Partilha de Pontos de Interesse, Vídeos e Experiências Sensoriais Baseada no Contexto do Utilizador

A evolução tecnológica das últimas décadas na área das Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (TIC) contribuiu para a proliferação de fontes de informação e de sistemas de partilha de recursos. As diversas redes sociais são um exemplo paradigmático de sistemas de partilha tanto de informação como de recursos (e.g. audiovisuais). Essa abundância crescente de recursos e fontes aumenta a importância de sistemas capazes de recomendar em tempo útil recursos personalizados, tendo por base o perfil e o contexto do utilizador. O objetivo deste projeto é partilhar e recomendar locais, artigos e vídeos em função do contexto do utilizador assim como proporcionar uma experiência mais rica de reprodução dos vídeos partilhados, simulando as condições de gravação dos vídeos. Este sistema teve como inspiração dois projetos anteriormente desenvolvidos de partilha e recomendação de locais, artigos e vídeos turísticos em função da localização do utilizador. O sistema desenvolvido consiste numa aplicação distribuída composta por um módulo cliente Android, que inclui a interface com o utilizador e o consumo direto de serviços externos de suporte, e um módulo servidor que controla o acesso à base de dados central e inclui o serviço de recomendação baseado no contexto do utilizador. A comunicação entre os módulos cliente e servidor utiliza um protocolo do nível de aplicação dedicado. As recomendações geradas pelo sistema têm por base o perfil de utilizador, informação contextual (posição do utilizador, data e hora atual e velocidade atual do utilizador) e podem ser geradas a pedido do utilizador ou automaticamente, caso sejam encontrados pontos de interesse de grande relevância para o utilizador. Os pontos de interesse recomendados são apresentados com recurso ao Google Maps, incluindo o período de funcionamento, artigos complementares e a reprodução imersiva dos vídeos relacionados. Essa imersão tem em consideração as condições meteorológicas, temporais e espaciais aquando da gravação do vídeo.The development in recent decades in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has greatly contributed to the proliferation of data sources and resource sharing systems. The various social networks are a prime example of such sharing schemes. This abundance of information increases the importance of filtering tools such as recommendation systems which are able to make timely customised suggestions based on the user profile and current context. The main objective of this project is to share and recommend places, articles and videos based on the user’s context and to provide a richer playback experience of shared videos, simulating the recording conditions. This system was inspired by two previous projects developed for sharing and recommendation of places, articles and videos depending on user location. The developed system consists of a distributed application comprising an Android client module, which includes user interface and the direct consumption of external support services and a server module that controls access to the central database and includes the recommendation service based on user context. Communication between the client and server modules is based on a dedicated application level protocol. The recommendations generated by the system are based on the user profile, contextual information (user position, date and current time and current speed of the user) and can be generated by user request or automatically, if new points of interest of great relevance to the user are found. The recommended points of interest are represented using Google Maps, including the period of operation, additional articles and immersive play of related videos. The immersion takes into account the weather conditions, time and space of when the video was recorded

Testing the capability of Rare Earth Elements to identify archaeological strata in an African site: The case of the terraced landscape at Konso, Ethiopia

Over the last twenty years Rare Earth Elements (REE) have started to be part of archaeometric studies. Due to their particular characteristics there have been several attempts to apply REE analysis to different archaeological scenarios including stratigraphically-controlled agricultural soils, demonstrating that this is an effective tool to understand how human activity is reflected in soil development. Our study proposes a new methodological approach for the identification of anthropogenic deposits through REE soil analysis, pushing current limitations of traditional chemical and sedimentology techniques. Our study represents the first application of REE concentrations in soils from tropical Africa within an archaeological context. The agricultural soils were captured in an artificial sediment trap that forms part of the terraced landscape in Konso, Ethiopia; a system thought to have developed over the last 500 years, and which was awarded World Heritage status in 2011. Forty samples were taken from successive alluvial layers down a c. 2m thick soil sequence that had accumulated behind a series of drystone walls. The samples were analyzed for trace elements and REE via ICP-MS. To understand the causes of enrichment or depletion of REE, the data were compared with soil organic matter, organic carbon and fire markers. To aid interpretation we crossreferenced our results with archaeobotanical and soil micromorphology data. Data were analysed using multivariate statistics. Taken together these results present a very different picture of landscape development to previous presented accounts; the REE analyses provide significant details regarding the source and transportation of sediments

Preserving user privacy in social media data processing

Social media data is used for analytics, e.g., in science, authorities or the industry. Privacy is often considered a secondary problem. However, protecting the privacy of social media users is demanded by laws and ethics. In order to prevent subsequent abuse, theft or public exposure of collected datasets, privacy-aware data processing is crucial. This dissertation presents a concept to process social media data with social media user’s privacy in mind. It features a data storage concept based on the cardinality estimator HyperLogLog to store social media data, so that it is not possible to extract individual items from it, but only to estimate the cardinality of items within a certain set, plus running set operations over multiple sets to extend analytical ranges. Applying this method requires to define the scope of the result before even gathering the data. This prevents the data from being misused for other purposes at a later point in time and thus follows the privacy by design principles. This work further shows methods to increase privacy through the implementation of abstraction layers. An included case study demonstrates the presented methods to be suitable for application in the field.:1 Introduction 1.1 Problem 1.2 Research objectives 1.3 Document structure 2 Related work 2.1 The notion of privacy 2.2 Privacy by design 2.3 Differential privacy 2.4 Geoprivacy 2.5 Probabilistic Data Structures 3 Concept and methods 3.1 Collateral data 3.2 Disposable data 3.3 Cardinality estimation 3.4 Data precision 3.5 Extendability 3.6 Abstraction 3.7 Time consideration 4 Summary of publications 4.1 HyperLogLog Introduction 4.2 VOST Case Study 4.3 Real-time Streaming 4.4 Abstraction Layers 4.5 VGIscience Book Chapter 4.6 Supplementary Software Materials 5 Discussion 5.1 Prevent accidental data disclosure 5.2 Feasibility in the field 5.3 Adjustability for different use cases 5.4 Limitations of HLL 5.5 Security 5.6 Outlook and further research 6 Conclusion Appendix References Publication

