bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Making sense of nonsense
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

The absolute, unalterable, incontestable hallmark of a good expository (non-fiction) text is its clarity. Whatever other attributes it may have, if it isn't clear, it isn't good, Likewise, if it isn't good, it isn't clear.
SC08 broader engagement offers mentoring and travel assistance grants
Authors: Kelley Kathryn L.
Published: October 2009

Austin, TX Interested in understanding what supercomputing means? Want to learn how next-generation computing, networking and storage technologies help to solve our worlds challenges and problems? Do you want to be in a place that brings together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers to discuss, discover and innovate the path forward for computing? If so, the SC08 Broader Engagement initiative might just be for you.
Information technology as an ethical challenge
Authors: Capurro Rafael
Published: October 2009

Information technology has an ambiguous impact on society. This situation calls for a two-level ethical analysis. On the one hand the issues of power and control must be reconsidered under the viewpoint of institutional structures, i.e., of living norms. On the other hand, the technological shaping of society, taking the character of power, oppression, verbosity and dogmatic belief, should be at the same time reconsidered under the viewpoint of a plurality of living forms, i.e., within a framework of deliberation and dissent. This paper presents briefly both issues, taking into account Michel Foucault's concept of "technologies of the self."
Dimension of Philosophy of Technologies
Authors: Tripathi Arun Kumar
Published: October 2009

Philosophy of technology promises the possibility of an understanding of technology that may be important not only to public policy but also in helping to conceptualise intellectual approaches to the study of technology and, indeed, to shaping new fields of knowledge and research. Philosophy of technology may also have a role to play in relation not only to structuring a largely disparate and inchoate field but also more directly in teaching and learning about technology (Peters, et. al 2008).
Software-Based Fault Tolerance
Authors: Saha Goutam Kumar
Published: October 2009

This paper aims to visually describe the important concepts of software-based fault tolerance and the relationships thereof using a concept map.
Four Short Reviews of Current Software Engineering Books of Interest
Authors: Gagliano Ross
Published: October 2009

Associate editor Ross Gagliano offers four short reviews of current software engineering books of interest.
Transcending from Virtual Reality into Tele-Immersive Technologies and Applications
Authors: Singh Ramesh , Singh Anubhav Kumar
Published: October 2009

The goal of this paper is to investigate the basic principles of a tele-immersive system, its main components, development history, demonstrations and potential uses as one of today's most challenging technologies which takes all our knowledge of virtual reality, networks, haptics etc to the limits and beyond. Ultimately the paper presents a future research and development roadmap for this technology. Tele-immersion involves combining teleconferencing, tele-presence and virtual reality to allow individuals to manipulate a shared environment, converse, interact and even see each other. But the ultimate objective of tele-immersion is not solely to reproduce a real face-to-face meeting in detail, but also to provide the interface for collaborators, world-wide, to work together in a shared virtual environment, even though they may be miles apart physically. Tele-immersion stands at the crossroad of researches related to virtual reality and networking, computer visualization and user interfaces and can be said to unify all of these research areas.
An Interview with Wei Zhao
Authors: Ubiquity staff
Published: October 2009

Wei Zhao is currently the Dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Before he joined RPI in 2007, he was a Senior Associate Vice President for Research at Texas A&M University. Between 2005 and 2007, he also served as the Director for the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the National Science Foundation. He completed his undergraduate program in physics at Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China, in 1977. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1983 and 1986, respectively. During his career, he has also served as a faculty member at Amherst College, the University of Adelaide, and Texas A&M University. This interview was conducted by Ubiquity editor-in-chief John Gehl.
21st Century Information Technology Revolution
Authors: Pal Sanjay Kumar
Published: October 2009

The computing power in the few micro processors that are now in a Ford Motor Car is much more than all the computing power that was put in the space vehicle that landed the first men on the moon and brought them back. In today's do-more-with-less business environment, with increasing demands from customers, shareholders, and regulators, the IT organization is not only asked to work harder and smarter, but is being asked to take on the role of assuring the business.

