Developing Collaborative XML Editing Systems

In many areas the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is becoming the standard exchange and data format. More and more applications not only support XML as an exchange format but also use it as their data model or default file format for graphic, text and database (such as spreadsheet) applications. Computer Supported Cooperative Work is an interdisciplinary field of research dealing with group work, cooperation and their supporting information and communication technologies. One part of it is Real-Time Collaborative Editing, which investigates the design of systems which allow several persons to work simultaneously in real-time on the same document, without the risk of inconsistencies. Existing collaborative editing research applications specialize in one or at best, only a small number of document types; for example graphic, text or spreadsheet documents. This research investigates the development of a software framework which allows collaborative editing of any XML document type in real-time. This presents a more versatile solution to the problems of real-time collaborative editing. This research contributes a new software framework model which will assist software engineers in the development of new collaborative XML editing applications. The devised framework is flexible in the sense that it is easily adaptable to different workflow requirements covering concurrency control, awareness mechanisms and optional locking of document parts. Additionally this thesis contributes a new framework integration strategy that enables enhancements of existing single-user editing applications with real-time collaborative editing features without changing their source code

Increasing the User Experience in Autonomous Driving through different Feedback Modalities

Within the ongoing process of defining autonomous driving solutions, experience design may represent an important interface between humans and the autonomous vehicle. This paper presents an empirical study that uses different ways of unimodal communication in autonomous driving to communicate awareness and intent of autonomous vehicles. The goal is to provide recommendations for feedback solutions within holistic autonomous driving experiences. 22 test subjects took part in four autonomous, simulated virtual reality shuttle rides and were presented with different unimodal feedback in the form of light, sound, visualisation, text and vibration. The empirical study showed that, compared to a no-feedback baseline ride, light, and visualisation were able to create a positive user experience

FlexCAR – eine autonome Fahrzeugforschungsplattform der Zukunft

FlexCAR ist ein öffentlich gefördertes BMBF - Forschungsprojekt, in welchem zwölf Verbundpartner aus Industrie und Wissenschaft zusammenarbeiten. FlexCAR ist eines von vier Leitprojekten der ARENA 2036 und läuft bis 09/2023. Das FlexCAR mit seiner standardisierten, autonomen Fahrzeugplattform für die Mobilität von morgen fungiert als Forschungsdemonstrator. Neue Technologien können nach dem Plug-and-Play-Prinzip unmittelbar aus dem Forschungsstadium implementiert werden, was eine frühzeitige Validierung im Hinblick auf künftige Anwendungspotentiale ermöglicht. Offene Soft- und Hardwareschnittstellen sind hier berücksichtigt, beziehungsweise werden weiterentwickelt. Das FlexCAR besteht aus drei modularen Komponenten: zwei Drive-Module und eine Energy-Modul. Das Energy-Modul kann mit Batteriespeichern, oder wahlweise mit Brennstoffzellenstacks bestückt werden. Die wesentlichen Fahrfunktionen werden durch einen elektrischen Allradantrieb und zwei gelenkte Achsen ermöglicht. Verschiedenartige Sensoren sind am FlexCAR verbaut und dienen der Automatisierung, als auch der Steuerung via Smartphone. Eine Positionsbestimmung erfolgt beispielsweise über 5G-Lokalisierung bzw. Sattelitennavigationssysteme, oder der Anbindung von Infrastruktur-Sensoren. Ex- und Interieur der Fahrgastzelle werden im Projekt cyberphysisch in Mixed Reality (Virtual Reality + echte, physische Objekte) dargestellt. Zwei Bodenplattenaufbauten mit integrierten Schienen für Sitze können auf die Plattform aufgesetzt werden, um somit neue „Mobile Working“-, sowie „Private“- Konzepte (cyber-)physisch untersuchen zu können. Das FlexCAR ist von seinem Forschungsansatz als ein UseCase-gesteuerter, offener Demonstrator aufgebaut, an welchem je nach gewünschtem UseCase wettbewerbs- und baureihenunabhängig in einem sehr frühen Forschungsstadium flexibel Forschungsarbeiten und Validierungen durchgeführt werden können

Don’t fail me! The Level 5 Autonomous Driving Information Dilemma regarding Transparency and User Experience

