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

Feature-based generation of pervasive systems architectures utilizing software product line concepts

As the need for pervasive systems tends to increase and to dominate the computing discipline, software engineering approaches must evolve at a similar pace to facilitate the construction of such systems in an efficient manner. In this thesis, we provide a vision of a framework that will help in the construction of software product lines for pervasive systems by devising an approach to automatically generate architectures for this domain. Using this framework, designers of pervasive systems will be able to select a set of desired system features, and the framework will automatically generate architectures that support the presence of these features. Our approach will not compromise the quality of the architecture especially as we have verified that by comparing the generated architectures to those manually designed by human architects. As an initial step, and in order to determine the most commonly required features that comprise the widely most known pervasive systems, we surveyed more than fifty existing architectures for pervasive systems in various domains. We captured the most essential features along with the commonalities and variabilities between them. The features were categorized according to the domain and the environment that they target. Those categories are: General pervasive systems, domain-specific, privacy, bridging, fault-tolerance and context-awareness. We coupled the identified features with well-designed components, and connected the components based on the initial features selected by a system designer to generate an architecture. We evaluated our generated architectures against architectures designed by human architects. When metrics such as coupling, cohesion, complexity, reusability, adaptability, modularity, modifiability, packing density, and average interaction density were used to test our framework, our generated architectures were found comparable, if not better than the human generated architectures

Service-oriented Context-aware Framework

Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware, client-service type application development and use. Location information is combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment (e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location data of various sources

ChimpCheck: Property-Based Randomized Test Generation for Interactive Apps

We consider the problem of generating relevant execution traces to test rich interactive applications. Rich interactive applications, such as apps on mobile platforms, are complex stateful and often distributed systems where sufficiently exercising the app with user-interaction (UI) event sequences to expose defects is both hard and time-consuming. In particular, there is a fundamental tension between brute-force random UI exercising tools, which are fully-automated but offer low relevance, and UI test scripts, which are manual but offer high relevance. In this paper, we consider a middle way---enabling a seamless fusion of scripted and randomized UI testing. This fusion is prototyped in a testing tool called ChimpCheck for programming, generating, and executing property-based randomized test cases for Android apps. Our approach realizes this fusion by offering a high-level, embedded domain-specific language for defining custom generators of simulated user-interaction event sequences. What follows is a combinator library built on industrial strength frameworks for property-based testing (ScalaCheck) and Android testing (Android JUnit and Espresso) to implement property-based randomized testing for Android development. Driven by real, reported issues in open source Android apps, we show, through case studies, how ChimpCheck enables expressing effective testing patterns in a compact manner.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures, Symposium on New ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!2017

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications