bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Globalization
Authors: Martinelli Russ , Rahschulte Tim , Waddell Jim
Published: May 2011

The strategy to improve business results through globalization has become increasingly common. Success in reaping the business value intended from a globalization strategy is, unfortunately, not as common. As national boundaries blur and everyone grows more connected through global collaboration, the dynamics of organizational life grow more complex. These complexities offer challenge, confusion, and frustration – but also great opportunity! The key to achieving improved business results does not hinge on strategies alone, but also on our ability to effectively lead global product and service development teams to successfully execute the strategies. Those struggling the most are the practitioners who find their historic team leadership practices ineffective in today’s global business model. To effectively lead a global team, one must first understand the forces driving our companies to a global business model. This chapter focuses on the forces that fuel and constrain globalization.
The Effect of Cultural Dimensions on the Development of Intra-Team Trust in Global Virtual Teams
Authors: Kirstein Kurt D.
Published: May 2011

The widespread adoption of global virtual teams has been driven by an unprecedented need to draw upon talents of employees from around the globe in a manner that is both organizationally and financially feasible. The success of these teams depends largely on the levels of intra-team trust and collaboration they are able to establish throughout the life of their projects. Team members on global virtual teams may differ substantially on a number of cultural dimensions including preferences for individualistic versus collective teamwork, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and contextual communication. This chapter will investigate how these four cultural dimensions are likely to impact intra-team trust within a global virtual team. Suggestions that team leaders can utilize to address these cultural dimensions are also presented.
Technology Stewardship for Distributed Project Teams
Authors: Smith John David
Published: May 2011

Distributed project teams and communities of practice face similar challenges in using technology to work together and “be together.” However, these technologies are not only powerful enablers, they also present persistent challenges in and of themselves and in that they enable and filter multiple kinds of heterogeneity. These challenges are magnified by linguistic and cultural heterogeneity, multiple time zones, organizational boundaries, and the variance in technology literacy in project teams. Project teams need to adopt some of the practices that are found in technology-mediated communities to cope with their persistent technology challenges. The notion of a “digital habitat,” which has been developed by Wenger, White, and Smith (2009), is used to describe the landscape of technologies and practices that in combination will enable a project team to accomplish its tasks. For some distributed teams, a project must include ensemble work to ensure that all team members can participate and contribute, that communication and collaboration practices exist or are being developed, and that what has been learned in the process of completing the work is assessed and retained. The technology steward is proposed as a new role and function for project teams that operate at this level. Activities that support the exploration of a digital habitat include the development of technology literacy and increase the learning capacity of project teams.
A Distributed Requirements Collaboration Process
Authors: Rydell Brandon , Eby Sean D. , Seaton Carl
Published: May 2011

This chapter outlines a new requirements collaboration process to address these issues. This new process is based on work done by Karl Wiegers in his paper Prioritizing Requirements (Wiegers, 1999), and is extended to include a method of proposing alternate requirements, documenting the negotiation of priority among interested parties, and a way to rationally select priority requirements based on an objective measure of their relative merit. The chapter also introduces an application prototype called the Distributed Requirements Collaboration Tool (DRCT) that was built for use by distributed teams to support the requirements negotiation process described above and also to address the issue of capturing rationale as requirements are negotiated. Lastly, the experience using the DRCT is discussed in order to identify priority requirements for a more functional version of the DRCT.
Dimensions of Team Distribution within a Software Team
Authors: Wilson Eric M.
Published: May 2011

This chapter broadens the definition of distributed teams to include facets beyond geographic, cultural, and organizational boundaries. Through the example of a typical software development team and its version control process, it shows how varying the ability to share network resources adversely affects collaboration. This network connectedness dimension of variability is solved through progressive adoption of newer tools and techniques, which in turn have unexpected strategic benefits beyond solving the immediate need. From this example, a pattern is extracted that can be applied to any team by identifying a dimension of distributedness, implementing solutions, and capitalizing on those solutions.
Teaching Globally Distributed Software Development (DSD)
Authors: Faulk Stuart , Young Michal
Published: May 2011