Humanity has progressed from agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution and is now moving to an information revolution. It is this awesome computing power at continuously falling prices and the computers being networked over global telecom highways that is leading to the use of Information Technology in every sector of human activity be it communication, banking, trading, learning and teaching, entertainment, socializing, government, management and librarying. Just as machines have extended man's mechanical power and his convenience and comfort, Information Technology as commonly picturized by computers, is extending man's mind or brain or intellectual power. The term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term is more recognizable than ever before.
Thoughts on the Nature of the Virtual
Authors: Tsekeris Charalambos
Published: October 2009

This article seeks to formulate some brief sociological and philosophical thoughts on the radically problematic nature and character of the virtual. These ultimately aim to critically challenge and reinvent the complex interrelations of contemporary virtuality to the real and the political. In such a context, new media studies acquire a normative impetus.
Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

Persons in every age group wonder why time seems to move so much faster than it did in their pasts. It seems as if there is never enough time to get everything done and that the situation only gets worse. Many explanations have been offered for this, but few seem to hit the target as well as Phil Yaffe's explanation. We hope you enjoy and find it provocative. Phil has been a writer and journalist for over four decades and is able to write eloquently about his personal experience with accelerating time.
An Interview with Terry Winograd
Authors: Staff Ubiquity
Published: October 2009

Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he directs the program on human-computer interaction. His SHRDLU program done at the MIT AI Lab was one of the early explorations in natural language understanding by computers. His book with Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, critiqued the underlying assumptions of AI and much of computer system design, and led to completely new directions in those fields. He was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility. His remarks, made in 2002, are as relevant today as they were when first spoken.
My Problem with Design
Authors: Bell Chauncey
Published: October 2009

I was reminded today of the things I find troubling about our modern notions of design and designing. Hundreds of years ago, if one wanted to become a designer, one would first have become a master craftsperson. We learned how to construct distinctive artifacts (and worlds of artifacts) and then we began to innovate in that tradition. To say one was a designer without that background would have been Harry Potteresque: ridiculous.
The Three Acid Tests of Persuasive Writing
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

If there are still scientists toiling away with little regard for what others may think of their efforts, it's time to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. In today's interconnected world, what scientists do is of vital concern to the wider public. And vice versa. Just consider the controversies surrounding nuclear energy, genetic engineering, telephone antennas, global warming -- and even the effects of computers on education and individual liberty (surveillance society).
An Interview with Frans Johansson
Authors: Gehl John
Published: October 2009

In this time of recession, innovation has jumped to the fore in many people's minds. How can we create new value through innovations and pull our individual companies out of the doldrums? In 2004, Frans Johansson published his book, The Medici Effect, in which he discussed how crossing community boundaries leads to innovations, and he said that the most effective way to create the crossing is to mix people from the communities in a common setting. John Gehl spoke with Johansson shortly after the book was published. Johansson's words are worth thinking about now as we reflect on what we all must do next.
An Interview with Michael Schrage
Authors: staff Ubiquity
Published: October 2009

It is November 2008 and much of the globe is in the throes of recession. Innovation is on many minds. We need new products and new services generating new value for our customers and our companies. It is more important than ever to innovate. The problem is that our collective success rate is abysmal -- 4 percent according to Business Week in August 2005. As we set out on new innovation initiatives, it is a good time to reflect on the illusions that drag our success rates so low. One illusion is that is innovation is a novel ideal or product, another is that those who spend more on R&D get more innovation, and another is that innovation is about great inventions. Michael Schrage of MIT has been challenging these illusions for a long time. He discussed them with Ubiquity editor John Gehl in February 2006. Now is the perfect time to reflect again on what Michael has to say to us about innovation. --Peter Denning, Editor
The Netflix prize, computer science outreach, and Japanese mobile phones
Authors: Linden Greg , Conover Michael , Robertson Judy
Published: October 2009

The
Communications
Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of
Communications
, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts.

Greg Linden writes about machine learning and the Netflix Prize, Judy Robertson offers suggestions about getting teenagers interested in computer science, and Michael Conover discusses mobile phone usage and quick response codes in Japan.
Managing data
Authors: Lindley David
Published: October 2009

Dealing with terabytes of data is not the monumental task it once was. The difficult part is presenting enormous amounts of information in ways that are most useful to a wide variety of users.
Debating net neutrality
Authors: Joch Alan
Published: October 2009

Advocates seek to protect users from potential business practices, but defenders of the status quo say that concerns are overblown.
Technology strategy and managementDealing with the venture capital crisis
Authors: Cusumano Michael
Published: October 2009

How New Zealand and other small, isolated markets can act as "natural incubators."
ViewpointRetrospective
Authors: Hoare C.A.R.
Published: October 2009

C.A.R. Hoare revisits his past
Communications
article on the axiomatic approach to programming and uses it as a touchstone for the future.
Unifying biological image formats with HDF5
Authors: Dougherty Matthew T. , Folk Michael J. , Zadok Erez , Bernstein Herbert J. , Bernstein Frances C. , Eliceiri Kevin W. , Benger Werner , Best Christoph
Published: October 2009

