VoodooFlash: authoring across physical and digital form

Design tools that integrate hardware and software components facilitate product design work across aspects of physical form and user interaction, but at the cost of requiring designers to work with other than their accustomed programming tools. In this paper we introduce VoodooFlash, a tool designed to build on the widespread use of Flash while facilitating design work across physical and digital components. VoodooFlash extends the existing practice of authoring interactive applications in terms of arranging components on a virtual stage, and provides a physical stage on which controls can be arranged, linked to software components, and appropriated with other physical design materials

PIWeCS: enhancing human/machine agency in an interactive composition system

This paper focuses on the infrastructure and aesthetic approach used in PIWeCS: a Public Space Interactive Web-based Composition System. The concern was to increase the sense of dialogue between human and machine agency in an interactive work by adapting Paine's (2002) notion of a conversational model of interaction as a ‘complex system’. The machine implementation of PIWeCS is achieved through integrating intelligent agent programming with MAX/MSP. Human input is through a web infrastructure. The conversation is initiated and continued by participants through arrangements and composition based on short performed samples of traditional New Zealand Maori instruments. The system allows the extension of a composition through the electroacoustic manipulation of the source material

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

Using smartphones as a proxy for forensic evidence contained in cloud storage services

Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box and SugarSync have been embraced by both individuals and organizations. This creates an environment that is potentially conducive to security breaches and malicious activities. The investigation of these cloud environments presents new challenges for the digital forensics community. It is anticipated that smartphone devices will retain data from these storage services. Hence, this research presents a preliminary investigation into the residual artifacts created on an iOS and Android device that has accessed a cloud storage service. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an initial assessment on the extent to which cloud storage data is stored on these client-side devices. This view acts as a proxy for data stored in the cloud. Secondly, it provides documentation on the artifacts that could be useful in a digital forensics investigation of cloud services

Perceptual multimedia quality: Implications of an empirical study

Copyright @ 2005 HCI InternationalIf commercial multimedia development continues to ignore the user-perspective in preference of other factors, i.e. user fascination (i.e. the latest gimmick), then companies ultimately risk alienating the customer. Moreover, by ignoring the user-perspective, future distributed multimedia systems risk ignoring accessibility issues, by excluding access for users with abnormal perceptual requirements. This paper presents an extensive examination of distributed multimedia quality. We define a model that considers multimedia quality from three distinct levels: the network, the media- and the content-levels; and two views: the technical- and the user-perspective. By manipulating both technical and user-perspective parameters, we examine the impact on quality perception at the three quality levels identified. Results show that: a significant reduction in frame rate does not proportionally reduce the user's understanding of the presentation, independent of technical parameters; the type of video clip significantly impacts user information assimilation, user level of enjoyment and user perception of quality; the display type impacts user information assimilation and user perception of quality. Finally, to ensure transfer of informational content, network parameter variation should be adapted; to maintain user enjoyment, video content variation should be adapted

IP Modularity: Profiting from Innovation by Aligning Product Architecture with Intellectual Property

Distributed value creation can boost the overall value created, but may create serious challenges for capturing value. In order to draw in external contributors, an innovator often waives legal exclusion rights or reveals formerly exclusive knowledge. But as a result, contributors may appropriate a large share of the jointly created value. In turn, integrating external contributions entails the risk of becoming dependent on outside owners of IP. To address this tension we propose the concept of “IP modularity.” We argue that, by managing a system’s modular structure in conjunction with its IP, firms can reconcile distributed innovation with value capture

Quantify resilience enhancement of UTS through exploiting connect community and internet of everything emerging technologies

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy based quantification of the VR on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario (water bomb/flash flooding) considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deploye

M-commerce perceptual quality of service

Copyright @ 2003 CAiS