This chapter describes an approach to building a collaborative teaching community that seeks to address these problems. It begins by identifying the skills students should acquire in a Distributed Software Development (DSD) course and discusses why firsthand experience with DSD problems is essential to learning them. The chapter identifies the attributes that make DSD project courses difficult to develop or teach, and then it describes a distributed team approach to developing a reusable infrastructure and a teaching community to address those difficulties. Future work focuses on building an international community of educators and industry participants interested in partnering to develop and teach DSD courses.
Changing Capabilities and Capacities
Authors: Konsynski Benn
Published: May 2011

Increasingly, the management of human capital management emerges as a key differentiator in the competitive marketplace. The talent pool and inventory of capabilities is a critical source of competitive differentiation, and also a key to accomplishing many of the strategic objectives essential for success of the competitive enterprise in the 21st century. Product and service innovation and process and practice improvement are essential in the modern market.
Trends in IT Human Resources and its Determinants
Authors: Agrawal Vijay K. , Agrawal Vipin K. , Taylor Ross , Tenkorang Frank
Published: May 2011

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the various, sometimes contradictory, factors influencing the demand for IT professionals and to build a simple framework that can be used to predict demand. The ability to predict the demand for IT professionals with a reasonable degree of accuracy is important for IHE’s and businesses to correctly identify where their scarce resources should be allocated to develop a curriculum for the 21st century workforce.
Retaining Global IT Talent
Authors: Khazanchi Deepak , Owens Dawn M.
Published: May 2011

The general problem of employee retention and the ability of an organization to influence and change actual turnover behavior are of great concern to employers, consultants, and academicians alike. This has been especially true in the IT profession. The growing need for IT professionals, combined with a shrinking labor pool, has made recruitment and retention of IT talent a top priority in many organizations. Forward thinking companies are looking to find and retain qualified IT talent wherever in the world it is available at a reasonable price. This chapter presents research that provides nuggets of wisdom that can be used as best practices for retaining global IT talent.
Building Great Talent and Effective Teams
Authors: Broadbent Marianne
Published: May 2011

A successful IT organization demands having the right talent that works effectively and efficiently together. IT managers must focus on identifying the right people and then continuously build and develop the respective talent, while ensuring the cohesiveness of the team dynamics. The valuable vignettes illustrate the “know and grow” focus of this important chapter.
Building IT Capacity for Leadership in a New Age
Authors: Greil Mary Jo , Millam Elaine
Published: May 2011

Who is responsible for identifying the focus of people development and ensuring that the development of future leaders is being given appropriate attention and support? These authors propose it begins with top management and includes both HR and IT functions in a highly collaborative and integrated fashion. Such collaboration is required for the people development investment to be sustainable.
A Players
Authors: Stevenson John
Published: May 2011

The term “A Players” was not a familiar categorization for staff until this author had been leading Information Technology organizations for over twenty five years. “A Players” as well as B, C and D Players is a common term for local charity and Pro-Am golf tournaments where competitively equal golf foursomes are created by balancing the known golf prowess and skills in each group. The “A Player” is the top ranked player in the group and “should” be the “low” or best scorer during play. The “B” Player is the next most skilled and so on. During my youth and mid-adult years, the author pursued other non-golf hobbies and activities such as boating and flying where “A Player” wasn’t a common term.
Summarizing Datacubes
Authors: Cicchetti Rosine , Lakhal Lotfi , Nedjar Sébastien , Novelli Noël , Casali Alain
Published: May 2011

Datacubes are especially useful for answering efficiently queries on data warehouses. Nevertheless the amount of generated aggregated data is huge with respect to the initial data which is itself very large. Recent research work has addressed the issue of summarizing Datacubes in order to reduce their size. In this chapter, we present three different approaches. They propose structures which make it possible to reduce the size of the data cube representation. The two former, the closed cube and the quotient cube, are said semantic and discard the redundancies captured within data cubes. The size of the underlying representations is especially reduced but the counterpart is an additional response time when answering the OLAP queries. The latter approach is rather syntactic since it enforces an optimization at the logical level. It is called Partition Cube and based on the concept of partition. We also give an algorithm to compute it. We propose a Relational Partition Cube, a novel R-Olap cubing solution for managing Partition Cubes using the relational technology. An analytical evaluation shows that the storage space of Partition Cubes is smaller than Datacubes. In order to confirm analytical comparison, experiments are performed in order to compare our approach with Datacubes and with two of the best reduction methods, the Quotient Cube and the Closed Cube.
A Parameterized Framework for Clustering Streams
Authors: Bhatnagar Vasudha , Kaur Sharanjit , Mignet Laurent
Published: May 2011