Autonomous vehicles can behave unexpectedly, as automated systems that rely on data-driven machine learning have shown to infer false predictions or misclassifications, e.g., due to stickers on traffic signs, and thus fail in some situations. In critical situations, system designs must guarantee safety and reliability. However, in non-critical situations, the possibility of failures resulting in unexpected behaviour should be considered, as they negatively impact the passenger’s user experience and acceptance. We analyse if an interactive conversational user interface can mitigate negative experiences when interacting with imperfect artificial intelligence systems. In our quantitative interactive online survey (N=113) and comparative qualitative Wizard of Oz study (N=8), users were able to interact with an autonomous SAE level 5 driving simulation. Our findings demonstrate that increased transparency improves user experience and acceptance. Furthermore, we show that additional information in failure scenarios can lead to an information dilemma and should be implemented carefully

Graph-Based Caching for Server-Push Enabled Adaptive Hypertext Applications

The inherent structure of applications defined with hypertext markup languages is that of a graph. Push-enabled protocols like HTTP/2 drive the need for solutions allowing the server to traverse this graph and preemptively push related resources to the client. In addition to this, user interface adaptation to various mobile devices belongs to the server's tasks. Taking into account the diversities in client hardware, software and user preferences we designed a solution to reuse once adapted resources for similar configurations. In this paper we propose a new caching architecture for these purposes that is based on the application of graph database systems. With different approaches we show how to increase their performance when used as resource caches. In our evaluation the proposed implementation reduced the amount of adapted resources by 89%. In a real-world scenario it achieved twice the throughput of a traditional implementation and used 40% less heap memory

Resource Dependency Processing in Web Scaling Frameworks

The upsurge of mobile devices paired with highly interactive social web applications generates enormous amounts of requests web services have to deal with. Consequently in our previous work, a novel request flow scheme with scalable components was proposed for storing interdependent, permanently updated resources in a database. The major challenge is to process dependencies in an optimal fashion while maintaining dependency constraints. In this work, three research objectives are evaluated by examining resource dependencies and their key graph measurements. An all-sources longest-path algorithm is presented for efficient processing and dependencies are analysed to find correlations between performance and graph measures. Two algorithms basing their parameters on six real-world web service structures, e.g., Facebook Graph API are developed to generate dependency graphs and a model is developed to estimate performance based on resource parameters. An evaluation of four graph series discusses performance effects of different graph structures. The results of an evaluation of 2,000 web services with over 850 thousand resources and 6 million requests indicate that resource dependency processing can be up to a factor of two faster compared to a traditional processing approach while an average model fit of 97 percent allows an accurate prediction

Accelerated service discovery in vehicular networks

Service discovery in vehicular networks has been extensively investigated in literature. Collecting and disseminating data in high mobility networks in a reliable and efficient way without exhausting network bandwidth is still challenging, due to unreliable channel access in broadcast scenarios and thus results in loss of time through resending packets. Sending delta information to reduce network traffic, grouping vehicles of same direction and velocity into clusters, performing multiplexing to access the shared wireless network channel are interesting existing approaches in vehicular networks. Discovery protocols do not profit from a combination of those techniques yet. This paper proposes the High Mobility Gossip-Konark for high mobility vehicular networks. Simulations underline the proposed design

RemoteUI: A high-performance remote user interface system for mobile consumer electronic devices

Innovative applications become feasible with solutions for remotely controlling mobile devices over the air. To realize these applications, efficient technologies for transferring the devices' user interfaces are required. Existing remote user interface (UI) solutions however were not built for the mobile world. Rich, touchable user interfaces on battery-powered devices combined with low available bandwidth and high network latency will highlight their problems. We propose a new solution called RemoteUI, which works with abstract UI descriptions and their remote replication. Experiment results show that RemoteUI significantly outperforms the existing popular Virtual Network Computing (VNC) approach, and it is highly efficient in terms of required bandwidth when compared with VNC

Measuring the impact of medicines information services on patient care: methodological considerations.

INTRODUCTION: Medicines information services (MISs) aim to promote the safe, effective and economic use of medicines. Results from published studies suggest that they provide effective information, which in many cases results in improved patient outcome. However, there are several methodological issues that are important in the interpretation of such studies. AIM: To address methodological issues in the evaluation of MISs. OBJECTIVES: To carry out a critical appraisal of papers assessing the impact on patient outcome of passive information given to health care professionals, to identify the key methodological issues and to make recommendations for future research in Europe. METHODS: Literature search to identify relevant papers meeting the inclusion criteria, critical evaluation of the methods used. RESULTS: Most studies have been conducted in the United States. Various methodological considerations were identified: study design, sampling, data collection, choice of outcome measures, and validity. The results of each study are interpreted in view of the methods used. In addition, the implications of the methods selected on the validity, reliability and generalisability of the results are discussed. Finally, suggestions for future studies are provided, in order to maximise validity and reliability