The biosciences need an image format capable of high performance and long-term maintenance. Is HDF5 the answer?
Smoothed analysis
Authors: Spielman Daniel A. , Teng Shang-Hua
Published: October 2009

This Gödel Prize-winning work traces the steps toward modeling real data.
Distinct-value synopses for multiset operations
Authors: Beyer Kevin , Gemulla Rainer , Haas Peter J. , Reinwald Berthold , Sismanis Yannis
Published: October 2009

The task of estimating the number of distinct values (DVs) in a large dataset arises in a wide variety of settings in computer science and elsewhere. We provide DV estimation techniques for the case in which the dataset of interest is split into partitions. We create for each partition a synopsis that can be used to estimate the number of DVs in the partition. By combining and extending a number of results in the literature, we obtain both suitable synopses and DV estimators. The synopses can be created in parallel, and can be easily combined to yield synopses and DV estimates for "compound" partitions that are created from the base partitions via arbitrary multiset union, intersection, or difference operations. Our synopses can also handle deletions of individual partition elements. We prove that our DV estimators are unbiased, provide error bounds, and show how to select synopsis sizes in order to achieve a desired estimation accuracy. Experiments and theory indicate that our synopses and estimators lead to lower computational costs and more accurate DV estimates than previous approaches.
De-escalating IT projects
Authors: Flynn Donal , Pan Gary , Keil Mark , Mähring Magnus
Published: October 2009

Introduction

Taming runaway Information Technology (IT) projects is a challenge that most organizations have faced and that managers continue to wrestle with. These are projects that grossly exceed their planned budgets and schedules, often by a factor of 2--3 fold or greater. Many end in failure; failure not only in the sense of budget or schedule, but in terms of delivered functionality as well.

Runaway projects are frequently the result of escalating commitment to a failing course of action, a phenomenon that occurs when investments fail to work out as envisioned and decision-makers compound the problem by persisting irrationally. Keil, Mann, and Rai reported that 30--40% of IT projects exhibit some degree of escalation. To break the escalation cycle, de-escalation of commitment to the failing course of action must occur so that valuable resources can be channeled into more productive use. But, making de-escalation happen is neither easy nor intuitive.

This article briefly examines three approaches that have been suggested for managing de-escalation. By combining elements from the three approaches, we introduce a de-escalation management maturity (DMM) model that provides a useful framework for improving practice.
How effective is Google's translation service in search?
Authors: Savoy Jacques , Dolamic Ljiljana
Published: October 2009

Introduction

In multilingual countries (Canada, Hong Kong, India, among others) and large international organizations or companies (such as, WTO, European Parliament), and among Web users in general, accessing information written in other languages has become a real need (news, hotel or airline reservations, or government information, statistics). While some users are bilingual, others can read documents written in another language but cannot formulate a query to search it, or at least cannot provide reliable search terms in a form comparable to those found in the documents being searched. There are also many monolingual users who may want to retrieve documents in another language and then have them translated into their own language, either manually or automatically.

Translation services may however be too expensive, not readily accessible or not available within a short timeframe. On the other hand, many documents contain non-textual information such as images, videos and statistics that do not need translation and can be understood regardless of the language involved. In response to these needs and in order to make the Web universally available regardless of any language barriers, in May 2007 Google launched a translation service that now provides two-way online translation services mainly between English and 41 other languages, for example, Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish (http://translate.google.com/). Over the last few years other free Internet translation services have been made available as for example by BabelFish (http://babel.altavista.com/) or Yahoo! (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/). These two systems are similar to that used by Google, given they are based on technology developed by Systran, one of the earliest companies to develop machine translation. Also worth mentioning here is the Promt system (also known as Reverso, http://translation2.paralink.com/), which was developed in Russia to provide mainly translation between Russian and other languages.

The question we would like to address here is to what extent a translation service such as Google can produce adequate results in the language other than that being used to write the query. Although we will not evaluate translations
per se
we will test and analyze various systems in terms of their ability to retrieve items automatically based on a translated query. To be adequate, these tests must be done on a collection of documents written in one given language plus a series of topics (expressing user information needs) written in other languages, plus a series of relevance assessments (relevant documents for each topic).
How to Generate Reader Interest in What You Write
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

Who has not discovered to their dismay that no one wants to read their most carefully crafted, meritorious, compelling, and passionate writings? Think of all the proposals you have written that no one is interested in. Or the web pages, the blog posts, or the company brochures. Chances are, your failures are linked to an inability to connect with what your readers would be interested in reading. Our intrepid writer about writing, Phil Yaffe, offers some valuable insight into how to get people to read your stuff. He says you need to adopt the "expository writing challenge": that no one is interested in what you are inclined to write, therefore you must discover what they want to read. Only then you can get started, and only then you can succeed.
How Crafty Word Order Can Instantly Improve Your Writing
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

