1,563 research outputs found
HOMEBOTS: Intelligent Decentralized Services for Energy Management
The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the namewe have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a `society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved \ud
version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed
Trends and Techniques in Visual Gaze Analysis
Visualizing gaze data is an effective way for the quick interpretation of eye
tracking results. This paper presents a study investigation benefits and
limitations of visual gaze analysis among eye tracking professionals and
researchers. The results were used to create a tool for visual gaze analysis
within a Master's project.Comment: pages 89-93, The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction
- COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most, ISBN:
978-87-643-0475-
A systematic literature review of cloud computing in eHealth
Cloud computing in eHealth is an emerging area for only few years. There
needs to identify the state of the art and pinpoint challenges and possible
directions for researchers and applications developers. Based on this need, we
have conducted a systematic review of cloud computing in eHealth. We searched
ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Inspec, ISI Web of Science and Springer as
well as relevant open-access journals for relevant articles. A total of 237
studies were first searched, of which 44 papers met the Include Criteria. The
studies identified three types of studied areas about cloud computing in
eHealth, namely (1) cloud-based eHealth framework design (n=13); (2)
applications of cloud computing (n=17); and (3) security or privacy control
mechanisms of healthcare data in the cloud (n=14). Most of the studies in the
review were about designs and concept-proof. Only very few studies have
evaluated their research in the real world, which may indicate that the
application of cloud computing in eHealth is still very immature. However, our
presented review could pinpoint that a hybrid cloud platform with mixed access
control and security protection mechanisms will be a main research area for
developing citizen centred home-based healthcare applications
Mapping customer needs to engineering characteristics: an aerospace perspective for conceptual design
Designing complex engineering systems, such as an aircraft or an aero-engine, is immensely challenging. Formal Systems Engineering (SE) practices are widely used in the aerospace industry throughout the overall design process to minimise the overall design effort, corrective re-work, and ultimately overall development and manufacturing costs. Incorporating the needs and requirements from customers and other stakeholders into the conceptual and early design process is vital for the success and viability of any development programme. This paper presents a formal methodology, the Value-Driven Design (VDD) methodology that has been developed for collaborative and iterative use in the Extended Enterprise (EE) within the aerospace industry, and that has been applied using the Concept Design Analysis (CODA) method to map captured Customer Needs (CNs) into Engineering Characteristics (ECs) and to model an overall ‘design merit’ metric to be used in design assessments, sensitivity analyses, and engineering design optimisation studies. Two different case studies with increasing complexity are presented to elucidate the application areas of the CODA method in the context of the VDD methodology for the EE within the aerospace secto
Gameplay experience in a gaze interaction game
Assessing gameplay experience for gaze interaction games is a challenging
task. For this study, a gaze interaction Half-Life 2 game modification was
created that allowed eye tracking control. The mod was deployed during an
experiment at Dreamhack 2007, where participants had to play with gaze
navigation and afterwards rate their gameplay experience. The results show low
tension and negative affects scores on the gameplay experience questionnaire as
well as high positive challenge, immersion and flow ratings. The correlation
between spatial presence and immersion for gaze interaction was high and yields
further investigation. It is concluded that gameplay experience can be
correctly assessed with the methodology presented in this paper.Comment: pages 49-54, The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction
- COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most, ISBN:
978-87-643-0475-
Do System Test Cases Grow Old?
Companies increasingly use either manual or automated system testing to
ensure the quality of their software products. As a system evolves and is
extended with new features the test suite also typically grows as new test
cases are added. To ensure software quality throughout this process the test
suite is continously executed, often on a daily basis. It seems likely that
newly added tests would be more likely to fail than older tests but this has
not been investigated in any detail on large-scale, industrial software
systems. Also it is not clear which methods should be used to conduct such an
analysis. This paper proposes three main concepts that can be used to
investigate aging effects in the use and failure behavior of system test cases:
test case activation curves, test case hazard curves, and test case half-life.
To evaluate these concepts and the type of analysis they enable we apply them
on an industrial software system containing more than one million lines of
code. The data sets comes from a total of 1,620 system test cases executed a
total of more than half a million times over a time period of two and a half
years. For the investigated system we find that system test cases stay active
as they age but really do grow old; they go through an infant mortality phase
with higher failure rates which then decline over time. The test case half-life
is between 5 to 12 months for the two studied data sets.Comment: Updated with nicer figs without border around the
Power Load Management as a Computational Market
Power load management enables energy utilities to reduce peak loads and thereby save money. Due to the large number of different loads, power load management is a complicated optimization problem. We present a new decentralized approach to this problem by modeling direct load management as a computational market. Our simulation results demonstrate that our approach is very efficient with a superlinear rate of convergence to equilibrium and an excellent scalability, requiring few iterations even when the number of agents is in the order of one thousand. Aframework for analysis of this and similar problems is given which shows how nonlinear optimization and numerical mathematics can be exploited to characterize, compare, and tailor problem-solving strategies in market-oriented programming
A participatory design approach for the development of support environments in eGovernment services to citizens
The introduction of eGovernment services and applications leads to major changes in the structure and operation of public administrations. In this paper we describe the work in progress in an Italian project called “SPO.T.” aimed at the analysis, development, deployment and evaluation of tools and environments to support the people who plan, deliver, use and evaluate user-centred provision of One-Stop-Shop services to citizens. The “SPO.T.” project has focused on two requirements: 1. the support tools and environments must facilitate the active involvement of all stakeholders in the definition and evolution of eGovernment applications and services, and it is argued that through participatory design changes of structure, process and culture can be delivered effectively; 2. they must embody a set of architecturally coherent resources which reflect the new roles and relationships of public administration and which are sufficiently generic to be relevant to a wide range of local contexts across the community
Patient safety in Europe: medication errors and hospital-acquired infections
The Report was commissioned by the European Federation of Nurses Associations (EFN) in November 2007 in order to support its policy statements on Patient Safety (June 2004). In that statement the EFN declares its belief that European Union health services should operate within a culture of safety that is based on working towards an open culture and the immediate reporting of mistakes; exchanging best practice and research; and lobbying for the systematic collection of information and dissemination of research findings. This Report adressess specifically the culture of highly reliable organisations using the work of James Reason (2000). Medication errors and hospital-acquired infections are examined in line with the Reprt´s parameters and a range of European studies are used as evidence. An extensive reference list is provided that allows EFN to explore work in greater detail as required
Compositional Design and Verification of a Multi-Agent System for One-to-Many Negotiation
A compositional verification method for multi-agent systems is presented and applied to a multi-agent system for one-to-many negotiation in the domain of load balancing of electricity use. Advantages of the method are that the complexity of the verification process is managed by compositionality, and that parts of the proofs can be reused in relation to reuse of components
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