Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Management of remote field instrumentation via the Internet

Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used by many industries because of their ability to manage sensors and control external hardware. The problem with commercially available systems is that they are restricted to a local network of users that use proprietary software. There was no Internet development guide to give remote users out of the network, control and access to SCADA data and external hardware through simple user interfaces. To solve this problem a server/client paradigm was implemented to make SCADAs available via the Internet. Two methods were applied and studied: polling of a text file as a low-end technology solution and implementing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) socket connection. Users were allowed to login to a website and control remotely a network of pumps and valves interfaced to a SCADA. This enabled them to sample the water quality of different reservoir wells. The results were based on real time performance, stability and ease of use of the remote interface and its programming. These indicated that the most feasible server to implement is the TCP/IP connection. For the user interface, Java applets and Active X controls provide the same real time access

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Live Coding

Open Access peer reviewed papers on live coding published at the 1st International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Leeds

QoSME: QoS Management Environment

Distributed multimedia applications are sensitive to the Quality of Service (QoS) delivered by underlying communication networks. For example, a video conference exchange can be very sensitive to the effective network throughput. Network jitter can greatly disrupt a speech stream. The main question this thesis addresses is how to adapt multimedia applications to the QoS delivered by the network and vice versa. Such adaptation is especially important because current networks are unable to assure the QoS required by applications and the latter is usually unprepared for periods of QoS degradation. This work introduces the QoS Management Environment (QoSME) that provides mechanisms for such adaptation. The main contributions of this thesis are: Language level abstractions for QoS management. The Quality Assurance Language (QuAL) in QoSME enables the specification of how to allocate, monitor, analyze, and adapt to delivered QoS. Applications can express in QuAL their QoS needs and how to handle potential violations. Automatic QoS monitoring. QoSME automatically generates the instrumentation to monitor QoS when applications use QuAL constructs. The QoSME runtime scrutinizes interactions among applications, transport protocols, and Operating Systems (OS) and collects in QoS Management Information Bases (MIBs) statistics on the QoS delivered. Integration of QoS and standard network management. A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent embedded in QoSME provides QoS MIB access to SNMP managers. The latter can use this feature to monitor end-to-end QoS delivery and adapt network resource allocation and operations accordingly. A partial prototype of QoSME has been released for public access. It runs on SunOS 4.3 and Solaris 2.3 and supports communication on ATM adaptation layer, ST-II, UDP/IP, TCP/IP, and Unix internal protocols

Bodies, Ideas, and Dynamics: Historical Perspectives on Systems Thinking in Engineering

Today, the idea that technology consists not simply of individual machines but of systems of components and interconnections underlies much of engineering theory and practice. Yet this idea is relatively new in the history of technology; it evolved over a long period, spanning more than a century, as engineers grappled with the implications of machinery and collections of apparatus that spread over broad geographical areas. A historical perspective on systems thinking provides a critical background for contemplating new directions in “engineering systems,” by highlighting the problems that have constantly challenged engineers, as well as the new puzzles posed by today’s world

Reasoning in non-probabilistic uncertainty: logic programming and neural-symbolic computing as examples

This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty (and even more, that there are kinds of uncertainty which are for principled reasons not addressable with probabilistic means); and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter claim, two paradigmatic examples are presented: Logic Programming with Kleene semantics for modelling reasoning from information in a discourse, to an interpretation of the state of affairs of the intended model, and a neural-symbolic implementation of Input/Output logic for dealing with uncertainty in dynamic normative context

IoT Smart City Architectures: An Analytical Evaluation

© 2018 IEEE. while several IoT architectures have been proposed for enabling smart city visions, not much work has been done to assess and compare these architectures. By applying our proposed evaluation framework that incorporates a variety of 33 criteria, this paper presents a comparative analysis of nine existing well-known IoT architectures. The results of the analysis highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these architectures and give insight to city leaders, architects, and developers aiming at selecting the most appropriate architecture or their combination that may fit their own specific smart city development scenario