Clustering of data streams finds important applications in tracking evolution of various phenomena in medical, meteorological, astrophysical, seismic studies. Algorithms designed for this purpose are capable of adapting the discovered clustering model to the changes in data characteristics but are not capable of adapting to the user’s requirements themselves. Based on the previous observation, we perform a comparative study of different approaches for existing stream clustering algorithms and present a parameterized architectural framework that exploits nuances of the algorithms. This framework permits the end user to tailor a method to suit his specific application needs. We give a parameterized framework that empowers the end-users of KDD technology to build a clustering model. The framework delivers results as per the user’s application requirements. We also present two assembled algorithms G-kMeans and G-dbscan to instantiate the proposed framework and compare the performance with the existing stream clustering algorithms.
Multidimensional Design Methods for Data Warehousing
Authors: Romero Oscar , Abelló Alberto
Published: May 2011

In the last years, data warehousing systems have gained relevance to support decision making within organizations. The core component of these systems is the data warehouse and nowadays it is widely assumed that the data warehouse design must follow the multidimensional paradigm. Thus, many methods have been presented to support the multidimensional design of the data warehouse.The first methods introduced were requirement-driven but the semantics of the data warehouse (since the data warehouse is the result of homogenizing and integrating relevant data of the organization in a single, detailed view of the organization business) require to also consider the data sources during the design process. Considering the data sources gave rise to several data-driven methods that automate the data warehouse design process, mainly, from relational data sources. Currently, research on multidimensional modeling is still a hot topic and we have two main research lines. On the one hand, new hybrid automatic methods have been introduced proposing to combine data-driven and requirement-driven approaches. These methods focus on automating the whole process and improving the feedback retrieved by each approach to produce better results. On the other hand, some new approaches focus on considering alternative scenarios than relational sources. These methods also consider (semi)-structured data sources, such as ontologies or XML, that have gained relevance in the last years. Thus, they introduce innovative solutions for overcoming the heterogeneity of the data sources. All in all, we discuss the current scenario of multidimensional modeling by carrying out a survey of multidimensional design methods. We present the most relevant methods introduced in the literature and a detailed comparison showing the main features of each approach.
A Survey of Extract–Transform–Load Technology
Authors: Vassiliadis Panos
Published: May 2011

The software processes that facilitate the original loading and the periodic refreshment of the data warehouse contents are commonly known as Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) processes. The intention of this survey is to present the research work in the field of ETL technology in a structured way. To this end, we organize the coverage of the field as follows: (a) first, we cover the conceptual and logical modeling of ETL processes, along with some design methods, (b) we visit each stage of the E-T-L triplet, and examine problems that fall within each of these stages, (c) we discuss problems that pertain to the entirety of an ETL process, and, (d) we review some research prototypes of academic origin.
Reliability Estimates for Regression Predictions
Authors: Bosnic Zoran , Kononenko Igor
Published: May 2011

In machine learning, the reliability estimates for individual predictions provide more information about individual prediction error than the average accuracy of predictive model (e.g. relative mean squared error). Such reliability estimates may represent decisive information in the risk-sensitive applications of machine learning (e.g. medicine, engineering, and business), where they enable the users to distinguish between more and less reliable predictions. In the atuhors’ previous work they proposed eight reliability estimates for individual examples in regression and evaluated their performance. The results showed that the performance of each estimate strongly varies depending on the domain and regression model properties. In this paper they empirically analyze the dependence of reliability estimates’ performance on the data set and model properties. They present the results which show that the reliability estimates perform better when used with more accurate regression models, in domains with greater number of examples and in domains with less noisy data.
Recent Contributions to a Generic Architecture Design that Supports Learning Objects Interoperability
Authors: Botsios Sotirios , Georgiou Dimitrios A.
Published: May 2011

