TOMRAS : a Task Oriented Mobile Remote Access System for desktop applications

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Mobile remote access to desktop applications is a potential enabler to improving the productivity and convenience of individuals and businesses. There is an increasing research interest in developing mobile remote access solutions for desktop applications. The developed proposals, however, are challenged by the hardware limitations of most mobile devices, such as the small display size. These limitations have a direct impact on the way existing desktop applications are presented on mobile devices. This thesis focuses on developing new ways of achieving effective mobile remote access to existing desktop applications. A conceptual model and implementation architecture for a task-oriented mobile remote access system (TOMRAS) have been introduced. The TOMRAS model adopts a user interface refactoring approach to generate task-oriented user interfaces for existing desktop applications without re-developing or modifying these applications. TOMRAS has a number of novel aspects, including, inferring user interface and behaviour knowledge from existing applications and transparently exposing the functionalities of existing desktop applications to be remotely accessible via a wide spectrum of mobile devices and platforms without redeveloping these desktop applications. The TOMRAS strategy of decoupling the generated mobile task's user interface from the functionality of existing applications also allows for a possible enriching of the mobile task's user interface with multimodal interaction capabilities. The thesis describes the TOMRAS conceptual model, and a potential implementation architecture for this model. The proposed implementation architecture articulates the intrinsic building blocks for mobile remote access solutions that adopt the TOMRAS model. The limitations of how widely and generically the model and techniques can be applied are also detailed in the thesis. Furthermore, a prototype that validates the feasibility of the TOMRAS implementation architecture is provided, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the task-oriented approach is presented

Imaging-guided chest biopsies: techniques and clinical results

Background This article aims to comprehensively describe indications, contraindications, technical aspects, diagnostic accuracy and complications of percutaneous lung biopsy. Methods Imaging-guided biopsy currently represents one of the predominant methods for obtaining tissue specimens in patients with lung nodules; in many cases treatment protocols are based on histological information; thus, biopsy is frequently performed, when technically feasible, or in case other techniques (such as bronchoscopy with lavage) are inconclusive. Results Although a coaxial system is suitable in any case, two categories of needles can be used: fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) and core-needle biopsy (CNB), with the latter demonstrated to have a slightly higher overall sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. Conclusion Percutaneous lung biopsy is a safe procedure even though a few complications are possible: pneumothorax, pulmonary haemorrhage and haemoptysis are common complications, while air embolism and seeding are rare, but potentially fatal complications

Transplantation of canine olfactory ensheathing cells producing chondroitinase ABC promotes chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan digestion and axonal sprouting following spinal cord injury

Olfactory ensheathing cell (OEC) transplantation is a promising strategy for treating spinal cord injury (SCI), as has been demonstrated in experimental SCI models and naturally occurring SCI in dogs. However, the presence of chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans within the extracellular matrix of the glial scar can inhibit efficient axonal repair and limit the therapeutic potential of OECs. Here we have used lentiviral vectors to genetically modify canine OECs to continuously deliver mammalian chondroitinase ABC at the lesion site in order to degrade the inhibitory chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans in a rodent model of spinal cord injury. We demonstrate that these chondroitinase producing canine OECs survived at 4 weeks following transplantation into the spinal cord lesion and effectively digested chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans at the site of injury. There was evidence of sprouting within the corticospinal tract rostral to the lesion and an increase in the number of corticospinal axons caudal to the lesion, suggestive of axonal regeneration. Our results indicate that delivery of the chondroitinase enzyme can be achieved with the genetically modified OECs to increase axon growth following SCI. The combination of these two promising approaches is a potential strategy for promoting neural regeneration following SCI in veterinary practice and human patients

Challenges for mobile remote access to desktop and web resources

Mobile remote access to personal computers and/or Web resources (i.e. Web contents and services) has the potential to enable important changes to the work practices of both businesses and individuals. There have been a number of attempts from both academic researchers as well as the industrial sector to develop mobile systems that can remotely access workstations or Web resources; however, a global acceptance of these systems has not been achieved yet. In this paper we review a decade of progress in the mobile remote access research area. We also highlight some of the open research issues and challenges that still exist. Copyright 2006 ACM

Enhancing mobile business through a task-oriented model for mobile remote access

Given the proliferation of mobile devices and the significant advancements in mobile technologies over the past few years, an important goal in mobile business is improving the productivity of field employees and executives through facilitating global remote access to their existing enterprise applications. While the research and industry efforts to develop mobile remote access systems is evident, a global acceptance of these systems has not been achieved yet. In this paper, we introduce a novel model and a candidate architecture that provides task oriented access to existing remote applications in order to provide the mobile users with the functionalities they need anywhere anytime. In this model, we propose a semiautomatic approach of generating a mobile device-based user interface for application tasks that allows remote access to desktop applications without modifying them. © 2007 IEEE

Towards the mobile Web - An architecture for multimodal interface auto-generation for Web pages and services

Given the research advancement in recognition technologies such as voice recognition, handwriting recognition, etc., multimodal interaction is an emerging technology that can revolutionize the mobile device input/ output capabilities given the limitations of mobile device keypads and screens. One important resource that can be accessed from mobile devices is the World Wide Web, but Web pages, as they are visual and may require typed input, may not be readily suited to mobile device access. While there are technology initiatives addressing the authoring of new Web pages that are multimodal-enabled, the generating of multimodal versions of existing Web pages has not been addressed. To help address this problem, we propose in this paper an architecture and approach to auto-generating multimodal representations of existing Web pages and services, thereby helping to enable the Mobile Web

Coordinating access control between a private registry and web service Providers

Securing and controlling the access to Web services is paramount to adopting Web services in distributed computing environments. In contrast to the existing access control models that focus on service client and provider ends, we propose in this paper a unified access control model, which uniquely consider the service registry as well as client and provider ends. The proposed model is applicable in the wired and wireless environments, and can support a wide spectrum of enterprises