I am usually very reticent about offering writing tips. Unless they are linked to the absolute, inescapable fundamental principles of good writing, such tips are too often poorly applied or misapplied. There is really only a handful of fundamental writing principles. Before this extraordinary tip can be properly revealed, we need to review three of them: 1) clarity, 2) conciseness, and 3) density.
Mind Hygiene for All
Authors: Saha Goutam Kumar
Published: October 2009

Maintaining mental sharpness and clarity is important to most everyone, and doing so is valuable for maintaining our professional edge. But we are under assault from many directions with challenges that can interfere with mental sharpness. Some of the challenges are familiar; others hide in the background. What are these challenges and what can we do about them? Goutam Saha has a very concise summary of everything contributing to mental hygiene, including the challenges and actions to meet them. He expresses this with mind maps, which themselves contribute to mental clarity.
How to Rapidly Improve Speaking Skills
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

Even as written communication is important, spoken communication has been assuming an increasing role. We are called on to speak in such media as videos, teleconferences, and podcasts. Our ability to speak clearly is as important as our ability to formulate our arguments concisely and clearly. Phil Yaffe, who has provided advice to Ubiquity readers on how to write clearly and concisely, offers advice on how to speak clearly.
FPGA-Based Hardware Acceleration of Lithographic Aerial Image Simulation
Authors: Cong Jason , Zou Yi
Published: October 2009

Lithography simulation, an essential step in design for manufacturability (DFM), is still far from computationally efficient. Most leading companies use large clusters of server computers to achieve acceptable turn-around time. Thus coprocessor acceleration is very attractive for obtaining increased computational performance with a reduced power consumption. This article describes the implementation of a customized accelerator on FPGA using a polygon-based simulation model. An application-specific memory partitioning scheme is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements for a large number of processing elements. Deep loop pipelining and ping-pong buffer based function block pipelining are also implemented in our design. Initial results show a 15X speedup versus the software implementation running on a microprocessor, and more speedup is expected via further performance tuning. The implementation also leverages state-of-art C-to-RTL synthesis tools. At the same time, we also identify the need for manual architecture-level exploration for parallel implementations. Moreover, we implement the algorithm on NVIDIA GPUs using the CUDA programming environment, and provide some useful comparisons for different kinds of accelerators.
Space Optimization on Counters for FPGA-Based Perl Compatible Regular Expressions
Authors: Lo Chia-Tien Dan , Tai Yi-Gang
Published: October 2009

With their expressiveness and simplicity, Perl compatible regular expressions (PCREs) have been adopted in mainstream signature based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) to describe known attack signatures, especially for polymorphic worms. NIDSs rely on an underlying string matching engine that simulates PCREs to inspect each network packet. PCRE is a superset of traditional regular expressions, and provides advanced features. However, this pattern matching becomes a performance bottleneck of software-based NIDSs, causing a big portion of their execution time to be dedicated to payload inspection, which results in an unacceptable packet drop rate. The penetration of these unexamined packets creates a security hole in such systems. Over the past decade, hardware acceleration for the pattern matching has been studied extensively and a marginal performance has been achieved. Among hardware approaches, FPGA-based acceleration engines provide great flexibility because new signatures can be compiled and programmed into their reconfigurable architecture. As more and more malicious signatures are discovered, it becomes harder to map a complete set of malicious signatures specified in PCREs to an FPGA chip. One of the space consuming components is the counter used in the constrained repetitions for PCREs. Therefore, we propose a space efficient SelectRAM counter for PCREs that use counting. The design takes advantage of the basic components contained in a configurable logic block, and thus optimizes space usage. A set of basic PCRE blocks has been built in hardware to implement PCREs. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing designs by at least fivefold.
Optimal Loop Unrolling and Shifting for Reconfigurable Architectures
Authors: Dragomir Ozana Silvia , Stefanov Todor , Bertels Koen
Published: October 2009

In this article, we present a new technique for optimizing loops that contain kernels mapped on a reconfigurable fabric. We assume the Molen machine organization as our framework. We propose combining loop unrolling with loop shifting, which is used to relocate the function calls contained in the loop body such that in every iteration of the transformed loop, software functions (running on GPP) execute in parallel with multiple instances of the kernel (running on FPGA). The algorithm computes the optimal unroll factor and determines the most appropriate transformation (which can be the combination of unrolling plus shifting or either of the two). This method is based on profiling information about the kernel’s execution times on GPP and FPGA, memory transfers and area utilization. In the experimental part, we apply this method to several kernels from loop nests extracted from real-life applications (DCT and SAD from MPEG2 encoder, Quantizer from JPEG, and Sobel’s Convolution) and perform an analysis of the results, comparing them with the theoretical maximum speedup by Amdahl’s Law and showing when and how our transformations are beneficial.
Tetris-XL
Authors: Xu Weifeng , Tessier Russell
Published: October 2009

