User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

A user-centric approach for developing and deploying service front-ends in the future internet of services

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) based on web services have attracted a great deal of interest and Internet Technology (IT) investment over the last few years, principally in the context of business-to-business integration within corporate intranets. However, they are now evolving and breaking through enterprise boundaries in a revolutionary attempt to make the approach pervasive. This is leading to what we call a user-centric SOA. A user-centric SOA is an SOA conceived as an internet of services made up of compositional resources empowering end users to collaboratively remix and ubiquitously exploit these resources. In this paper we explore the architectural basis, technologies, frameworks and tools considered necessary to tackle this novel vision of SOA. We also present the rationale behind Ez Web/FAST, an ongoing EU-funded project whose first outcomes could serve as a preliminary proof of concept

Web 2.0 as syndication

There is considerable excitement about the notion of 'Web 2.0', particularly among Internet businesspeople. In contrast, there is an almost complete lack of formal literature on the topic. It is important that movements with such energy and potential be subjected to critical attention, and that industry and social commentators have the opportunity to draw on the eCommerce research literature in formulating their views

Provision of academic data for research: a step for academic success

One of the most widely researched questions about higher education focuses on exposing paths that lead to academic success. This dissertation provides a tool aligned with the scientific contributions to the concept of success in higher education, as well as the implementation of a system capable of automatic generation of SQL queries based on high level constraints. It includes the use of students' data contained in the ISCTE-IUL University Fénix system in a web application, to assist analyzes and researches. Providing relevant data for consultation can offer a differentiated explanation of the pathways of success in higher education and identify problems and failures to support more effective intervention measures later.Uma das questões mais discutidas sobre ensino superior foca a descoberta de caminhos e padrões que levem ao sucesso académico. Esta dissertação fornece uma ferramenta alinhada com as contribuições científicas em relação ao conceito de sucesso no ensino superior, bem como a implementação de um sistema capaz de gerar automaticamente consultas SQL com base em restrições de alto nível. Inclui o uso dos dados dos alunos contidos no sistema Fénix da Universidade ISCTE-IUL numa aplicação web, de forma a auxiliar análises e investigações. Ao disponibilizar dados relevantes para consulta, pode fornecer uma explicação diferenciada dos caminhos de sucesso no ensino superior, bem como identificar problemas e falhas, para apoiar medidas de intervenção mais eficazes posteriormente

Design of neurophysiological signal analysis software

Recenti sviluppi tecnologici permettono registrazioni sempre più accurate dell’attività neuronale. Diversi laboratori hanno sviluppato programmi per l’analisi di tali dati, ma tuttora non esiste alcun software che fornisca un supporto completo per l’analisi e l’elaborazione dei segnali raccolti, condiviso dall’intera comunità scientifica. A tal fine, una simile applicazione è stata recentemente sviluppata presso il NeuroChip Laboratory dell’Università di Padova. Il pacchetto applicativo è stato realizzato seguendo una metologia di programmazione funzionale, ma per facilitarne il riutilizzo ed eventualmente fornire un supporto multi piattaforma è necessario che il software sia realizzato seguendo metologie di design orientato agli oggettiopenEmbargo per motivi di segretezza e di proprietà dei risultati e informazioni sensibil

A distributed analysis and monitoring framework for the compact Muon solenoid experiment and a pedestrian simulation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The design of a parallel and distributed computing system is a very complicated task. It requires a detailed understanding of the design issues and of the theoretical and practical aspects of their solutions. Firstly, this thesis discusses in detail the major concepts and components required to make parallel and distributed computing a reality. A multithreaded and distributed framework capable of analysing the simulation data produced by a pedestrian simulation software was developed. Secondly, this thesis discusses the origins and fundamentals of Grid computing and the motivations for its use in High Energy Physics. Access to the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to be provided for more than five thousand scientists all over the world. Users who run analysis jobs on the Grid do not necessarily have expertise in Grid computing. Simple, userfriendly and reliable monitoring of the analysis jobs is one of the key components of the operations of the distributed analysis; reliable monitoring is one of the crucial components of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid for providing the functionality and performance that is required by the LHC experiments. The CMS Dashboard Task Monitoring and the CMS Dashboard Job Summary monitoring applications were developed to serve the needs of the CMS community

From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time