Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

SeeChart: Enabling Accessible Visualizations Through Interactive Natural Language Interface For People with Visual Impairments

Web-based data visualizations have become very popular for exploring data and communicating insights. Newspapers, journals, and reports regularly publish visualizations to tell compelling stories with data. Unfortunately, most visualizations are inaccessible to readers with visual impairments. For many charts on the web, there are no accompanying alternative (alt) texts, and even if such texts exist they do not adequately describe important insights from charts. To address the problem, we first interviewed 15 blind users to understand their challenges and requirements for reading data visualizations. Based on the insights from these interviews, we developed SeeChart, an interactive tool that automatically deconstructs charts from web pages and then converts them to accessible visualizations for blind people by enabling them to hear the chart summary as well as to interact through data points using the keyboard. Our evaluation with 14 blind participants suggests the efficacy of SeeChart in understanding key insights from charts and fulfilling their information needs while reducing their required time and cognitive burden.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure

Examination of the Transitioning of the Book from Print to Digital: Inspiration, Possibilities & Application

My principal research question is: what future/s might there be for the book as it shifts away from paper volumes and into an ebook protocol, as regards marginal epistemologies, inclusivity, multiple authors, interdisciplinarity and alternative narratives? My research takes the form of both a thesis and a research-creation EPUB3 ebook. I chose the subject of bees as the content of the book. This subject offered me both an alternative narrative and a way to showcase the capabilities of the EPUB. Working with disciplines of Design, Film and Computer Science, I traced a trajectory through the history of the printed book to the present day finding a natural place for the self-published ebook. The thesis speculates on the genesis of the ebook as a recuperative medium in the evolution of the knowledge commons. It navigates a path toward progressive accessibility standards coexisting with a visual design paradigm

Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

Masks: Maintaining Anonymity by Sequestering Key Statistics

High-resolution digital cameras are becoming ever-larger parts of our daily lives, whether as part of closed-circuit surveillance systems or as part of portable digital devices that many of us carry around with us. Combining the broadening reach of these cameras with automatic face recognition technology creates a sensor network that is ripe for abuse: our every action could be recorded and tagged with our identities, the date, and our location as if we each had an investigator tasked only with keeping each of us under constant surveillance. Adding the continually falling cost of data storage to this mix, and we are left with a situation where the privacy abuses don\u27t need to happen today: the stored imagery can be mined and re-mined forever, while the sophistication of automatic analysis continues to grow. The MASKS project takes the first steps toward addressing this problem. If we would like to be able to de-identify faces before the images are shared with others, we cannot do so with ad hoc techniques applied identically to all faces. Since each face is unique, the method of disguising that face must be equally unique. In order to hide or reduce those critical identifying characteristics, we are delivering the following foundational contributions toward characterizing the nature of facial information: - We have created a new pose-controlled, high-resolution database of facial images. - The most prominent anatomical markers on each face have been marked for position and shape, establishing a new gold standard for facial segmentation. - A parameterized model of the diversity of our subject population was built based on statistical analysis of the annotations. The model was validated by comparison with the performance of a standard set of artificial disguises

Arabic Typography and Visual Identity in Online Newspaper: Case Study in the Egyptian online journalism

Unique Arabic typography has different applications in local newspapers whether traditional newspapers or online forms. It started as an art and developed as a science which has been utilized to improve the way of communicating ideas. In Egyptian newspapers, typography has been used as a medium for transmitting news with roughly similar identities among different newspapers. This similarity has been reflected clearly in online newspaper versions due to either missing the visual identity criteria or technological deficiencies, or both. This study tries to explore three main Egyptian national newspapers’ visual identity as represented in their Arabic typography traditionally and via the web. The paper also discusses the readers’ and designers’ feedback regarding visual identity and technological changes in a bid to rebrand online newspaper visual identity

Casual Information Visualization on Exploring Spatiotemporal Data

The goal of this thesis is to study how the diverse data on the Web which are familiar to everyone can be visualized, and with a special consideration on their spatial and temporal information. We introduce novel approaches and visualization techniques dealing with different types of data contents: interactively browsing large amount of tags linking with geospace and time, navigating and locating spatiotemporal photos or videos in collections, and especially, providing visual supports for the exploration of diverse Web contents on arbitrary webpages in terms of augmented Web browsing