As technology has advanced, the application space of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors has grown to include a variety of embedded platforms. Due to cost and power consumption constraints, many embedded VLIW processors contain limited resources, including registers. As a result, a VLIW compiler that maximizes instruction level parallelism (ILP) without considering register constraints may generate excessive register spills, leading to reduced overall system performance. To address this issue, this article presents a new spill reduction technique that improves VLIW runtime performance by reordering operations prior to register allocation and instruction scheduling. Unlike earlier algorithms, our approach explicitly considers both register reduction and data dependency in performing operation reordering. Data dependency control limits unexpected schedule length increases during subsequent instruction scheduling. Our technique has been evaluated using Trimaran, an academic VLIW compiler, and evaluated using a set of embedded systems benchmarks. Experimental results show that, on average, this technique improves VLIW performance by 10% for VLIW processors with 32 registers and 8 functional units compared with previous spill reduction techniques. Limited improvement is seen versus prior approaches for VLIW processors with 64 registers and 8 functional units.
Exploring the limits of early register release
Authors: Jones Timothy M. , O'Boyle Michael F. P. , Abella Jaume , González Antonio , Ergin Oğuz
Published: October 2009

Register pressure in modern superscalar processors can be reduced by releasing registers early and by copying their contents to cheap back-up storage. This article quantifies the potential benefits of register occupancy reduction and shows that existing hardware-based schemes typically achieve only a small fraction of this potential. This is because they are unable to accurately determine the last use of a register and must wait until the redefining instruction enters the pipeline. On the other hand, compilers have a global view of the program and, using simple dataflow analysis, can determine the last use. This article evaluates the extent to which compiler analysis can aid early releasing, explores the design space, and introduces commit and issue-based early releasing schemes, quantifying their benefits. Using simple compiler analysis and microarchitecture changes, we achieve 70% of the potential register file occupancy reduction. By adding more hardware support, we can increase this to 94%. Our schemes are compared to state-of-the-art approaches for varying register file sizes and are shown to outperform these existing techniques.
Next research idea beyond Live and CitizenMedia
Authors: Macwilliams Carmen , Trogemann Georg , Göllner Stefan , Hesselmeier Martin
Published: October 2009

In the video we summarize our experiences as researchers in running the ICT European research pojects, “LIVE -- Live Staging of Media Events” and “CitizenMedia”. Carmen MacWilliams and Georg Trogemann were responsible for the content research workgroup in LIVE, and created the staging plan for the iTV broadcast of the Olympic Games 2008 with the help of the Austrian public TV broadcaster, ORF. Georg Trogemann, Stefan Göllner, and Martin Hesselmeier were responsible for the Cologne test-bed in CitizenMedia and developed the Web-based “Unortkataster”. In the video, Carmen MacWilliams, Stefan Göllner, and Martin Hesselmeier talk about new research ideas beyond LIVE and CitizenMedia.
The emperor's clothes in high resolution
Authors: Joor Dirkjan , Beekhuizen Wilco , Wijngaert Lidwien Van De , Baaren Eva
Published: October 2009

In this article, an experiment was conducted to measure the effect of framing a high definition television (HDTV) clip. One group of participants was told they were watching a brand new HDTV clip, while the other group was told they were watching a digital DVD clip. Both groups were in fact watching the same (low) quality DVD clip. After watching this clip, the beliefs of the participants and their viewing experiences were measured via a questionnaire. The people framed to watch the HDTV clip were found to have a significantly more positive viewing experience. This shows that participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high definition signals but were influenced by the frame set for them. This effect has been shown in many different situations, and has now been established when watching HD-quality television as well. The results still indicate that the HDTV-frame is already associated with a high-quality viewing experience, which may influence the selling strategy and/or speed in the adoption of this technology. In the following discussion we will pay attention to the different ways in which HDTV can be framed in the media.
Interactive documentaries
Authors: Ursu Marian F. , Zsombori Vilmos , Wyver John , Conrad Lucie , Kegel Ian , Williams Doug
Published: October 2009

