Personalizable edge services for Web accessibility

Web Content Accessibility guidelines by W3C (W3C Recommendation, May 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) provide several suggestions for Web designers regarding how to author Web pages in order to make them accessible to everyone. In this context, this paper proposes the use of edge services as an efficient and general solution to promote accessibility and breaking down the digital barriers that inhibit users with disabilities to actively participate to any aspect of society. The idea behind edge services mainly affect the advantages of a personalized navigation in which contents are tailored according to different issues, such as client’s devices capabilities, communication systems and network conditions and, finally, preferences and/or abilities of the growing number of users that access the Web. To meet these requirements, Web designers have to efficiently provide content adaptation and personalization functionalities mechanisms in order to guarantee universal access to the Internet content. The so far dominant paradigm of communication on the WWW, due to its simple request/response model, cannot efficiently address such requirements. Therefore, it must be augmented with new components that attempt to enhance the scalability, the performances and the ubiquity of the Web. Edge servers, acting on the HTTP data flow exchanged between client and server, allow on-the-fly content adaptation as well as other complex functionalities beyond the traditional caching and content replication services. These value-added services are called edge services and include personalization and customization, aggregation from multiple sources, geographical personalization of the navigation of pages (with insertion/emphasis of content that can be related to the user’s geographical location), translation services, group navigation and awareness for social navigation, advanced services for bandwidth optimization such as adaptive compression and format transcoding, mobility, and ubiquitous access to Internet content. This paper presents Personalizable Accessible Navigation (Pan) that is a set of edge services designed to improve Web pages accessibility, developed and deployed on top of a programmable intermediary framework. The characteristics and the location of the services, i.e., provided by intermediaries, as well as the personalization and the opportunities to select multiple profiles make Pan a platform that is especially suitable for accessing the Web seamlessly also from mobile terminals

SPRWeb: preserving subjective responses to website colour schemes through automatic recolouring

Colours are an important part of user experiences on the Web. Colour schemes influence the aesthetics, first impressions and long-term engagement with websites. However, five percent of people perceive a subset of all colours because they have colour vision deficiency (CVD), resulting in an unequal and less-rich user experience on the Web. Traditionally, people with CVD have been supported by recolouring tools that improve colour differentiability, but do not consider the subjective properties of colour schemes while recolouring. To address this, we developed SPRWeb, a tool that recolours websites to preserve subjective responses and improve colour differentiability - thus enabling users with CVD to have similar online experiences. To develop SPRWeb, we extended existing models of non-CVD subjective responses to CVD, then used this extended model to steer the recolouring process. In a lab study, we found that SPRWeb did significantly better than a standard recolouring tool at preserving the temperature and naturalness of websites, while achieving similar weight and differentiability preservation. We also found that recolouring did not preserve activity, and hypothesize that visual complexity influences activity more than colour. SPRWeb is the first tool to automatically preserve the subjective and perceptual properties of website colour schemes thereby equalizing the colour-based web experience for people with CVD.Engineering and Applied Science

Antecedents and consequences of effectuation and causation in the international new venture creation process

The selection of the entry mode in an international market is of key importance for the venture. A process-based perspective on entry mode selection can add to the International Business and International Entrepreneurship literature. Framing the international market entry as an entrepreneurial process, this paper analyzes the antecedents and consequences of causation and effectuation in the entry mode selection. For the analysis, regression-based techniques were used on a sample of 65 gazelles. The results indicate that experienced entrepreneurs tend to apply effectuation rather than causation, while uncertainty does not have a systematic influence. Entrepreneurs using causation-based international new venture creation processes tend to engage in export-type entry modes, while effectuation-based international new venture creation processes do not predetermine the entry mod

The Liquid Argon Jet Trigger of the H1 Experiment at HERA

We report on a novel trigger for the liquid argon calorimeter which was installed in the H1 Experiment at HERA.This trigger, called the “Jet Trigger”, was running at level 1 and implemented a real-time cluster algorithm. Within only 800 ns, the Jet Trigger algorithm found local energy maxima in the calorimeter, summed their immediate neighbors, sorted the resulting jets by energy, and applied topological conditions for the final level 1 trigger decision. The Jet Trigger was in operation from the year 2006 until the end of the HERA running in the summer of 2007. With the Jet Trigger it was possible to substantially reduce the thresholds for triggering on electronsand jets, giving access to a largely extended phase space for physical observables which could not have been reached in H1 before. The concepts of the Jet Trigger may be an interesting upgrade option for the LHC experiments

