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Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies
Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development.
Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability?
This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres
CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap
After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in
multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year.
In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio-
economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown
of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on
requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the
community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our
Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as
National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core
technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research
challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal
challenges
CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines
Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective.
The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines.
From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research
An Application of Multimedia Services on Transportation: The Use of the World Wide Web (WWW)
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there is an ever-increasing demand and interest in the use of multimedia
technology and applications in industry, government and academia. Multimedia is often
seen by researchers as the next step forward in interfacing science, technology and
community. Yet, the terminology of multimedia bears several meanings. It may refer to
Compact Disc (CD), moving pictures or video-conferencing. The multimedia technology
referred in this paper is the World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext publishing information
system which was developed by and started at the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since the introduction of WWW, its use has
increased dramatically within a couple of years in a widely diverse community including
government departments, university and research establishments, and commercial
organisations. It has significant influence to our communities and our daily lives. Yet, in
most cases, applications of WWW services are largely restricted to electronic library
referencelcatalogue search facilities, electronic mail systems, electronic conference and
discussion systems, electronic news and publishing agents, and remote access to computing
resources on the Internet.
The primary objective of this paper is to exploit the potential of this multimedia technology
as a simple, easy-to-use and effective means of telematics application in transportation
research. It is hoped that initiatives are highlighted via this study and hence encourage
participations and collaborations from different sectors of industries.
In this paper, a brief history of WWW is given in section (2). An overview of the technical
aspects in providing a WWW service is presented in section (3) in terms of computer
hardware requirements, software installation, network connections, application
maintenance and administration, and system security. Compared to most commercially
available multimedia software in the market, WWW services are cheap to run, userfriendly
and readily available to the public on the Internet. In order to exploit the potential
of WWW on transportation research, a study was carried out and results of the findings are
reported in section (4). To further substantiate the level of usefulness, two particular
WWW applications were chosen amongst other web services and they are reported in
section (5) for illustrative purposes. The selected applications are the 'Transportation
Resources on the Internet' developed in mid-1994 in the Institute for Transport Studies
(ITS) at the University of Leeds in England, and the 'Southern California Real-Time
Traffic Report' developed by Maxwell Laboratories, Inc. in collaboration with the
California State Department of Transportation in the US. Finally, a set of issues are raised
in section (6), highlighting the directions of future development of WWW as an easy-touse,
cheap and effective multimedia telematics application on transportation
The state of peer-to-peer network simulators
Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results
An Exploratory Study of Online Information Regarding Colony Collapse Disorder
The cause or causes of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) are uncertain. CCD defines specific characteristics of the nationwide deaths of honey bee colonies in the last decade. Adult bees often disappear from the hive and die, leaving the colony weak and vulnerable to disease. Environmental scientists and agriculturalists have developed many different theories about CCD and its origins. The different theories create challenges regarding the effective dissemination of information about CCD to the different realms of public information seekers. There is a need for an exploration of the online communication of CCD information using federal environmental agency web resources. CCD research information dissemination practices are one example of the trans-disciplinary complexity surrounding many current environmental issues. The study addresses different information “packages” offered or not offered for different types of CCD information seekers. The goal of the study is to inform future research addressing the comprehensive construction of federal e-government science information by finding strengths and weaknesses in the current information landscape of CCD resources on the web
Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications
Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted
surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require
indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between
anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a
design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers
indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active
adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by
subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour
of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing
behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image
sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully
overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant
restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional
social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we
propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world
dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring
low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page
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