Adaptation and personalization services in e-learning environments are considered the turning point of recent research efforts, as the “one-size-fits-all” approach has some important drawbacks, from the educational point of view. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems in World Wide Web became a very active research field and the need of standardization arose, as the continually augmenting research efforts lacked interoperability capabilities. This article concentrates and classifies recent research work and notices important points that can lead to an open, modular and generic architecture of a Learning Management System based on widely accepted standards.
A 3D Geometry Model Search Engine to Support Learning
Authors: Tam Gary K. L. , Lau Rynson W. H. , Zhao Jianmin
Published: May 2011

Due to the popularity of 3D graphics in animation and games, usage of 3D geometry deformable models increases dramatically. Despite their growing importance, these models are difficult and time consuming to build. A distance learning system for the construction of these models could greatly facilitate students to learn and practice at different time and geographical locations. In such a system, an important component is the search engine, which serves as both the source of teaching materials and a platform for sharing resources. Although there have been a lot of works on text and multimedia retrieval, search engines for 3D models are still in its infant stage. In this article, we investigate two important issues: feature analysis, which affects the general usage of a system, and speed, which affects the number of concurrent users. Our method offers a mechanism to extract, index, match and efficiently retrieve features from these models.
A FCA-Based Cognitive Diagnosis Model for CAT
Authors: Shuqun Yang , Shuliang Ding
Published: May 2011

There is little room for doubt about that cognitive diagnosis has received much attention recently. Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is adaptive, fair, and efficient, which is suitable to large-scale examination. Traditional cognitive diagnostic test needs quite large number of items, the efficient and tailored CAT could be a remedy for it, so the CAT with cognitive diagnosis (CD-CAT) is prospective. It is more beneficial to the students who live in the developing area without rich source of teaching, and distance education is adopted there. CD is still in its infancy (Leighton at el.2007), and some flaws exist, one of which is that the rows/columns could form a Boolean lattice in Tatsuoka’s Q-matrix theory. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is proved to be a useful tool for cognitive science. Based on Rule Space Model (RSM) and the Attribute Hierarchy Method (AHM), FCA is applied into CD-CAT and concept lattices are served as the models of CD. The algorithms of constructing Qr matrice and concept lattices for CAT, and the theory and methods of diagnosing examinees and offering the best remedial measure to examinees are discussed in detail. The technology of item bank construction, item selection strategies in CD-CAT and estimation method are considered to design a systemic CD-CAT, which diagnoses examinees on-line and offers remedial measure for examinees in time. The result of Monte Carlo study shows that examinees’ knowledge states are well diagnosed and the precision in examinees’ abilities estimation is satisfied.
Adaptivity in ProPer
Authors: Kazanidis Ioannis , Satratzemi Maya
Published: May 2011

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems provide personalized educational content to learners. However most of them do not support the functionality of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and the reusability of their courses is hard work. On the other hand some LMS support SCORM specifications but do not provide adaptive features. This article presents ProPer, a LMS that conforms to SCORM specifications and provides adaptive hypermedia courses. ProPer manages and delivers SCORM compliant courses and personalizes them according to learner’s knowledge, goals and personal characteristics. In addition learner’s progress and behavior is monitored and useful feedback is returned to tutors. ProPer will be used for an adaptive Java Programming course distribution to CS1 students. Statistical feedback will be gathered by tutors in order to improve course effectiveness. The technology background is briefly given and the system’s architecture and functionality are analyzed.
A Rule-Based System for Test Quality Improvement
Authors: Costagliola Gennaro , Fuccella Vittorio
Published: May 2011

To correctly evaluate learners’ knowledge, it is important to administer tests composed of good quality question items. By the term “quality” we intend the potential of an item in effectively discriminating between skilled and untrained students and in obtaining tutor’s desired difficulty level. This article presents a rule-based e-testing system which assists tutors in obtaining better question items through subsequent test sessions. After each test session, the system automatically detects items’ quality and provides the tutors with advice about what to do with each of them: good items can be re-used for future tests; among items with lower performances, instead, some should be discarded, while some can be modified and then re-used. The proposed system has been experimented in a course at the University of Salerno.
2D Animated Social Story for Assisting Social Skills Learning of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Authors: Mandasari Vivi , Lu Marlene Valerie , Theng Lau Bee
Published: May 2011