Peculiarities of selecting the gearboxes and wheel shift coefficients in the optimization of drive gear transmissions

В якості вузлового моменту оптимізаційного проектування тягових зубчастих передач залізничного рухомого складу виділено процедуру обґрунтованого вибору коефіцієнтів зміщення шестерень і коліс за рахунок використання відповідних блокувальних контурів. Обґрунтовано актуальність досліджень з розроблення методичного забезпечення для раціонального отримання блокувальних контурів при проектуванні тягових зубастих передач. Представлені розроблені математичні залежності, що пов’язують фіксовані величині обмежувальних і контрольованих параметрів передач з числами зубців і коефіцієнтами зміщення шестерні та колеса. Їх використання дозволяє отримувати конкретні блокувальні контури для вибору коефіцієнтів зміщення шестерні та колеса при оптимізаційному проектуванні тягових зубчастих передач з різними початковими параметрами. Наведено приклад практичної реалізації розроблених математичних залежностей при отриманні блокувального контуру для вибору коефіцієнтів зміщення шестерні та колеса тягової зубчастої передачі сучасного магістрального вантажного тепловозу. Зроблено висновок про доцільність використання запропонованого методичного забезпечення при оптимізаційному проектуванні тягових зубчатих передач.As a key point in the optimization design of traction gears of the railway rolling stock, a procedure for a reasonable choice of the coefficients for the displacement of gears and wheels is provided by using the appropriate blocking circuits. The relevance of studies on the development of methodological support for the rational production of blocking contours in the design of traction-toothed gears is substantiated. The developed mathematical dependences connecting the fixed values of the limiting and controlled parameters of the gears with the numbers of the teeth and the gearing coefficients of the gears and wheels are presented. Their use makes it possible to obtain specific blocking contours for the selection of gear and wheel bias coefficients in the optimization design of traction gears with different initial parameters. An example of the practical implementation of the developed mathematical dependencies in obtaining a blocking contour for selecting the gear displacement coefficients and the traction gear wheel of a modern mainline freight locomotive is given. The conclusion is made about the expediency of using the proposed methodological support in the optimization design of traction gears

Industry 4.0 as enabler of sustainability diffusion in supply chain: analysis of influential strength of drivers in emerging economy

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and sustainability are recent buzzwords in manufacturing environments. However, the connection between these two concepts is less explored in the literature. In the current business context, the future generation of manufacturing systems is greatly influenced by the rapid advancement of information technology. Therefore, this study aims to examine the drivers of I4.0 to diffuse sustainability in Supply Chains (SCs). This research identifies the most relevant drivers through the literature and discusses them with area experts. Afterwards, an empirical analysis is conducted to validate the key drivers. Finally, the Grey based DEMATEL method is employed to examine the influential strength of the identified drivers and to build an interrelationship diagram. ‘Government supportive policies’ and ‘Collaboration and transparency among supply chain members’ were reported as highly significant drivers of I4.0. This study is an initial effort that investigates the key drivers of I4.0 to achieve high triple bottom line (ecological-economic-social) gains in SCs by taking an example from an emerging economy, i.e. India. This study may help managers, practitioners and policy makers interested in I4.0 applications to diffuse sustainability in SCs.N/

Systems Perspectives on the Interaction Between Human and Technological Resources

Peer reviewe

Cultura de Inovação: Conceitos e Modelos Teóricos

This study portrays the state of the art in scientific literature on the culture of innovation, with the objective of characterizing its meaning and especially describing different theoretical models that seek to understand how it occurs in an organizational environment. To enrich the analysis, research results show the relationship between organizational culture and innovation. The literature review was carried out in 2011 using the following databases: Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), Proquest and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The keywords used were the expression culture of innovation and the joint terms culture and innovation, only full articles were included in the research. Culture of innovation articles that were cited in the papers identified in the literature search were also considered. The analysis consisted of 40 articles, based on the predefined criteria, and showed that this is a topic of interest for researchers in different world regions. It is a complex theme determined by factors with a systemic character. There is a predominance of quantitative research and strong evidence of a relationship between organizational culture and innovation, which requires further research to test the theoretical models proposed by these different authors