The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

The dream team: sharing architect and librarian skills to ensure library design excellence

Many library managers around the world are developing close working relationships with architects to ensure that the design of libraries meets client needs, functional requirements, and efficiency criteria, with attractive inspiring buildings providing a sense of community for various types of use and user. At the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, a model of library service delivery was developed through an effective partnership of the then University Librarian and the Principal of a local architectural firm. Library design and refurbishment at the University of Queensland used innovative design principles, blending the perspectives of both the librarian and the architect in a unique partnership which was both personally rewarding and professionally successful

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity