Advancing Multimedia: Application Sharing, Latency Measurements and User-Created Services

Online collaboration tools exist and have been used since the early days of the Internet. Asynchronous tools such as wikis and discussion boards and real-time tools such as instant messaging and voice conferencing have been the only viable collaboration solutions up until recently, due to the low bandwidth between participants. With the increasing bandwidth in computer networks, multimedia collaboration such as application sharing and video conferencing have become feasible. Application and desktop sharing allows sharing of any application with one or more people over the Internet. The participants receive the screen-view of the shared application from the server. Their mouse and keyboard events are delivered and regenerated at the server. Application and desktop sharing enables collaborative work, software tutoring, and e-learning over the Internet. I have developed a high performance application and desktop sharing system called BASS which is efficient, reliable, independent of the operating system, scales well via heterogeneous multicast, supports all applications, and features true application sharing. Most of the time an application sharing session requires audio and video conferencing to be more useful. High quality video conferencing requires a fair amount of bandwidth and unfortunately Internet bandwidth of home users is still limited and shared by more than one application and user. Therefore, I measured the performance of popular video conferencing applications under congestion to understand whether they are flexible enough to adapt to fluctuating and limited bandwidth conditions. In particular, I analyzed how Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Eyebeam and X-Lite react to changes in available bandwidth, presence of HTTP and BitTorrent traffic and wireless packet losses. To perform these measurements more effectively, I have also developed vDelay, a novel tool for measuring the capture-to-display latency (CDL) and frame rate of real-time video conferencing sessions. vDelay enables developers and testers to measure the CDL and frame rate of any video conferencing application without modifying the source code. Further, it does not require any specialized hardware. I have used vDelay to measure the CDL and frame rate of popular video chat applications including Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and GMail video chat. vDelay can also be used to measure the CDL and frame rate of these applications in the presence of bandwidth variations. The results from the performance study showed that existing products, such as Skype, adapt to bandwidth fluctuations fairly well and can differentiate wireless and congestion-based packet losses. Therefore, rather than trying to improve video conferencing tools, I changed my focus to end-user created communication-related services to increase the utility of existing stand alone Internet services, devices in the physical world, communication and online social networks. I have developed SECE (Sense Everything, Control Everything), a new language and its supporting software infrastructure for user created services. SECE allows non-technical end-users to create services that combine communication, social networks, presence, calendaring, location and devices in the physical world. SECE is an event-driven system that uses a natural-English-like language to trigger action scripts. Users associate actions with events and when an event happens its associated action is executed. Presence updates, social network updates, incoming calls, email, calendar and time events, sensor inputs and location updates can trigger rules. SECE retrieves all this information from multiple sources to personalize services and to adapt them to changes in the user's context and preferences. Actions can control the delivery of email, change the handling of phone calls, update social network status and set the state of actuators such as lights, thermostats and electrical appliances

WEB 2.0 ON ACADEMIC LIBRARIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The presence on Web 2.0 has significantly changed the role of the library and the way librarians interact with their users. Depending on the needs of the library, different Web 2.0 applications are used for different purposes and definitely will bring different impact on the users. For instance, streaming media such as YouTube has been the most popular video-sharing application that allows users to post personally developed videos/recordings or video tutorials to train users how to use library resources and access various services in their library. Whereas, social media such as Facebook is commonly used to interact with users, sharing library news or events, sharing pictures as well as marketing library services. This paper examines the implementation of Web 2.0 applications on academic library websites from Southeast Asia which offer LIS (Library and Information Science) program. Seventy three academic library websites were sampled and analyzed by using a web analysis. It is also discussed on how the libraries can collaborate by applying Web 2.0 on their websites. The findings revealed that the order of popularity of Web 2.0 applications implemented on the websites are Facebook, Twitter, RSS and Messenger. Applications less widely used is a Wiki. In summary, the application of Web 2.0 is still not widely used or not even provided in some academic libraries in Southeast Asia which offer LIS program

OpenLearn and knowledge maps for language learning

This chapter presents new methodologies designed to facilitate language acquisition in open learning communities via open educational resources and knowledge mapping. It specifically focuses on the OpenLearn project developed by the Open University. This offers a virtual learning environment based on Moodle platform with free educational materials and knowledge media tools such as the instant messaging MSG, the video webconference FlashMeeting and the knowledge mapping software tool Compendium. In this work, these technologies and mapping techniques are introduced in order to promote open language learning. Ways in which teachers and students can make use of these OpenLearn tools and resources are discussed and some benefits fully described

Characterization of ISP Traffic: Trends, User Habits, and Access Technology Impact

In the recent years, the research community has increased its focus on network monitoring which is seen as a key tool to understand the Internet and the Internet users. Several studies have presented a deep characterization of a particular application, or a particular network, considering the point of view of either the ISP, or the Internet user. In this paper, we take a different perspective. We focus on three European countries where we have been collecting traffic for more than a year and a half through 5 vantage points with different access technologies. This humongous amount of information allows us not only to provide precise, multiple, and quantitative measurements of "What the user do with the Internet" in each country but also to identify common/uncommon patterns and habits across different countries and nations. Considering different time scales, we start presenting the trend of application popularity; then we focus our attention to a one-month long period, and further drill into a typical daily characterization of users activity. Results depict an evolving scenario due to the consolidation of new services as Video Streaming and File Hosting and to the adoption of new P2P technologies. Despite the heterogeneity of the users, some common tendencies emerge that can be leveraged by the ISPs to improve their servic

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Desktop multimedia environments to support collaborative distance learning

Desktop multimedia conferencing, when two or more persons can communicate among themselves via personal computers with the opportunity to see and hear one another as well as communicate via text messages while working with commonly available stored resources, appears to have important applications to the support of collaborative learning. In this paper we explore this potential in three ways: (a) through an analysis of particular learner needs when learning and working collaboratively with others outside of face-to-face situations; (b) through an analysis of different forms of conferencing environments, including desktop multimedia environments, relative to their effectiveness in terms of meeting learner needs for distributed collaboration; and (c) through reporting the results of a formative evaluation of a prototype desktop multimedia conferencing system developed especially for the support of collaborative learning. Via these analyses, suggestions are offered relating to the functionalities of desktop multimedia conferencing systems for the support of collaborative learning, reflecting new developments in both the technologies available for such systems and in our awareness of learner needs when working collaboratively with one other outside of face-to-face situations