The NeuroDante Project: Neurometric measurements of participant’s reaction to literary auditory stimuli from dante’s “divina commedia”

Neurodante. Progetto di analisi neurometrica di alcuni brani della Commedi

The system architecture of the Pocket Companion

In the Moby Dick project we design the architecture of a so-called Pocket Companion. It is a small personal portable computer with wireless communication facilities for every day use. The typical use of the Pocket Companion induces a number of requirements concerning security, performance, energy consumption, communication and size. We have shown that these requirements are interrelated and can only be met optimal with one single architecture. The Pocket Companion architecture consists of a central switch with a security module surrounded by several modules. The Pocket Companion is a personal machine. Communication, and particularly wireless communication, is essential for the system to support electronic transactions. Such a system requires a good security infrastructure not only for safeguarding personal data, but also to allow safe (financial) transactions. The integration of a security module in the Pocket Companion architecture provides the basis for a secure environment.\ud Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Pocket Companion, energy consumption plays a crucial role in the architecture. An important theme of the architecture is: enough performance for minimal energy consumption

Writers' Bloc: reading into late Soviet experience through Latvian artists' books.

Previously in the University eprints HAIRST pilot service at http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/00000364/Article 1 of 6 in an issue devoted to Scandinavian and Baltic visual cultureThis article focuses on book works by Latvian artists during the late-Soviet period, and also offers an initial discussion of the peculiarities of the Soviet publishing environment, as it existed shortly before the USSR’s annexation of Latvia at the end of World War II, and the roughly concurrent publication experiences of progressive artists in inter-bellum Latvia, the so-called First Republic. During its heyday in the 1960s and 70s the artist’s book was hailed by many practitioners in the West as the superlative democratic art form, due to the hypothetical possibility of the widespread ownership of the art object. An examination of how artist-authored books developed amid Latvian society's repeated, abrupt transitions between democracy and totalitarianism during the past century may further illuminate this concept of a democratic art medium.Postprin

A File System Abstraction for Sense and Respond Systems

The heterogeneity and resource constraints of sense-and-respond systems pose significant challenges to system and application development. In this paper, we present a flexible, intuitive file system abstraction for organizing and managing sense-and-respond systems based on the Plan 9 design principles. A key feature of this abstraction is the ability to support multiple views of the system via filesystem namespaces. Constructed logical views present an application-specific representation of the network, thus enabling high-level programming of the network. Concurrently, structural views of the network enable resource-efficient planning and execution of tasks. We present and motivate the design using several examples, outline research challenges and our research plan to address them, and describe the current state of implementation.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures Workshop on End-to-End, Sense-and-Respond Systems, Applications, and Services In conjunction with MobiSys '0

Octopus - an energy-efficient architecture for wireless multimedia systems

Multimedia computing and mobile computing are two trends that will lead to a new application domain in the near future. However, the technological challenges to establishing this paradigm of computing are non-trivial. Personal mobile computing offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The approach we made to achieve such a system is to use autonomous, adaptable modules, interconnected by a switch rather than by a bus, and to offload as much as work as possible from the CPU to programmable modules that is placed in the data streams. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch called Octopus exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies

Avatars and Lebensform: Kirchberg 2007

Several years ago, after a decade of experiments in the software industry, I returned to academia and found philosophy colleagues troubled by the term “virtual reality” — a term which enjoys wide usage in the ?eld of immersive computing but which raises hackles in post-metaphysical philosophers. Some vocabulary in this paper may create similar unease, so a warning may be in order. What makes sense to software engineers may for philosophers carry too much baggage. Words like “empathetic” or “empathic” may cause similar discomfort for those with an allergy to Romanticism. While these adjectives associated with poets like Wordsworth, the term “empathy” belongs equally to software designers and video-game artists who use it to describe the opposite of “?rst-person shooter” software. Empathic, as opposed to “shoot ‘em up” software, encourages the exchange of viewpoints beyond ?rst-person perspective and may even merge several perspectives. Rather than deepen a user’s ?rst-person point-of-view, empathic software offers a socializing experience, and in fact, is sometimes called “social” software, “Net 2.0,” or “computer supported cooperative work.