Foundations for Reliable and Flexible Interactive Multimedia Scores

International audienceInteractive Scores (IS) is a formalism for composing and performing interactive multimedia scores with several applications in video games, live performance installations, and virtual museums. The composer defines the temporal organization of the score by asserting temporal relations (TRs) between temporal objects (TOs). At execution time, the performer may modify the start/stop times of the TOs by triggering interaction points and the system guarantees that all the TRs are satisfied. Implementations of IS and formal models of their behavior have already been proposed, but these do not provide usable means to reason about their properties. In this paper we introduce ReactiveIS, a programming language that fully captures the temporal structure of IS during both composition and execution. For that, we propose a semantics based on tree-like structures representing the execution state of the score at each point in time. The semantics captures the hierarchical aspects of IS and provides an intuitive representation of their execution. We also endow ReactiveIS with a logical semantics based on linear logic, thus widening the reasoning techniques available for IS. We show that ReactiveIS is general enough to capture the full behavior of IS and that it provides declarative ways to increase IS expressivity with, for instance, conditional statements and loops

A cross-layer architecture to improve mobile host rate performance and to solve unfairness problem in WLANs

The evolution of the Internet has been mainly promoted in recent years by the emergence and pro- liferation of wireless access networks towards a global ambient and pervasive network accessed from mobile devices. These new access networks have introduced new MAC layers independently of the legacy "wire- oriented" protocols that are still at the heart of the pro- tocol stacks of the end systems. This principle of isola- tion and independence between layers advocated by the OSI model has its drawbacks of maladjustment between new access methods and higher-level protocols built on the assumption of a wired Internet. In this paper, we introduce and deliver solutions for several pathologi- cal communication behaviors resulting from the malad- justment between WLAN MAC and higher layer stan- dard protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP. Specially, based on an efficient analytical model for WLANs band- width estimation, we address in this paper the two fol- lowing issues: 1) Performance degradation due to the lack of flow control between the MAC and upper layer resulting in potential MAC buffer overflow; 2) Unfair bandwidth share issues between various type of flows. We show how these syndromes can be efficiently solved from neutral "cross layer" interactions which entail no changes in the considered protocols and standards

Segmentation TV series into scenes using speaker diarization

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to perform scene segmentation of TV series. Using the output of our existing speaker diarization system, any temporal segment of the video can be described as a binary feature vector. A straightforward segmentation algorithm then allows to group similar contiguous speaker segments into scenes. An additional visual-only color-based segmentation is then used to refine the first segmentation. Experiments are performed on a subset of the Ally McBeal TV series and show promising results, obtained with a rule-free and genericmethod. For comparison purposes, test corpus annotations and description are made available to the community

Early Medieval Muslim Graves in France: First Archaeological, Anthropological and Palaeogenomic Evidence

International audienceThe rapid Arab-Islamic conquest during the early Middle Ages led to major political and cultural changes in the Mediterranean world. Although the early medieval Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula is now well documented, based in the evaluation of archeological and historical sources, the Muslim expansion in the area north of the Pyrenees has only been documented so far through textual sources or rare archaeological data. Our study provides the first archaeo-anthropological testimony of the Muslim establishment in South of France through the multidisciplinary analysis of three graves excavated at Nimes. First, we argue in favor of burials that followed Islamic rites and then note the presence of a community practicing Muslim traditions in Nimes. Second, the radiometric dates obtained from all three human skeletons (between the 7th and the 9th centuries AD) echo historical sources documenting an early Muslim presence in southern Gaul (i.e., the first half of 8th century AD). Finally, palaeogenomic analyses conducted on the human remains provide arguments in favor of a North African ancestry of the three individuals, at least considering the paternal lineages. Given all of these data, we propose that the skeletons from the Nimes burials belonged to Berbers integrated into the Umayyad army during the Arab expansion in North Africa. Our discovery not only discusses the first anthropological and genetic data concerning the Muslim occupation of the Visigothic territory of Septimania but also highlights the complexity of the relationship between the two communities during this period