Dimensions of situatedness for digital public displays

Public displays are often strongly situated signs deeply embedded in their physical, social, and cultural setting. Understanding how the display is coupled with on-going situations, its level of situatedness, provides a key element for the interpretation of the displays themselves but is also an element for the interpretation of place, its situated practices, and its social context. Most digital displays, however, do not achieve the same sense of situatedness that seems so natural in their nondigital counterparts. This paper investigates people’s perception of situatedness when considering the connection between public displays and their context. We have collected over 300 photos of displays and conducted a set of analysis tasks involving focus groups and structured interviews with 15 participants. The contribution is a consolidated list of situatedness dimensions that should provide a valuable resource for reasoning about situatedness in digital displays and informing the design and development of display systems

Internationalization capacitation of a SME in the dental prosthetics industry: Oralook

The phenomenon of market globalization has been posing new challenges and opportunities for Portuguese companies, resulting in internationalization initiatives. With the opening and expansion of markets and with the increasing competition and pace of innovation, companies seek for growth in international markets. Increasingly, companies’ must be able to respond to challenges that threaten their economic survival, resulting in stagnation. Internationalization is one of business strategic responses to the globalization challenge. The aim of this dissertation is to develop an in-company project to evaluate a dental laboratory internationalization capacity, and the subject to be studied is a top technological company, Oralook. The motivation to internationalize emerged from an entrepreneurial vision of the company’s managing partner, Gonçalo Duque, a dental prosthetics expert. Today, Oralook has one of the best facilities among Portuguese dental laboratories, equipped with the latest dental technology worldwide, which allows the sale of products and services outside the domestic market. From the detailed internal and external analysis, it is possible to answer pertinent questions brought up by careful research and find solutions towards shaping the future of the laboratory’s internationalization process.O fenómeno da globalização do mercado tem vindo a oferecer novos desafios e oportunidades para as empresas portuguesas, incentivando-as a considerar iniciativas de internacionalização. Com a abertura e expansão dos mercados, com o incremento da concorrência e o acelerado ritmo de inovação, as empresas procuram o seu lugar nos mercados internacionais. Cada vez mais as empresas precisam de estar preparadas para dar resposta aos desafios que poderão ameaçar a sua sobrevivência económica, resultando em estagnação. A internacionalização é uma das estratégias que podem dar resposta ao desafio da globalização. O objetivo desta dissertação é a de elaborar um projeto que avalie a capacidade de internacionalização de um laboratório de prótese dentária. Assim, faz sentido que o objeto de estudo seja uma empresa em constante evolução técnica e tecnológica: Oralook. A iniciativa para internacionalizar a empresa surgiu da visão empreendedora do sócio gestor, Gonçalo Duque, um profissional de prótese dentária. Atualmente, a Oralook tem uma das melhores instalações laboratoriais a nível nacional, equipada com a mais recente tecnologia na área dentária, o que permite a venda de produtos e serviços fora do mercado doméstico. A partir da análise detalhada interna e externamente, é possível responder a questões pertinentes levantadas pela pesquisa cuidadosa e encontrar soluções com vista a moldar o futuro da empresa no processo da internacionalização

IF-MANET: Interoperable framework for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

The advances in low power micro-processors, wireless networks and embedded systems have raised the need to utilize the significant resources of mobile devices. These devices for example, smart phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and sensors are gaining enormous processing power, storage capacity and wireless bandwidth. In addition, the advancement in wireless mobile technology has created a new communication paradigm via which a wireless network can be created without any priori infrastructure called mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While progress is being made towards improving the efficiencies of mobile devices and reliability of wireless mobile networks, the mobile technology is continuously facing the challenges of un-predictable disconnections, dynamic mobility and the heterogeneity of routing protocols. Hence, the traditional wired, wireless routing protocols are not suitable for MANET due to its unique dynamic ad hoc nature. Due to the reason, the research community has developed and is busy developing protocols for routing in MANET to cope with the challenges of MANET. However, there are no single generic ad hoc routing protocols available so far, which can address all the basic challenges of MANET as mentioned before. Thus this diverse range of ever growing routing protocols has created barriers for mobile nodes of different MANET taxonomies to intercommunicate and hence wasting a huge amount of valuable resources. To provide interaction between heterogeneous MANETs, the routing protocols require conversion of packets, meta-model and their behavioural capabilities. Here, the fundamental challenge is to understand the packet level message format, meta-model and behaviour of different routing protocols, which are significantly different for different MANET Taxonomies. To overcome the above mentioned issues, this thesis proposes an Interoperable Framework for heterogeneous MANETs called IF-MANET. The framework hides the complexities of heterogeneous routing protocols and provides a homogeneous layer for seamless communication between these routing protocols. The framework creates a unique Ontology for MANET routing protocols and a Message Translator to semantically compare the packets and generates the missing fields using the rules defined in the Ontology. Hence, the translation between an existing as well as newly arriving routing protocols will be achieved dynamically and on-the-fly. To discover a route for the delivery of packets across heterogeneous MANET taxonomies, the IF-MANET creates a special Gateway node to provide cluster based inter-domain routing. The IF-MANET framework can be used to develop different middleware applications. For example: Mobile grid computing that could potentially utilise huge amounts of aggregated data collected from heterogeneous mobile devices. Disaster & crises management applications can be created to provide on-the-fly infrastructure-less emergency communication across organisations by utilising different MANET taxonomies

Management of Temporally and Spatially Correlated Failures in Federated Message Oriented Middleware for Resilient and QoS-Aware Messaging Services.

PhDMessage Oriented Middleware (MOM) is widely recognized as a promising solution for the communications between heterogeneous distributed systems. Because the resilience and quality-of-service of the messaging substrate plays a critical role in the overall system performance, the evolution of these distributed systems has introduced new requirements for MOM, such as inter domain federation, resilience and QoS support. This thesis focuses on a management frame work that enhances the Resilience and QoS-awareness of MOM, called RQMOM, for federated enterprise systems. A common hierarchical MOM architecture for the federated messaging service is assumed. Each bottom level local domain comprises a cluster of neighbouring brokers that carry a local messaging service, and inter domain messaging are routed through the gateway brokers of the different local domains over the top level federated overlay. Some challenges and solutions for the intra and inter domain messaging are researched. In local domain messaging the common cause of performance degradation is often the fluctuation of workloads which might result in surge of total workload on a broker and overload its processing capacity, since a local domain is often within a well connected network. Against performance degradation, a combination of novel proactive risk-aware workload allocation, which exploits the co-variation between workloads, in addition to existing reactive load balancing is designed and evaluated. In federated inter domain messaging an overlay network of federated gateway brokers distributed in separated geographical locations, on top of the heterogeneous physical network is considered. Geographical correlated failures are threats to cause major interruptions and damages to such systems. To mitigate this rarely addressed challenge, a novel geographical location aware route selection algorithm to support uninterrupted messaging is introduced. It is used with existing overlay routing mechanisms, to maintain routes and hence provide more resilient messaging against geographical correlated failures