Asperger Syndrome is a developmental disorder under the umbrella term of Autism Spectrum Disorders, and it is a milder variant of autism. It is characterized by a significant difficulty in communication, prominently in social interaction and non-verbal communication. Since a decade ago, there have been a variety of tools for teaching and assisting children with AS in the acquisition of social skills, ranging from the simple picture exchange system to the high-end virtual reality system. This chapter discusses on the effectiveness of integrating Social Story, 2D animations and video instruction for teaching social skills to children diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in an interactive manner. The prototype has been developed, implemented, and evaluated in an experimental way. This chapter will discuss on the evaluation process, results, findings, and areas for further exploration.
Collaborative Virtual Learning for Assisting Children with Cerebral Palsy
Authors: Valeria Nia , Lu Marlene Valerie , Theng Lau Bee
Published: May 2011

Communication through speech is a vital skill, an innate ability in most human beings intended to convey thoughts, needs, and it is the very foundation of literacy. However, some people find it as one of the challenges in their lives, particularly children with Cerebral Palsy. Children with such disability suffer from brain injuries before, during, and after birth that evidently affect their motor, cognitive, and linguistic skills. Some of the additional complexities may also cause hearing, visual, and speech impairments that further decrease their learning abilities. Their development milestones in learning is slower than a typical child, thus they require intensive personal drilling. It is believed that the cognitive skills in these children can be improved to enable them to lead a more productive life. That was an antecedent that strongly motivated us to develop the proposed Virtual Collaborative Learning Tool. It aims to assist the learning ability of the targeted children through a responsive avatar of their parents, teachers, or caretakers. A preliminary study was conducted on voluntary participants to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed learning model. The results showed 80% of the participants were able to answer questions provided within the program.
Enabling Context Aware Services in the Area of AAC
Authors: Lun Lau Sian , David Klaus
Published: May 2011

Technology can be used to assist people with disabilities in their daily activities. Especially when the users have communication deficiencies, suitable technology and tools can assuage such needs. We envision that context awareness is a potential method suitable to provide services and solutions in the area of Assistive and Augmentative Communication (AAC). In this chapter, the authors give an introduction to context awareness and the state of the art. This is followed with the elaboration on how context awareness can be used in AAC. The Context Aware Remote Monitoring Assistant (CARMA) is presented as an application designed for a care assistant and his patient. A demonstration of a context aware component implemented in the CARMA application is shown in this chapter. An experiment that investigates movement recognition using an accelerometer in a smartphone and the obtained results are presented. This chapter ends with a discussion on challenges, future work and the conclusion.
Trip to the Virtual Career World
Authors: Wunderlich Tom , Forbes Beverly , Mills Erin
Published: May 2011

A Faculty Innovator Grant allowed the Old Dominion University Career Management Center to develop the capability and protocol to take a group of students to an employer site in Second Life (SL) within the context of a one-credit-hour career course. This chapter will discuss the development process and the challenges encountered in preparing a class to visit and productively interact with employers in SL. It will also discuss minimizing development costs and the amount of faculty time and effort necessary to incorporate trips to virtual worlds in their class syllabi. This is an example of “how to” for those interested in taking groups into SL rather than an academic study of the effects of a visit in SL on the students. Therefore citing of research and discussion of educational outcomes is kept to a minimum.
Teaching and Learning in Second Life
Authors: Feng Jiuguang , Song Liyan
Published: May 2011

Various advantages of Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) have been identified in literature. However, MUVEs have not been widely adopted in educational settings due to technical and pedagogical challenges. This chapter discusses a qualitative case study that examines how Second Life, as a MUVE, was diffused on a university campus. Both instructors and students’ perspectives were examined using interviews, observations, and survey data collection methods. The theory of diffusion of innovation was used as a theoretical framework in both the design of the study and the analysis of the data. The findings from the study indicate that although the future application of MUVE can be promising, various challenges exist for instructors to adopt Second Life in their instruction.
Object Design in Virtual Immersive Environments
Authors: Baum Jan
Published: May 2011

