An architecture for evolving the electronic programme guide for online viewing

Watching television and video content is changing towards online viewing due to the proliferation of content providers and the prevalence of high speed broadband. This trend is coupled to an acceleration in the move to watching content using non-traditional viewing devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones. This, in turn, poses a problem for the viewer in that it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate those programmes of interest across such a broad range of providers. In this thesis, an architecture of a generic cloud-based Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) system has been developed to meet this challenge. The key feature of this architecture is the way in which it can access content from all of the available online content providers and be personalized depending on the viewer’s preferences and interests, viewing device, internet connection speed and their social network interactions. Fundamental to its operation is the translation of programme metadata adopted by each provider into a unified format that is used within the core system. This approach ensures that the architecture is extensible, being able to accommodate any new online content provider through the addition of a small tailored search agent module. The EPG system takes the programme as its core focus and provides a single list of recommendations to each user regardless of their origins. A prototype has been developed in order to validate the proposed system and evaluate its operation. Results have been obtained through a series of user trials to assess the system’s effectiveness in being able to extract content from several sources and to produce a list of recommendations which match the user’s preferences and context. Results show that the EPG is able to offer users a single interface to online television and video content providers and that its integration with social networks ensures that the recommendation process is able to match or exceed the published results from comparable, but more constrained, systems

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application

The 1991 research and technology report, Goddard Space Flight Center

The 1991 Research and Technology Report for Goddard Space Flight Center is presented. Research covered areas such as (1) earth sciences including upper atmosphere, lower atmosphere, oceans, hydrology, and global studies; (2) space sciences including solar studies, planetary studies, Astro-1, gamma ray investigations, and astrophysics; (3) flight projects; (4) engineering including robotics, mechanical engineering, electronics, imaging and optics, thermal and cryogenic studies, and balloons; and (5) ground systems, networks, and communications including data and networks, TDRSS, mission planning and scheduling, and software development and test

Cooperative innovation in the commons : rethinking distributed collaboration and intellectual property for sustainable design innovation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-127).Addressing global design challenges in the environment and underserved communities requires a cooperative approach towards sustainable design innovation, one that embraces multidisciplinary expertise, participatory design and rapid dissemination of critical innovations in the field. How can a rural farmer in Botswana cooperatively develop appropriate solutions for his community with external research expertise? How can a doctor in Sao Paulo access a network of medical device companies to help manufacture her design innovation? While there is a great emphasis on large breakthrough R&D innovations, there is often little support for developing and disseminating small-scale, affordable, and locally sustainable designs. The open source phenomenon has been influential in the software community, however distributed collaboration in engineering design requires awareness and sharing of physical artifacts, design tools and working environments as well as novel mechanisms to support social norms, communities of practice, and intellectual property rights for product innovations. ThinkCycle was created as a web-based collaboration platform with tools and shared online spaces for designers, domain experts and stakeholders to discuss, develop and peer-review evolving design solutions in critical domains. Over 2000 users worldwide access and contribute hundreds of concepts, resources, projects and publications on the site. ThinkCycle is emerging as a collaborative platform, open design repository and global community for innovations in sustainable design: http.//www. thinkcycle.org. Studies were conducted on the nature of design interaction, learning and intellectual property emerging from studio courses run at MIT in 2001-2002.(cont.) Cooperative design is best understood when viewed as a "social process", which is better sustained in online settings by peer-review from remote participants. There is a need for lightweight asynchronous interfaces with existing modes of communication like email. Social inquiry into notions of intellectual property reveal a typology of patterns with distinct forms of protection and disclosure, including patents and open source, adopted under different conditions. However, there is much ambiguity and conflict regarding how to deal with cooperative innovations as they evolve from being subpatentable learning experiments to functional and commercially viable solutions with potentially great social impact. The thesis provides a framework within which we can begin to explore these challenges.by Nitin Sawhney.Ph.D

Experiencing Finnish Lapland: Design for Sustainability Through Cultural Communication in Tourism

Tourism, as an important domestic economy booster, has been heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and severely declined. Governments are rethinking tourism for future new opportunities. Previous research has shown that large development scale of tourism is not conducive to sustainability, nevertheless, researchers have also found that managing tourists’ behavior can reduce the adverse effects, while other studies are proposing the effectiveness of environmental education on sustainability. However, little attention has been paid to the combination of environmental education and tourist management for sustainability purpose. This study aims to explore the potential of sustainability-oriented design through cultural communication in tourism. No matter what method is used to communicate sustainability, this research believes that the impacts of communication should seek to be sustainable and far-reaching, and more importantly to be applied in reality to present its value. To achieve the goal, this study takes Finnish Lapland as a practical entry point, follows service design thinking and takes ethnography as the research strategy, conducting qualitative research through semi-structured interviews, field studies, and workshops. The data from 57 stakeholders have been collected to quest opportunities and needs, based on which, a design outcome was produced as feedback for iterate. The findings show that sensory design can prolong the impact of sustainability, and the application of environmental education as a cultural content can meet the needs of stakeholders while contributing to sustainability. Furthermore, online sales may provide alternative options to alleviate COVID-19 impact on tourism industry and to build economic resilience and consumer confidence. The results show considerable potential in cultural communication for sustainability in tourism, which offers directions for future research in the area

Design for Living Complexities

Lectures from a 12-session course that addresses the intersection of design with critical thinking. Design in this course means intentionality in construction, which involves a range of materials, a sequence of steps, and principles that inform the choice of materials and the steps. Design also always involves putting people, as well as materials, into place. This happens by working with the known properties of people, as well as the known properties of material, and trying out new arrangements to work around their constraints (at least temporarily). Critical thinking, as I define it, involves understanding ideas and practices better when we examine them in relationship to alternatives. Design cannot proceed without the idea that there are alternatives to the current way of doing things, even if you have not yet found those alternatives, or have not yet found the best ones, or have not yet been able to put them into practice. So critical thinking is in design from the start. Alternative designs are exposed and explored during the course through multiple lenses. First, design is explored through historical cases that illustrate how things have by no means always been the way they are now. Second, the class does archaeology of the present to shed light on what we might have taken for granted, relegated as someone else’s responsibility, or deferred to someone who is a specialist. Third, the class compares how things are arranged in different organizations and different cultures. And finally, through their own design sketches, students examine ill-defined problems in cases of real-world living complexity that invite a range of responses