Personalizable Service Discovery in Pervasive Systems

Today, telecom providers are facing changing challenges. To stay ahead in the competition and provide market leading offerings, carriers need to enable a global ecosystem of third party independent application developers to deliver converged services. This is the aim of leveraging a open standardsbased service delivery platform. To identify and to cope with those challenges is the main target of the EU funded project IST DAIDALOS II. And a central point to satisfy the changing user needs is the provision of a well working, user friendly and personalized service discovery. This paper describes our work in the project on a middleware in a framework for pervasive service usage. We have designed an architecture for it, that enables full transparency to the user, grants high compatibility and extendability by a modular and pluggable conception and allows for interoperability with most known service discovery protocols. Our Multi-Protocol Service Discovery and the Four Phases Service Filtering concept enabling personalization should allow for the best possible results in service discovery

REDUCCIÓN DEL COSTE COMPUTACIONAL DE LA INFERENCIA DE CONTEXTO BAYESIANA MEDIANTE EL USO DE RANGOS DE VALORES DINÁMICOS

This paper shows how to reduce evaluation time for context inference. Probabilistic Context Inference has proven to be more powerful and better adapted to the challenges of the physical reality with uncertain or missing information. As the inference complexity is very high, the complexity of the to be evaluated rule (representing a share of the real world) should be reduced as far as possible. Therefore we present an approach to select only relevant values of context types and to adapt this selection during its usage time. In an evaluation we show that with only a few evaluations of the reduced inference rules the reduction costs will have amortized and the system brings significant benefit to context aware computing

The Influence of Implicit Hand-Based Representations on Mental Arithmetic

Recently, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. It has been argued that bodily experiences such as finger counting may influence the structure of the basic mental representations of numbers even in adults. However, to date it remains unclear whether the structure of finger counting systems also influences educated adults’ performance in mental arithmetic. In the present study, we pursued this question by examining finger-based sub-base-five effects in an addition production task. With the standard effect of a carry operation (i.e., base-10 crossing) being replicated, we observed an additional sub-base-five effect such that crossing a sub-base-five boundary led to a relative response time increase. For the case of mental arithmetic sub-base-five effects have previously been reported only in children. However, it remains unclear whether finger-based numerical effects in mental arithmetic reflect an important but transitory step in the development of arithmetical skills. The current findings suggest that even in adults embodied representations such as finger counting patterns modulate arithmetic performance. Thus, they support the general idea that even seemingly abstract cognition in adults may at least partly be rooted in our bodily experiences

Open Vehicular Data Interfaces for In-Car Context Inference

In this paper, we present a concept for an open vehicular data interface and describe it's components and architecture. We discuss the enabled applications in the context of advanced driver assistance systems with a focus on humanmachine interfaces, vehicle-to-x (V2X) communication and context inference systems. We conclude by a presentation of the initial implementation and deployed system

Multimodal Semantic Quantity Representations: Further Evidence from Korean Sign Language

Korean deaf signers performed a number comparison task on pairs of Arabic digits. In their response times profiles, the expected magnitude effect was systematically modified by properties of number signs in Korean sign language in a culture-specific way (not observed in hearing and deaf Germans or hearing Chinese). We conclude that finger-based quantity representations are automatically activated even in simple tasks with symbolic input although this may be irrelevant and even detrimental for task performance. These finger-based numerical representations are accessed in addition to another, more basic quantity system which is evidenced by the magnitude effect. In sum, these results are inconsistent with models assuming only one single amodal representation of numerical quantity

A Hybrid Preference Learning and Context Refinement Architecture

Pervasive computing envisions a world where people are surrounded by numerous communication and computing interconnected devices that are invisible and assist users in their everyday tasks in a seamless unobtrusive manner. Most pervasive computing research initiatives aim towards the realization of smart spaces, i.e. fixed spaces that provide pervasive features in a static and geographically limited environment. To bridge these isolated pervasive spaces, the EU project Persist has introduced the concept of self-improving Personal Smart Spaces (PSSs) that follow their owners wherever they go. This paper provides an overview of the context and preference learning facilities that have been designed to support the realization of PSSs and enhance their proactivity and self-improvement features

Providing real-time assistance in disaster relief by leveraging crowdsourcing power

Crowdsourcing platforms for disaster management have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to their efficiency in disaster relief tasks, especially for disaster data collection and analysis. Although the on-site rescue staff can largely benefit from these crowdsourcing data, due to the rapidly evolving situation at the disaster site, they usually encounter various difficulties and have requests, which need to be resolved in a short time. In this paper, aiming at efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing power to provide those on-site rescue staff with real-time remote assistance, we design and develop a crowdsourcing disaster support platform by considering three unique features, viz., selecting and notifying relevant off-site users for individual request according to their expertise; providing collaborative working functionalities to off-site users; improving answer credibility via “crowd voting.” To evaluate the platform, we conducted a series of experiments with three-round user trials and also a System Usability Scale survey after each trial. The results show that the platform can effectively support on-site rescue staff by leveraging crowdsourcing power and achieve good usability

Categorical and continuous - disentangling the neural correlates of the carry effect in multi-digit addition

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recently it was suggested that the carry effect observed in addition involves both categorical and continuous processing characteristics.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In the present study, we aimed at identifying the specific neural correlates associated with processing either categorical or continuous aspects of the carry effect in an fMRI study on multi-digit addition.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In line with our expectations, we observed two distinct parts of the fronto-parietal network subserving numerical cognition to be associated with either one of these two characteristics. On the one hand, the categorical aspect of the carry effect was associated with left-hemispheric language areas and the basal ganglia probably reflecting increased demands on procedural and problem solving processes. Complementarily, the continuous aspect of the carry effect was associated with increased intraparietal activation indicating increasing demands on magnitude processing as well as place-value integration with increasing unit sum.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In summary, the findings suggest representations and processes underlying the carry effect in multi-digit addition to be more complex and interactive than assumed previously.</p

S100A9 is indispensable for survival of pneumococcal pneumonia in mice

S100A8/A9 has important immunomodulatory roles in antibacterial defense, but its relevance in focal pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) is understudied. We show that S100A9 was significantly increased in BAL fluids of patients with bacterial but not viral pneumonia and correlated with procalcitonin and sequential organ failure assessment scores. Mice deficient in S100A9 exhibited drastically elevated Zn$^{2+}$ levels in lungs, which led to bacterial outgrowth and significantly reduced survival. In addition, reduced survival of S100A9 KO mice was characterized by excessive release of neutrophil elastase, which resulted in degradation of opsonophagocytically important collectins surfactant proteins A and D. All of these features were attenuated in S. pneumoniae-challenged chimeric WT→S100A9 KO mice. Similarly, therapy of S. pneumoniae-infected S100A9 KO mice with a mutant S100A8/A9 protein showing increased half-life significantly decreased lung bacterial loads and lung injury. Collectively, S100A9 controls central antibacterial immune mechanisms of the lung with essential relevance to survival of pneumococcal pneumonia. Moreover, S100A9 appears to be a promising biomarker to distinguish patients with bacterial from those with viral pneumonia. Trial registration: Clinical Trials register (DRKS00000620)