The ubiquity of digital technology and the pervasiveness of the Web have led to a paradigm shift in life and work. Never before have so many tools for communication, contribution, and collaboration been so globally interconnected. The Object Design program at Towson University engages the network effect of emergent technologies developing pedagogy to keep pace with global developments. Students learn 21st century skills as they engage virtual immersive environments as a digital design tool, for iterative prototyping, as a virtual presence augmenting traditional studio practice, to engage new economic platforms, and as a virtual learning environment for global dialogue and collaboration. Steady growth in virtual immersive environments support a burgeoning virtual goods market and further exploration for learning, training, and innovation across social sectors: enterprise, education, and government in the evolution of society.
INDUSTRIAL TRAINING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN SPAIN
Authors: Dominguez Urbano , Magdaleno Jesus
Published: May 2011

Practical training in companies has been recognized for many years as an important component of the education of new engineering graduates all over the world. The format used to provide this education to students varies widely not only across national boundaries, but also within each country. This chapter deals first with the state of industrial training in engineering education in Spain, both in the old engineering degrees and in the new ones, following the European higher education area requirements, which are now in the process of introduction. An analysis is also carried out on the evaluation and assessment of industrial training when this activity is a part of first cycle engineering curricula, and the role played by the tutor is discussed. Finally, some weak points of industrial training in Spanish curricula are discussed, as well as some proposals to overcome that situation and to move towards a global approach of industrial training in engineering education.
Work Integrated Learning and Construction Project Management
Authors: Thomas Ken , Wall John , Graham Brian , Troy Patrick , Crowe David , O’Connell Aidan
Published: May 2011

This chapter concerns the design, delivery and management of a unique part-time postgraduate MSc in Construction Project Management (MScCPM) programme through an industry-academia partnership in Ireland during the period 2007-2010. The partners are BAM Contractors, part of the wider Royal BAM Group based in The Netherlands, and Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). There are many innovative Work Integrated Learning (WIL) aspects to this bespoken programme, including the blending of teaching and assessment by both WIT lecturers and senior BAM staff. There is also a blend of traditional classroom activities and e-learning technologies to suit the geographically dispersed participants. All stakeholders in this programme have benefited from their participation. These benefits and the associated lessons learned are described in the hope that they may be of use to those developing WIL postgraduate programmes in the future.
An Archetype of WIL in Information Technology at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Ravensburg, Germany
Authors: Reinhard Karin , Singh Shalini
Published: May 2011

The chapter provides an overview of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) into the Information Technology (IT) programme offered at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Ravensburg, Germany. The opinions and debates of leading role-players in WIL are featured. The university’s pose and the operations adopted in managing this programme will be presented. These include the structure of the IT programme, its accreditation process, strengths, and weaknesses. The chapter concludes with the programmes direction for the future.
Improving an Ambient Intelligence Based Multi-Agent System for Alzheimer Health Care using Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Tapia Dante I. , Alonso Ricardo S. , Corchado Juan M.
Published: May 2011

This paper describes last improvements made on ALZ-MAS; an Ambient Intelligence based multi-agent system aimed at enhancing the assistance and health care for Alzheimer patients. The system makes use of several context-aware technologies that allow it to automatically obtain information from users and the environment in an evenly distributed way, focusing on the characteristics of ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, mobility, etc., all of which are concepts defined by Ambient Intelligence. Among these context-aware technologies we have Wireless Sensor Networks. In this sense, ALZ-MAS is currently being improved by the use of a new platform of ZigBee devices that provides the system with new telemonitoring and locating engines.
Adaptive Awareness of Hospital Patient Information through Multiple Sentient Displays
Authors: Favela Jesus , Tentori Mónica , Segura Daniela , Berzunza Gustavo
Published: May 2011

