and Design, and Software Engineerin

Speedes: A Case Study Of Space Operations

This thesis describes the application of parallel simulation techniques to represent the structured functional parallelism present within the Space Shuttle Operations Flow using the Synchronous Parallel Environment for Emulation and Discrete-Event Simulation (SPEEDES), an object-oriented multi-computing architecture. SPEEDES is a unified parallel simulation environment, which allocates events over multiple processors to get simulation speed up. Its optimistic processing capability minimizes simulation lag time behind wall clock time, or multiples of real-time. SPEEDES accommodates an increase in process complexity with additional parallel computing nodes to allow sharing of processing loads. This thesis focuses on the process of translating a model of Space Shuttle Operations from a procedural oriented and single processor approach to one represented in a process-driven, object-oriented, and distributed processor approach. The processes are depicted by several classes created to represent the operations at the space center. The reference model used is the existing Space Shuttle Model created in ARENA by NASA and UCF in the year 2001. A systematic approach was used for this translation. A reduced version of the ARENA model was created, and then used as the SPEEDES prototype using C++. The prototype was systematically augmented to reflect the entire Space Shuttle Operations Flow. It was then verified, validated, and implemented

Study on quality in 3D digitisation of tangible cultural heritage: mapping parameters, formats, standards, benchmarks, methodologies and guidelines: final study report.

This study was commissioned by the Commission to help advance 3D digitisation across Europe and thereby to support the objectives of the Recommendation on a common European data space for cultural heritage (C(2021) 7953 final), adopted on 10 November 2021. The Recommendation encourages Member States to set up digital strategies for cultural heritage, which sets clear digitisation and digital preservation goals aiming at higher quality through the use of advanced technologies, notably 3D. The aim of the study is to map the parameters, formats, standards, benchmarks, methodologies and guidelines relating to 3D digitisation of tangible cultural heritage. The overall objective is to further the quality of 3D digitisation projects by enabling cultural heritage professionals, institutions, content-developers, stakeholders and academics to define and produce high-quality digitisation standards for tangible cultural heritage. This unique study identifies key parameters of the digitisation process, estimates the relative complexity and how it is linked to technology, its impact on quality and its various factors. It also identifies standards and formats used for 3D digitisation, including data types, data formats and metadata schemas for 3D structures. Finally, the study forecasts the potential impacts of future technological advances on 3D digitisation

Visual Techniques for Geological Fieldwork Using Mobile Devices

Visual techniques in general and 3D visualisation in particular have seen considerable adoption within the last 30 years in the geosciences and geology. Techniques such as volume visualisation, for analysing subsurface processes, and photo-coloured LiDAR point-based rendering, to digitally explore rock exposures at the earth’s surface, were applied within geology as one of the first adopting branches of science. A large amount of digital, geological surface- and volume data is nowadays available to desktop-based workflows for geological applications such as hydrocarbon reservoir exploration, groundwater modelling, CO2 sequestration and, in the future, geothermal energy planning. On the other hand, the analysis and data collection during fieldwork has yet to embrace this ”digital revolution”: sedimentary logs, geological maps and stratigraphic sketches are still captured in each geologist’s individual fieldbook, and physical rocks samples are still transported to the lab for subsequent analysis. Is this still necessary, or are there extended digital means of data collection and exploration in the field ? Are modern digital interpretation techniques accurate and intuitive enough to relevantly support fieldwork in geology and other geoscience disciplines ? This dissertation aims to address these questions and, by doing so, close the technological gap between geological fieldwork and office workflows in geology. The emergence of mobile devices and their vast array of physical sensors, combined with touch-based user interfaces, high-resolution screens and digital cameras provide a possible digital platform that can be used by field geologists. Their ubiquitous availability increases the chances to adopt digital workflows in the field without additional, expensive equipment. The use of 3D data on mobile devices in the field is furthered by the availability of 3D digital outcrop models and the increasing ease of their acquisition. This dissertation assesses the prospects of adopting 3D visual techniques and mobile devices within field geology. The research of this dissertation uses previously acquired and processed digital outcrop models in the form of textured surfaces from optical remote sensing and photogrammetry. The scientific papers in this thesis present visual techniques and algorithms to map outcrop photographs in the field directly onto the surface models. Automatic mapping allows the projection of photo interpretations of stratigraphy and sedimentary facies on the 3D textured surface while providing the domain expert with simple-touse, intuitive tools for the photo interpretation itself. The developed visual approach, combining insight from all across the computer sciences dealing with visual information, merits into the mobile device Geological Registration and Interpretation Toolset (GRIT) app, which is assessed on an outcrop analogue study of the Saltwick Formation exposed at Whitby, North Yorkshire, UK. Although being applicable to a diversity of study scenarios within petroleum geology and the geosciences, the particular target application of the visual techniques is to easily provide field-based outcrop interpretations for subsequent construction of training images for multiple point statistics reservoir modelling, as envisaged within the VOM2MPS project. Despite the success and applicability of the visual approach, numerous drawbacks and probable future extensions are discussed in the thesis based on the conducted studies. Apart from elaborating on more obvious limitations originating from the use of mobile devices and their limited computing capabilities and sensor accuracies, a major contribution of this thesis is the careful analysis of conceptual drawbacks of established procedures in modelling, representing, constructing and disseminating the available surface geometry. A more mathematically-accurate geometric description of the underlying algebraic surfaces yields improvements and future applications unaddressed within the literature of geology and the computational geosciences to this date. Also, future extensions to the visual techniques proposed in this thesis allow for expanded analysis, 3D exploration and improved geological subsurface modelling in general.publishedVersio