Promoting Andean children's learning of science through cultural and digital tools

Conference Theme: To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scaleIn Peru, there is a large achievement gap in rural schools. In order to overcome this problem, the study aims to design environments that enhance science learning through the integration of ICT with cultural artifacts, respecting the Andean culture and empower rural children to pursue lifelong learning. This investigation employs the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework, and the Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology using an iterative process of design, implementation and evaluation of the innovative practice.published_or_final_versio

Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability

Housing quality and lost (public) space in Croatia

IN ENGLISH: In the post-socialist period and within the current social transition context, urban and rural Croatia has, just like other transition countries, experienced many changes in the social structure and space. One example is the housing quality which is a replica of the situation in the Croatian society and has also undergone some major changes. Socially oriented housing construction co-financed by the state and the cities is in an unfavourable position compared to private housing construction. In the last twenty years the amount of the social housing construction has been only a minor part of the total contruction work in the country. For instance, out of nine newly planned residential housing developments in Zagreb, the capital city, only three have been completed and the work on the rest of them has stopped and is unlikely to continue. Private construction work prevails especially on the edge of the city and is characterised by high density housing. This type of housing construction doesn't benefit the majority of citizens in search of accommodation (price per square meter is too high, low-quality building). There is also a big problem of the community facilities (primary and secondary infrastructure, schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, green areas, sidewalks, public transport etc.). The existing globalisation-transition circumstances of the Croatian society corroborate the fact which experts of various profiles often point out: ignoring the process of (urban) planning will irreparably damage the space. The city transformation shows the absence of comprehensive urban planning which results in an ever increasing number of random buildings which do not fit in the surroundings. This leads up to yet another important issue – the shrinking and, in some cases, disappearance of public space which becomes the “lost space“. In recent years there has been a lot of building in the city core and on the edge which does not quite fit in the existing urban structure, image or the skyline of the city. The current situation in the process of planning can be characterized as a conflict and imbalance between the powerful actors (mostly political and economic) and less powerful actors (mostly professional and civil). The actors who have the political power and influence and the ones who possess the capital are forming an “alliance” between two important layers of the social structure. The lack of civil and professional actors, “lost spatial actors”, and therefore of civic aggregation is also present and that is also the cause of public space “disappearance” and undermined process of public participation. --------------- IN CROATIAN: U postsocijalističkom razdoblju i trenutnom tranzicijskom kontekstu urbana i ruralna Hrvatska su, kao i ostale tranzicijske zemlje, doživjele mnoge promjene u društvenoj strukturi i samom prostoru. Na primjeru kvalitete stanovanja kao replike stanja u hrvatskom društvu mogu se vidjeti značajne promjene. Društveno usmjerena stambena izgradnja sufinancirana od strane države i gradova je stoga rjeđa i u nepovoljnijoj je situaciji prema privatnoj stanogradnji. Zadnjih dvadeset godina udjel socijalne stambene gradnje je zanemariv u ukupnoj izgradnji na razini zemlje. Primjerice, od devet planiranih stambenih naselja izgrađenih po modelu POS-a u Zagrebu samo su tri i završena. Na ostalima je proces gradnje zastao i ne čini se da će se privesti kraju. Privatna je gradnje prisutnija, posebno na rubovima grada, a obilježava je visoka gustoća gradnje. Ovakav tip gradnje ne odgovara većini stanovnika koji su u procesu potražnje stambene nekretnine (visoka cijena kvadratnog metra, a slaba kvaliteta gradnje). Postoji također i problem nedostatne opremljenosti susjedstva (primarna i sekundarna infrastruktura, škole, vrtići, igrališta, zelene površine, pješačke staze, javni transport itd.). Navedene globalizacijsko-tranzicijske okolnosti hrvatskog društva potvrđuju ono što eksperti različitih profila ističu, a to je da će ignoriranje procesa (urbanog) planiranja nepovratno uništiti prostor gradova. Ovakve transformacije pokazuju nedostatak sustavnog urbanog planiranja što rezultira sve većim brojem zgrada koje se ne uklapaju u neposrednu okolinu. To nadalje dovodi do drugog važnog aspekta – smanjivanja i u nekim slučajevima, nestanka javnog prostora koji postaje „izgubljeni prostor“. Posljednjih je godina izgrađen velik broj zgrada, i u središtu i na rubovima grada, koje se ne uklapaju u postojeću urbanu strukturu, izgled ili vizuru grada. Ovakvu situaciju obilježavaju sukob i neravnoteža između moćnijih društvenih aktera (većinom političkih i ekonomskih) i onih manje moćnih (većinom profesionalnih i civilnih). Politički i ekonomski akteri se često povezuju u „savez“ dvaju najjačih u društvenoj strukturi. S druge strane nedostatak utjecaja civilnih i profesionalnih aktera kao „izgubljenih prostornih aktera“ dovodi do „nestanka“ javnih prostora te smanjenja važnosti procesa participacije (sudjelovanja javnosti)