This article is motivated by the opportunity presented by recent advances in information and communication technology—particularly by faster broadband connections and faster digital media processing capabilities—for interactive television to extend and develop
interactive storytelling
or
interactive narratives
. This will give viewers the ability to shape and configure the programs they watch,
while watching
, according to their needs and desires. Rather than consuming a predefined linear narration—represented by the traditional dramatic or factual program—which has to address the potential audience as a whole, individuals or groups of viewers can receive tailored-made personal narratives. Each viewer can thus potentially become an active explorer of a
narrative space
rather than a receiver of a predefined narration. This article presents the production of
A Golden Age
, an interactive configurable documentary about the arts of the Renaissance in England, as a comprehensive illustration of the potential offered by interactive narration. At the same time, it is also a successful example of the employment of the recently developed, production- and genre-independent, ShapeShifting Media technology in the realization of a good quality interactive narrative. This article describes the concept of
A Golden Age
, the content production process, carried out from the outset with the aim of producing an interactive experience, and, finally, its authoring and delivery with the ShapeShifting Media toolkit. The focus of the presentation is on the design and implementation of the computational interactive narrative structures expressed in the Narrative Structure Language (NSL), the declarative representation language underlying ShapeShifting Media.
A Golden Age
places a distinct emphasis on the quality and style of each emerging individual narration, aiming at levels at least comparable to those of (good quality) linearly compiled documentaries. NSL and the ShapeShifting Media toolkit provided the means to achieve this.
A Golden Age
is a production realized by Illuminations Television Ltd, London, in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and BT over a period of more or less two years. Approximately 50 hours of rushes were filmed for its production.
A Golden Age
has already inspired the production of another similar documentary,
Films of Fact
, soon to be released in the public domain as an installation at the Science Museum, London, and, it is hoped, will continue to serve as inspiration for other interactive documentaries.
Nonlinear news production and consumption
Authors: Lindstedt Inger , Löwgren Jonas , Reimer Bo , Topgaard Richard
Published: October 2009

People depend on news to make sense of happenings in the world, but current digital news products do not live up to their potential in this regard. Interactivity in relation to news is often seen as a way to give the consumer control over when to consume something and on which platform. Less attention has been placed on what should be consumed and how. Within the project MyNewsMyWay, a news service was constructed that makes possible a more in-depth and varied media consumption than what traditional news services offer today. In the follow-up design study OurNewsOurWays, additional attention was put on the possibility of combining professional news material with user-generated content.
Local communities and IPTV
Authors: Obrist Marianna , Miletich Marc , Holocher Teresa , Beck Elke , Kepplinger Sara , Muzak Paul , Bernhaupt Regina , Tscheligi Manfred
Published: October 2009

Local communities are communities that have relationships in real life due to the physical location of their households. IPTV can be a way to support these local communities (either in their establishment, in fostering relationships, or even in extending these local communities). Through a two-year research process, requirements for IPTV as support for local communities were investigated and IPTV services were developed and evaluated. In this article, findings and lessons learned from the early design and development phase of a specific case study are presented. The findings show that support for local communities must take communication structures into account, balance real life and online community support, while at the same time it must also provide for more fun and entertaining aspects.
Prospecting the appropriation of digital TV in a Brazilian project
Authors: Furtado Elizabeth , Kampf Thais , Piccolo Lara , Baranauskas M. Cecília C.
Published: October 2009

A good practice for developers of new technology, which has great influence on the life of users (e.g., digital TV), would be to inform them about the benefits of the technology and the challenges to its appropriation. Usually, the focus of work that investigates the appropriation of digital TV has been on how to avoid user resistance based on usability and accessibility concerns. This work presents other risks related to user non-acceptance, influenced by the way the technology will be owned, by the infrastructure of the city, and by the life style of the population. Human and contextual factors help to overcome rejection by users and provide some recommendations useful for the developers of this technology in order to mitigate such risks.
A quantitative evaluation of aspect-oriented software quality model (AOSQUAMO)
Authors: Kumar Avadhesh , Grover P. S. , Kumar Rajesh
Published: October 2009

Aspect-Oriented (AO) technology is a new paradigm and emerging field of software development. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) cleanly encapsulates crosscutting concerns which cannot be encapsulated or modularized by traditional programming approaches like Module-Oriented (MO) and Object-Oriented (OO). In order to evaluate quality of software systems, researchers and practitioners have proposed their software quality characteristics and models. As AO is a new abstraction, there is no dedicated software quality model, which can describe and include new features of AO technology. In this paper, a new Aspect-Oriented Software Quality Model (AOSQUAMO) has been proposed. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to evaluate quality of AO software systems as a single parameter. This proposed quality model further may be used to compare AO software systems which will help consumer to choose better quality software.
Agent oriented requirements engineering for a data warehouse
Authors: Kumar Manoj , Gosain Anjana , Singh Yogesh
Published: October 2009

