Desktop Sharing Portal

Desktop sharing technologies have existed since the late 80s. It is often used in scenarios where collaborative computing is beneficial to participants in the shared environment by the control of the more knowledgeable party. But the steps required in establishing a session is often cumbersome to many. Selection of a sharing method, obtaining sharing target’s network address, sharing tool’s desired ports, and firewall issues are major hurdles for a typical non-IT user. In this project, I have constructed a web-portal that helps collaborators to easily locate each other and initialize sharing sessions. The portal that I developed enables collaborated sessions to start as easily as browsing to a URL of the sharing service provider, with no need to download or follow installation instructions on either party’s end. In addition, I have added video conferencing and audio streaming capability to bring better collaborative and multimedia experience

BIM-Vision-Based Indoor Localization Prototype

[[abstract]]Purpose In order to provide an economical indoor location detective technique, this study is uses photo images as the indoor spatial identification tags associated with the spatial information of the existing building information model (BIM), so that users can identify their locations via the camera on mobile device based on the real images. Method Unlike the wireless and radio frequency identification based indoor positioning techniques, this study applied the image recognition technique to indoor location detection. Three functional modules, namely, (i) BIM object location collector, (ii) spatial image management module, and (iii) vision-based location recognition module are developed. BIM object location collec- tor takes the responsibility to automatically collect the location data from the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) dataset of the existing BIM. Firstly, the spatial image management module provides an interface to clients for collecting spatial photos in buildings, and bind them with the location data transferred from the original buildinginformation model. Second- ly, the recognizable features of the spatial photos can be analyzed by the visionbased location recognition module which is developed based on the Dâfusion studio. According to the analyzed image features, the vision-based location recogni- tion module can then recognize the frames of the visions captured by the mobile device camera. Once the frame is rec- ognized, the corresponding spatial data can be retrieved. Results & Discussion Based on the designed architecture, a BIM-vision-based indoor localization prototype was developed as an android platform application running on the mobile device such as smart phones and tablets. Technique feasibility is continuously tested in the current phase. According to the basic test results, the prototype can identify the indoor locations of decorated spaces; however, once the indoor spaces lack of recognizable features, such as the empty spaces with blank and monotony walls, the recognition function failed. To overcome this defect, the Quick Response (QR) code, the trademark for a type of two-dimensional code, is used as a substitution of the photos for this prototype. Besides, since the location data is transferred from the existing building information model, data consistency can be ensured. In the future, the economic feasibility of this prototype will be analyzed to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20120627~20120629[[booktype]]紙本[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Eindhoven, Netherland

Impacts of stock prices and interest rates on tourism consumption

Tourism industry has emerged as a leader in the U.S.\u27s service economy in the last decade. Meanwhile, stock markets and interest rates have been playing a more important role in Americans everyday lives. Prior research mainly focused on the economic impact of travel and tourism industry, but there are very few studies regarding how changes in economic factors will affect domestic tourism industry. This study focuses on measuring the impacts of stock prices and interest rates on tourism consumption. The results of this study show that stock prices and interest rates do have a certain amount of impacts on people\u27s tourism consumption