Hand Posture Recognition in Sign Language Using Shape Distributions

A shape distribution is a histogram used to uniquely identify different shapes. The histogram is produced by taking random distances on the surface of a shape or object. Theoretically, each shape or object should produce a unique histogram, as the distribution of distances for each shape should be different. Shape distributions have recently been implemented in a number of object recognition areas. They are an attractive method as they are inherently simple, fast and generic. This paper presents the results of research undertaken on the application of shape distributions for the purpose of sign language recognition. There are four main elements that need to be undertaken in building a fully operational sign language recognition system, namely: posture, position, orientation and motion. It is the first of these components that this paper addresses

Initial Experiences Gained and Initiatives employed in the Teaching of Java Programming in the Institute of Technology Tallaght

This paper describes recent experiences gained and initiatives employed in the teaching of Java programming to first and second year students in the Institute of Technology Tallaght from September 2000 to March 2002. It outlines some elearning, technological and pedagogical initiatives that were undertaken within the department and the resultant preliminary outcomes. The outcomes have been determined after detailed analysis of the results of a survey which was commissioned to determine the effectiveness of the initiatives and also to identify those parts of the Java language which were causing students particular difficulty. The students surveyed are currently completing their fourth and final Java programming module. The Java programming modules make up the software development stream of a 2- year National Certificate in Computing (Information Systems). The typical profile of a first year computing student in IT Tallaght is someone who has achieved a reasonable but not exceptional level of academic attainment in the Leaving Certificate and who has had little or no previous exposure to software development. The design of the Java programming modules, while geared towards novices, is ambitious in an institutional learning context

A performance analysis of WS-* (SOAP) and RESTful Web Services for Implementing Service and Resource Orientated Architectures

The past number of years have seen the emergence of Service-Oriented Architectures as a dominant architecture for implementing enterprise scale distributed systems. Two main styles of SOA exist, namely SOAP based services and RESTful services. There has been much comment and debate on the pros and cons of each approach to implementing a SOA, a lot of which has surrounded the performance characterictcs of both approaches. In this paper, the authors presents the results of a performance analysis that was conducted on a set of test SOA scenarios implemented using both SOAP and RESTful approaches; in particular the caching capabilities of REST have been exploited with significant benefits accruing, an option not available with SOAP based approaches

An Investigation of Distributed Schema Free Tabular Data Storage Technologies on Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure

This paper examines schema free non-relational tabular storage for two important emerging Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments, where Google App Engine applications persist data to the Google Datastore, and Microsoft Azure applications store data in Azure Tables. A simple mobile web application was initially developed for both platforms, to understand how an application could be developed and deployed. Java Data Objects (JDO) was selected for Google App Engine and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in C# for Microsoft Azure. Many applications have a requirement to store complex data that is organised in relations in the order of One to One, One to Many and Many to Many that are often implemented in a relational database. Azure SQL and Google Cloud SQL are RDBMS technologies implemented on these Cloud platforms but are more costly to use. A testbed was developed to investigate implementation of these relations using automatic management features and developer managed techniques on each platform using JDO and WCF. An evaluation on primitive operations was carried out on both environments indicating each provided adequate operations to create, update, delete and display data. Due to design differences App Engine JDO scored better. An evaluation of how relations could be implemented was also conducted. Google App Engine JDO provides automatic management of One to One and One to Many relations while Microsoft Azure does not provide any relations management features. Google App Engine JDO permits storage of non-primitive types such as java.util.List objects which allows for tracking of child entity keys with ease, but this is not available in Azure Tables. Attempting to develop Join semantics in application code proved to be error prone and difficult with Azure Tables. A number of alternative proposals are made to implement relations on Azure Tables

Managing Content-Initiated Application Delivery With a Client-Side Agent

Mobile devices have evolved with improvements in processing power and support for various application environments such as MExE [1]. Currently a large number of devices and platforms exist, each with various attributes. Such diversity results in problems providing appropriate applications to these devices. This paper outlines need for an integrated approach to application delivery for mobile devices. The solution allows suitable applications to be delivered to devices. Application management is removed from non-technical mobile device users through the presence of a client-side agent to manage the complexity of application provisioning, device resource management and application management

An investigation of the impact of language runtime on the performance and cost of serverless functions

Serverless, otherwise known as “Function-as-a- Service” (FaaS), is a compelling evolution of cloud computing that is highly scalable and event-driven. Serverless applications are composed of multiple independent functions, each of which can be implemented in a range of programming languages. This paper seeks to understand the impact of the choice of language runtime on the performance and subsequent cost of serverless function execution. It presents the design and implementation of a new serverless performance testing framework created to analyse performance and cost metrics for both AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. For optimum performance and cost management of serverless applications, Python is the clear choice on AWS Lambda. C# .NET is the top performer and most economical option for Azure Functions. NodeJS on Azure Functions and .NET Core 2 on AWS should be avoided or at the very least, used carefully in order to avoid their potentially slow and costly start-up times

Prototyping real-time systems

The traditional software development paradigm, the waterfall life cycle model, is defective when used for developing real-time systems. This thesis puts forward an executable prototyping approach for the development of real-time systems. A prototyping system is proposed which uses ESML (Extended Systems Modelling Language) as a prototype specification language. The prototyping system advocates the translation of non-executable ESML specifications into executable LOOPN (Language of Object Oriented Petn Net) specifications so that ESML can be used as a graphical executable specification language for the prototyping of real-time systems. If the translation process is automatic then the user need not be aware of LOOPN. The ESML/LOOPN prototyping system defines an execution semantics for the ESML language in terms of LOOPN nets, a set of translation templates are supplied for the translation of ESML language specifications into LOOPN language specifications. The execution semantics are based on a set of execution rules (guidelines) which have been defined for ESML to allow prediction of the behaviour of ESML specifications over time. A C language program which can be run by the user as a prototype of the modelled system is generated automatically from the LOOPN specification. The ESML/LOOPN prototyping system has been applied to build an exploratory prototype of a typical real-time system, 1e the Fuel Subsystem of the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), an avionic system used on the Boeing-737 airplane series

A Study of Mobile Internet Capability Trends to Assess the Effectiveness of the W3C Default Delivery Context (DDC)

The mobile Internet is becoming increasingly popular, but the usability of many Web applications provides a negative mobile Internet experience. This paper researched the Internet capabilities of Web-enabled mobile phones through statistics generated using the R programming environment with data sourced from MobileAware’s Device Description Repository (DDR). Time series analysis and measures of location were applied to the data set. Hands-on testing using selected mobile browsers were carried out to backup and prove findings. The data set contained 1384 device descriptions from LG, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson mobile phones that have a browser capable rendering XHTML Basic 1.0 or better. The results of the research were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the W3C Default Delivery Context (DDC) and recommendations were proposed to adjust parts of the specification to improve end user experience and give developers more flexibility when designing mobile Internet applications. Five of the eight DDC recommendations were adjusted and presented as an Enhanced Delivery Context (EDC). Keywords: mobile Internet, mobile browsers, DDC, ED