Business Model Development for a Mobile Context-aware Service

Mobile information services, preceded on tablet computers, smartphones or other mobile devices, are a significant source of information for people nowadays. By including context data, a new category of information services has been established. On the application side, a range of innovative services, providing the user with an added-value, could be observed in the previous years, boosted by the wide-spread adoption of smartphones in developed countries. For the application provider, the question how to configure the business model is crucial: several factors such as the service configuration, the revenue model and the configuration of the value creation network, which all can be seen as decisive factors for success or failure of a service. In this paper we present a context-aware service named \u27Digital Graffiti\u27 and describe the process of the business model development. As an outcome of this process, a specific business model, based on feasibility and future prospect, was chosen and further described

Imaging of metabolic activity adaptations to UV stress, drugs and differentiation at cellular resolution in skin and skin equivalents – Implications for oxidative UV damage

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Suppression of Autophagy Dysregulates the Antioxidant Response and Causes Premature Senescence of Melanocytes

YesAutophagy is the central cellular mechanism for delivering organelles and cytoplasm to lysosomes for degradation and recycling of their molecular components. To determine the contribution of autophagy to melanocyte (MC) biology, we inactivated the essential autophagy gene Atg7 specifically in MCs using the Cre-loxP system. This gene deletion efficiently suppressed a key step in autophagy, lipidation of microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3 beta (LC3), in MCs and induced slight hypopigmentation of the epidermis in mice. The melanin content of hair was decreased by 10–15% in mice with autophagy-deficient MC as compared with control animals. When cultured in vitro, MCs from mutant and control mice produced equal amounts of melanin per cell. However, Atg7-deficient MCs entered into premature growth arrest and accumulated reactive oxygen species (ROS) damage, ubiquitinated proteins, and the multi-functional adapter protein SQSTM1/p62. Moreover, nuclear factor erythroid 2–related factor 2 (Nrf2)–dependent expression of NAD(P)H dehydrogenase, quinone 1, and glutathione S-transferase Mu 1 was increased, indicating a contribution of autophagy to redox homeostasis in MCs. In summary, the results of our study suggest that Atg7-dependent autophagy is dispensable for melanogenesis but necessary for achieving the full proliferative capacity of MCs

A dialogue based mobile virtual assistant for tourists: The SpaceBook Project

Ubiquitous mobile computing offers innovative approaches in the delivery of information that can facilitate free roaming of the city, informing and guiding the tourist as the city unfolds before them. However making frequent visual reference to mobile devices can be distracting, the user having to interact via a small screen thus disrupting the explorative experience. This research reports on an EU funded project, SpaceBook, that explored the utility of a hands-free, eyes-free virtual tour guide, that could answer questions through a spoken dialogue user interface and notify the user of interesting features in view while guiding the tourist to various destinations. Visibility modelling was carried out in real-time based on a LiDAR sourced digital surface model, fused with a variety of map and crowd sourced datasets (e.g. Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap, Flickr, Foursquare) to establish the most interesting landmarks visible from the user's location at any given moment. A number of variations of the SpaceBook system were trialled in Edinburgh (Scotland). The research highlighted the pleasure derived from this novel form of interaction and revealed the complexity of prioritising route guidance instruction alongside identification, description and embellishment of landmark information – there being a delicate balance between the level of information ‘pushed’ to the user, and the user's requests for further information. Among a number of challenges, were issues regarding the fidelity of spatial data and positioning information required for pedestrian based systems – the pedestrian having much greater freedom of movement than vehicles

Systems The Telegram Pattern

Frameworks are considered as a fundamental base for building powerful applications in object-oriented systems. In connection with design patterns, they provide an architectural guide for frequently appearing problems. Although, frameworks and design patterns can be regarded as state of the art in modern Software Engineering [5], they have not made their entrance to the industrial market, yet. Many process automation systems [2] are still developed with traditional programming languages like Fortran or C, which restrict the reuse of software to a low level, whereas object-oriented techniques allow to reuse the whole logic of a system. This paper presents a part of a framework for process automation systems [4], which has been developed in the course of an EU-project. It deals with the difficulties in telegrambased communication when telegrams (data streams) are transferred between different platforms and converted to the data format of the target system. The problem is modeled by a new design pattern- the Telegram Pattern. The Telegram Pattern has been implemented with C++ and the CORBA [3] implementation Orbix. Its applicability within the framework has been validated by tests under realtime conditions at a hot rolling mill in Austria. It fulfills the requirements efficiency, flexibility, adaptability, reuse and portability and can henceforth be considered as a platform for the development of future process automation software