Operating-system support for distributed multimedia

Multimedia applications place new demands upon processors, networks and operating systems. While some network designers, through ATM for example, have considered revolutionary approaches to supporting multimedia, the same cannot be said for operating systems designers. Most work is evolutionary in nature, attempting to identify additional features that can be added to existing systems to support multimedia. Here we describe the Pegasus project's attempt to build an integrated hardware and operating system environment from\ud the ground up specifically targeted towards multimedia

Authoring Edutainment Stories for Online Players (AESOP): Introducing Gameplay into Interactive Dramas

The video gaming industry has experienced extraordinary technological growth in the recent past, causing a boom in both the quality and revenue of these games. Educational games, on the other hand, have lagged behind this trend, as their creation presents major creative and pedagogical challenges in addition to technological ones. By providing the technological advances of the entertainment genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators, and developing an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games can be realized. Section 1 postulates three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 2 and 3 present progress on simple versions of those tools and a case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create an interactive drama

Gameplay, Interactive Drama, and Training: Authoring Edutainment Stories for Online Players (AESOP)

This paper describes initial efforts at providing some of the technological advances of the videogame genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators. By providing these capabilities inside an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games may eventually be realized. Sections 1 and 2 postulate three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 3 and 4 present progress on those tools and an in-depth case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create a large interactive drama. We close with lessons learned to date and a look at the remaining challenges: the unpleasant reality that state-of-the-art tools are not yet able to boost the productivity of edutainment authors

An architecture supporting the development of serious games for scenario-based training and its application to Advanced Life Support

The effectiveness of serious games for training has already been proved in several domains. A major obstacle to the mass adoption of serious games comes from the difficulties in their development, due to the lack of widely adopted architectures that could streamline their creation process. In this thesis we present an architecture supporting the development of serious games for scenario-based training, a serious games for medical training we developed exploiting the architecture and the results of a study about its effectivenes

Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research

Emerging applications such as Internet of Everything, Holographic Telepresence, collaborative robots, and space and deep-sea tourism are already highlighting the limitations of existing fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. These limitations are in terms of data-rate, latency, reliability, availability, processing, connection density and global coverage, spanning over ground, underwater and space. The sixth-generation (6G) of mobile networks are expected to burgeon in the coming decade to address these limitations. The development of 6G vision, applications, technologies and standards has already become a popular research theme in academia and the industry. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the current developments towards 6G. We highlight the societal and technological trends that initiate the drive towards 6G. Emerging applications to realize the demands raised by 6G driving trends are discussed subsequently. We also elaborate the requirements that are necessary to realize the 6G applications. Then we present the key enabling technologies in detail. We also outline current research projects and activities including standardization efforts towards the development of 6G. Finally, we summarize lessons learned from state-of-the-art research and discuss technical challenges that would shed a new light on future research directions towards 6G

High availability using virtualization

High availability has always been one of the main problems for a data center. Till now high availability was achieved by host per host redundancy, a highly expensive method in terms of hardware and human costs. A new approach to the problem can be offered by virtualization. Using virtualization, it is possible to achieve a redundancy system for all the services running on a data center. This new approach to high availability allows to share the running virtual machines over the servers up and running, by exploiting the features of the virtualization layer: start, stop and move virtual machines between physical hosts. The system (3RC) is based on a finite state machine with hysteresis, providing the possibility to restart each virtual machine over any physical host, or reinstall it from scratch. A complete infrastructure has been developed to install operating system and middleware in a few minutes. To virtualize the main servers of a data center, a new procedure has been developed to migrate physical to virtual hosts. The whole Grid data center SNS-PISA is running at the moment in virtual environment under the high availability system. As extension of the 3RC architecture, several storage solutions have been tested to store and centralize all the virtual disks, from NAS to SAN, to grant data safety and access from everywhere. Exploiting virtualization and ability to automatically reinstall a host, we provide a sort of host on-demand, where the action on a virtual machine is performed only when a disaster occurs.Comment: PhD Thesis in Information Technology Engineering: Electronics, Computer Science, Telecommunications, pp. 94, University of Pisa [Italy

Practical aspects of designing and developing a multimodal embodied agent

2021 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis reviews key elements that went into the design and construction of the CSU CwC Embodied agent, also known as the Diana System. The Diana System has been developed over five years by a joint team of researchers at three institutions – Colorado State University, Brandeis University and the University of Florida. Over that time, I contributed to this overall effort and in this thesis, I present a practical review of key elements involved in designing and constructing the system. Particular attention is paid to Diana's multimodal capabilities that engage asynchronously and concurrently to support realistic interactions with the user. Diana can communicate in visual as well as auditory modalities. She can understand a variety of hand gestures for object manipulation, deixis, etc. and can gesture in return. Diana can also hold a conversation with the user in spoken and/or written English. Gestures and speech are often at play simultaneously, supplementing and complementing each other. Diana conveys her attention through several non-verbal cues like slower blinking when inattentive, keeping her gaze on the subject of her attention, etc. Finally, her ability to express emotions with facial expressions adds another crucial human element to any user interaction with the system. Central to Diana's capabilities is a blackboard architecture coordinating a hierarchy of modular components, each controlling a part of Diana's perceptual, cognitive, and motor abilities. The modular design facilitates contributions from multiple disciplines, namely VoxSim/VoxML with Text-to-speech/Automatic Speech Recognition systems for natural language understanding, deep neural networks for gesture recognition, 3D computer animation systems, etc. – all integrated within the Unity game engine to create an embodied, intelligent agent that is Diana. The primary contribution of this thesis is to provide a detailed explanation of Diana's internal working along with a thorough background of the research that supports these technologies

Outline of a Subversive Technopoetic: for a Libertarian Pedartgogy

The thesis explores the relationships between knowledge and knowing in contemporary 21st century information society, using the foundation of the Faculty of Media Design & New Media Art at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milano as a research apparatus. This Faculty was established between 2003 and 2012, in Milano, Italy. The starting point of the research was established in the hypothesis that technics have tertiarised memory (Stiegler B., 1994), that knowledge is always founded on an ontological pessimism (Queneau R., 1933, Lyotard F., 1979) and on a perpetual process of the generation of meaning (Gadda C., 1923-29, Foucault M., 1966). Knowledge is always and inevitably linked to the technics with which it is passed on. Pedagogy becomes a questioning of the object of knowledge, which transmutes into a definition of the ways it can be visualised. This research then, setting out from a pessimistic position in relation to knowledge and truth, amplifies them to infinite possible forms and therefore causes a dual shift of philosophy towards art and of pedagogy towards hermeneutics. The methodology consisted of a textual and visual description of a territory in a cartography of meaning, seen as the relation between intuition and the way in which practices as knowledges, arts, form remnants