Error resilience analysis of wireless image transmission using JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL

The wireless extension of the JPEG 2000 standard formally known as JPWL is the newest international standard for still image compression. Different from all previous standards, this new standard was created specifically for wireless imaging applications. This paper examines the error resilience performance of the JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL standards in combating multi-path and fading impairments in Rayleigh fading channels. Comprehensive objective and subjective results are presented in relation to the error resilience performance of these three standards under various conditions. The major findings in this paper reveal that a CRC approach is not a viable option for protecting wireless image data when not used in conjunction with an efficient retransmission strategy. In addition, the Reed-Solomon error correction codes in JPWL provide strong protection for wireless image transmission. However, any stronger protection beyond RS(64,32) yields diminishing returns

Work in progress: a novel method of creating an academic content repository

This paper outlines a project aimed at addressing the issue of the scalability of online academic support. This project is being run during the Autumn semester at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) Toowoomba Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Digital Futures Institute. The study attached to the project will use Design-Based Research to evaluate the effectiveness of a simple, but innovative academic content and metadata creation tool referred to as Academic Assist. Academic Assist has been recently developed at USQ as a plug-in block for the moodle-based Learning Management System employed at USQ for its several hundred online subjects. The pilot project and associated study now extends over nine subjects, including three consecutive subjects in computer engineering; and covers faculties of Engineering, Education, Business, Science and Arts. Some preliminary results are presented here. Complete results of the study including acceptance surveys, expert reviews and usage statistics will be presented at FIE 2009

ICMI 2012 chairs' welcome

Welcome to Santa Monica and to the 14th edition of the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2012. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. We had a record number of submissions this year: 147 (74 long papers, 49 short papers, 5 special session papers and 19 demo papers). From these submissions, we accepted 15 papers for long oral presentation (20.3% acceptance rate), 10 papers for short oral presentation (20.4% acceptance rate) and 19 papers presented as posters. We have a total acceptance rate of 35.8% for all short and long papers. 12 of the 19 demo papers were accepted. All 5 special session papers were directly invited by the organizers and the papers were all accepted. In addition, the program includes three invited Keynote talks. One of the two novelties introduced at ICMI this year is the Multimodal Grand Challenges. Developing systems that can robustly understand human-human communication or respond to human input requires identifying the best algorithms and their failure modes. In fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, and computational linguistics, the availability of datasets and common tasks have led to great progress. This year, we accepted four challenge workshops: the Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC), the Haptic Voice Recognition challenge, the D-META challenge and Brain-Computer Interface challenge. Stefanie Telex and Daniel Gatica-Perez are co-chairing the grand challenge this year. All four Grand Challenges will be presented on Monday, October 22nd, and a summary session will be happening on Wednesday, October 24th, afternoon during the main conference. The second novelty at ICMI this year is the Doctoral Consortium—a separate, one-day event to take place on Monday, October 22nd, co-chaired by Bilge Mutlu and Carlos Busso. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to provide Ph.D. students with an opportunity to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from a diverse set of academic and industrial backgrounds and institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young researchers interested in designing multimodal interfaces. All accepted students receive a travel grant to attend the conference. From among 25 applications, 14 students were accepted for participation and to receive travel funding. The organizers thank the National Science Foundation (award IIS-1249319) and conference sponsors for financial support

Ontology-based specific and exhaustive user profiles for constraint information fusion for multi-agents

Intelligent agents are an advanced technology utilized in Web Intelligence. When searching information from a distributed Web environment, information is retrieved by multi-agents on the client site and fused on the broker site. The current information fusion techniques rely on cooperation of agents to provide statistics. Such techniques are computationally expensive and unrealistic in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a model that uses a world ontology constructed from the Dewey Decimal Classification to acquire user profiles. By search using specific and exhaustive user profiles, information fusion techniques no longer rely on the statistics provided by agents. The model has been successfully evaluated using the large INEX data set simulating the distributed Web environment