Scalable exploration of highly detailed and annotated 3D models

With the widespread availability of mobile graphics terminals andWebGL-enabled browsers, 3D graphics over the Internet is thriving. Thanks to recent advances in 3D acquisition and modeling systems, high-quality 3D models are becoming increasingly common, and are now potentially available for ubiquitous exploration. In current 3D repositories, such as Blend Swap, 3D Café or Archive3D, 3D models available for download are mostly presented through a few user-selected static images. Online exploration is limited to simple orbiting and/or low-fidelity explorations of simplified models, since photorealistic rendering quality of complex synthetic environments is still hardly achievable within the real-time constraints of interactive applications, especially on on low-powered mobile devices or script-based Internet browsers. Moreover, navigating inside 3D environments, especially on the now pervasive touch devices, is a non-trivial task, and usability is consistently improved by employing assisted navigation controls. In addition, 3D annotations are often used in order to integrate and enhance the visual information by providing spatially coherent contextual information, typically at the expense of introducing visual cluttering. In this thesis, we focus on efficient representations for interactive exploration and understanding of highly detailed 3D meshes on common 3D platforms. For this purpose, we present several approaches exploiting constraints on the data representation for improving the streaming and rendering performance, and camera movement constraints in order to provide scalable navigation methods for interactive exploration of complex 3D environments. Furthermore, we study visualization and interaction techniques to improve the exploration and understanding of complex 3D models by exploiting guided motion control techniques to aid the user in discovering contextual information while avoiding cluttering the visualization. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approaches both in large screen museum installations and in mobile devices, by performing interactive exploration of models ranging from 9Mtriangles to 940Mtriangles

New media technologies to enhance learning and audience engagement in cultural institutions

New media technologies have drastically changed most aspects of our daily lives in a short time span. They have become ubiquitous in the workspace, they have made their way to our homes and remarkably changed the ways by which knowledge is disseminated. The growing pervasiveness of those technologies has led to fundamental transformations in cultural institutions’ organisational factors on a global scale (Bearman and Geber 2008, 387). New media technologies have also contributed to changing educational institutions on a managerial level and on a pedagogical level; they have paved the way for the digitalisation of the classroom and for more interactive ways of learning, some of whose concepts have been implemented in cultural institutions for the dissemination of knowledge. In this internship report, we will particularly drive our attention towards the use of new media technologies in cultural institutions and to the correlation between those technologies, audience engagement and learning experience enhancement within cultural institutions. It is our belief that such technologies have the potential to enhance cultural institutions’ educational programs, strengthen audience engagement, and create stronger and more genuine links between traditional institutions and the audience. In this report, we will qualitatively and critically shed light on how new media technologies have fundamentally contributed to changing audience engagement and ways of learning within the cultural institution. We will put the highlight on the institutional shifts and extensions that new media technologies gave rise to. Then, we will drive our attention towards the educational possibilities that those technologies have led to, we will see how new media technologies can contribute to improving engagement and learning for audiences with disabilities, and we will, finally, shed light on the experiential metamorphoses that new media technologies have induced within cultural institutions. We will use our case study, which is a Viennese augmented reality application named Artivive, in order strengthen our analyses and respond to our research question

Facilitating immersion, engagement and flow in multi-user virtual environments

Virtual worlds are providing myriad opportunities for the development of innovative curricula for tertiary educators. They provide a virtual meeting space for those students and lecturers who are geographically remote from one another, rendering distance irrelevant and facilitating the formation of community. This paper will look at those factors - physical, social, virtual and those related to pedagogy - which facilitate immersion in virtual worlds; that suspension of disbelief which generates the feeling of presence or 'being there', crucial to promoting student engagement and ultimately, flow