In recent years, a number of requirements engineering (RE) proposals for a data warehouse (DW) systems have been made. In the traditional/operational systems, requirements engineering has been divided into two phases: early & late requirements engineering phase. Most of the data warehouse requirements engineering (DWRE) approaches have not distinguished early requirements engineering phase from late requirements engineering phase. A very few approaches are seen in the literature that explicitly model early & late requirements for a DW. In this paper, we propose an AGDI (Agent-Goal-Decision-Information) model to support early requirements engineering issues for a data warehouse. Here, early requirements have been modeled through organization modeling and goal modeling activities as an illustration of proposed AGDI model to support decisional goals of the organization for which DW is to be built.
Software maintenance productivity assessment using fuzzy logic
Authors: Mittal J. P. , Bhatia Pradeep , Mittal Harish
Published: October 2009

This paper proposes a fuzzy logic based precise approach to quantify maintenance productivity of software. Cyclomatic complexity density i.e., cyclomatic complexity per lines of code is proposed as a metric for software maintenance productivity. Triangular fuzzy numbers are used to represent cyclomatic complexity density. Fuzzy logic offers significant advantages over other approaches due to its ability to naturally represent qualitative aspect of inspection data and apply flexible inference rules based on fuzziness. The model is evaluated on the basis of published data for a small pilot project on actual maintenance data. However, the technique is quite general and may be tested for medium and large projects in other languages. Results obtained using fuzzy logic is better than results obtained by existing technique without fuzzy logic [9].
Performance evaluation of network system through UML
Authors: Saxena Vipin , Arora Deepak , Shrivastava Manish
Published: October 2009

In distributing computing environments, information processing is distributed among many computer systems rather than confined to a single computer. They are widely used for enhancing the performance of complex and bulky numerical calculations. Distributed computer systems heavily depend on efficacy of computer networks. The performance of computer network is a major factor in implementing software on any distributed system as these software need critical response time. Load balancing is an important method for improving system performance. In present paper, authors have estimated the performance of a local area network system, which is evaluated through a well known modeling language, the Unified Modeling Language. A UML model has been designed for real case study of Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, India. Network performance in terms of load balancing and sharing, is evaluated after designing UML class and sequence diagrams.
Where agile research goes
Authors: Wang Xiaofeng , Lane Michael , Conboy Kieran , Pikkarainen Minna
Published: October 2009

This report summarizes the key findings from a workshop at the 10th International Conference on Agile Processes and eXtreme Programming in Software Engineering (XP2009) called "Agile Research -- A 7-Year Retrospective", held in Sardinia in May 2009. The workshop was based on an open discussion around past papers presented at the conference, identifying current gaps and areas for future research. A research topic map has been drawn and several future research directions have been highlighted as the results of running the workshop.
Designing empirical studies
Authors: Sillitti Alberto
Published: October 2009

The 10th International Conference on Agile Processes and eXtreme Programming in Software Engineering (XP 2009) was held in Sardinia (Italy) in May 25-29, 2009. The 3rd International Workshop on Designing Empirical Studies (IWDES 2009) was organized and focused on the assessment of the effectiveness of agile methods.
Software development governance (SDG)
Authors: Dubinsky Yael , Kruchten Philippe
Published: October 2009

This is a report on the 2nd roles and responsibilities workshop on governance software development (SDG), which took place as part of ICSE 2009. While the first workshop in 2008 focused on the definitions of the concepts involved in software development governance, the second workshop focused on case studies in which changes are introduced to software teamwork, e.g., distributed and agile environments, and on governance approaches that are used to better align software development with the business goals.
Report from the second international workshop on software engineering for computational science and engineering (SE-CSE 09)
Authors: Carver Jeffrey C.
Published: October 2009

This is the report from a one-day workshop that took place on May 23, 2009 in as part of the International Conference on Software Engineering in Vancouver, Canada. The main focus of this workshop was to provide a venue for discussion of problems related to the application of software engineering principles to the development of Computational Science and Engineering software.
Lift the hood, go to jail?
Authors: von Lohmann Fred
Published: October 2009

Preserve consumers' right to tinker and innovate with the gadgets they own.
Talking bodies
Authors: McDonnell Rachel , Ennis Cathy , Dobbyn Simon , O'Sullivan Carol
Published: October 2009

In this article, we investigate human sensitivity to the coordination and timing of conversational body language for virtual characters. First, we captured the full body motions (excluding faces and hands) of three actors conversing about a range of topics, in either a polite (i.e., one person talking at a time) or debate/argument style. Stimuli were then created by applying the motion-captured conversations from the actors to virtual characters. In a 2AFC experiment, participants viewed paired sequences of synchronized and desynchronized conversations and were asked to guess which was the real one. Detection performance was above chance for both conversation styles but more so for the polite conversations, where desynchronization was more noticeable.
Screen-space perceptual rendering of human skin
Authors: Jimenez Jorge , Sundstedt Veronica , Gutierrez Diego
Published: October 2009

We propose a novel skin shader which translates the simulation of subsurface scattering from texture space to a screen-space diffusion approximation. It naturally scales well while maintaining a perceptually plausible result. This technique allows us to ensure real-time performance even when several characters may appear on screen at the same time. The visual realism of the resulting images is validated using a subjective psychophysical preference experiment. Our results show that, independent of distance and light position, the images rendered using our novel shader have as high visual realism as a previously developed physically-based shader.
Perceptual influence of approximate visibility in indirect illumination
Authors: Yu Insu , Cox Andrew , Kim Min H. , Ritschel Tobias , Grosch Thorsten , Dachsbacher Carsten , Kautz Jan
Published: October 2009

In this article we evaluate the use of approximate visibility for efficient global illumination. Traditionally, accurate visibility is used in light transport. However, the indirect illumination we perceive on a daily basis is rarely of high-frequency nature, as the most significant aspect of light transport in real-world scenes is diffuse, and thus displays a smooth gradation. This raises the question of whether accurate visibility is perceptually necessary in this case. To answer this question, we conduct a psychophysical study on the perceptual influence of approximate visibility on indirect illumination. This study reveals that accurate visibility is not required and that certain approximations may be introduced.
Perception of differences in natural-image stimuli
Authors: To M.P.S. , Gilchrist I.D. , Troscianko T. , Kho J.S.B. , Tolhurst D.J.
Published: October 2009

Visual Difference Predictor (VDP) models have played a key role in digital image applications such as the development of image quality metrics. However, little attention has been paid to their applicability to peripheral vision. Central (i.e., foveal) vision is extremely sensitive for the contrast detection of simple stimuli such as sinusoidal gratings, but peripheral vision is less sensitive. Furthermore, crowding is a well-documented phenomenon whereby differences in suprathreshold peripherally viewed target objects (such as individual letters or patches of sinusoidal grating) become more difficult to discriminate when surrounded by other objects (flankers). We examine three factors that might influence the degree of crowding with natural-scene stimuli (cropped from photographs of natural scenes): (1) location in the visual field, (2) distance between target and flankers, and (3) flanker-target similarity. We ask how these factors affect crowding in a suprathreshold discrimination experiment where observers rate the perceived differences between two sequentially presented target patches of natural images. The targets might differ in the shape, size, arrangement, or color of items in the scenes. Changes in uncrowded peripheral targets are perceived to be less than for the same changes viewed foveally. Consistent with previous research on simple stimuli, we find that crowding in the periphery (but not in the fovea) reduces the magnitudes of perceived changes even further, especially when the flankers are closer and more similar to the target. We have tested VDP models based on the response behavior of neurons in visual cortex and the inhibitory interactions between them. The models do not explain the lower ratings for peripherally viewed changes even when the lower peripheral contrast sensitivity was accounted for; nor could they explain the effects of crowding, which others have suggested might arise from errors in the spatial localization of features in the peripheral image. This suggests that conventional VDP models do not port well to peripheral vision.
Gem #56
Authors: Ochem Quentin
Published: October 2009

In a previous Gem we introduced ada2java, which maps an Ada specification to a Java specification, to support calls from Java to Ada. Even though ada2java doesn't support creating Ada bindings of Java specs, it's still possible to use it to support calls from Ada to Java. In this Gem we'll look at a first possibility of doing this, using callbacks (in Ada terms, access-to-subprogram calls).
Gem #63
Authors: Dismukes Gary
Published: October 2009

The features of Ada have generally been designed to prevent violating the properties of data types, enforced either by compile-time rules or, in the case of dynamic properties, by using run-time checks. Ada allows run-time checks to be suppressed, but not with the intent of allowing programmers to subvert the type system.
Gem #64
Authors: Briot Emmanuel
Published: October 2009

This Gem describes how to compile applications in GNAT when source files contain multiple units. The preferred approach is to split source files, and here we describes how this can be done, although GNAT also provides a workaround that allows you to keep your existing files.