Sentient computing can provide ambient intelligence environments with devices capable of inferring and interpreting context, while ambient displays allow for natural and subtle interactions with such environment. In this paper we propose to combine sentient devices and ambient displays to augment everyday objects. These sentient displays are aware of their surroundings while providing continuous information in a peripheral, subtle, and expressive manner. To seamlessly convey information to multiple sentient displays in the environment, we also propose an approach based on abstract interfaces which use contextual information to decide which display to use and how the information in the display changes in response to the environment. Our approach is illustrated through a hospital monitoring application. We present the design of two sentient displays that provide awareness of patient’s urine outputs to hospital workers, and how contextual information is used to integrate the functionality of both displays.
Variability in Ambient Intelligence A Family of Middleware Solution
Authors: Fuentes Lidia , Gamez Nadia , Sanchez Pablo
Published: May 2011

The development of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) software applications implies dealing with a wide variety of devices, which runs in different environments. These applications also target a wide range of end-users, with different needs and requirements. Software Product Lines are a relatively modern software paradigm whose main goal is to offer techniques and mechanisms to the systematic development of applications belonging to a domain with a high degree of variability. Therefore, the application of a Software Product Line for the construction of a family of middleware platforms for AmI applications should help to deal with the variability inherent to this domain. The first step when constructing a Software Product Line (SPL) is to create some sort of model which specifies the variability of the domain the SPL targets. This model is then used as basis for configuring and automatically creating specific products. The aim of this article is to highlight the complexity of managing different types of variability during the development of applications for AmI environments. A generic process for automatically generating a custom configuration of a middleware variant is also presented.
Motorola’s Experiences in Designing the Internet of Things
Authors: Schaller Andreas , Mueller Katrin
Published: May 2011

The Internet of Things will enable connectivity for virtually any physical object that potentially offers a message, and will affect every aspect of life and business. This article looks at the concepts and technologies in three application areas that Motorola is contributing to now and in the coming years.
On Ambient Information Systems
Authors: Hazlewood William R. , Coyle Lorcan
Published: May 2011

The rise of the Internet, the ever increasing ubiquity of data, and its low signal-to-noise ratio have contributed to the problem of information overload, whereby individuals have access to more data than they can assimilate into meaningful and actionable information. Much of the success of Web 2.0 has been achieved after an effective tackling of this problem. Ambient Information Systems take the battle into the physical world by integrating information into the physical environment in a non-intimidating and non-overloading fashion. After two international workshops on Ambient Information Systems, we outline our vision for the field, consolidate a new definition, identify the key concerns of the research community, and issue a call to arms for future research.
Meaning Makers
Authors: Insua Germán Lado , Bennett Mike , Nixon Paddy , Coyle Lorcan
Published: May 2011

Presence is an important part of our day-to-day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographical separate friends and colleagues. In this article we report on Ambient Jewelry, which is a project exploring the intersection of individual and user generated customization with ambient presence displays. With this research we are seeking techniques that enable people to invent, discover and find new forms of ambient presence visualisations.
Designing Interactive Architecture
Authors: Wiberg Mikael
Published: May 2011

Interactive architecture bridges in itself two design traditions, i.e. design of interactive systems on the one hand, and architecture as the tradition of designing our built environment on the other hand. This article reports from our ongoing project focused on the design and implementation of an interactive environment for public use. The article describes the project, reviews and outlines the main design challenges as pinpointed in the literature on interactive architecture, and describes the practical challenges identified in this particular project. This article then presents the participatory design approach adopted in this project to overcome these challenges, and describes and analysis the methodological implications from this project. These implications include the lessons learned from the coordination of a geographically distributed design team, “role gliding” as the reinterpretation of the designers as users in the participatory design process, and a shift from communities of practices to mixtures of professions.
Routing in Opportunistic Networks
Authors: Nguyen Hoang Anh , Giordano Silvia
Published: May 2011

In Opportunistic Networks (OppNets), mobile devices transmit messages by exploiting the direct contacts, without the need of an end-to-end infrastructure. Disconnections of nodes and high churn rates are normal features of opportunistic networks. Hence, routing is one of the main challenges in this environment. In this article, we provide a survey of the main routing approaches in OppNets and classify them into three classes: context-oblivious, mobility-based, and social context-aware routing. We emphasize the role of context information in forwarding data in OppNets, and evaluate the relative performance of the three routing techniques. Finally, we present how context-based information is used to route data in a specific subclass of OppNets: Sensor Actor Networks (SANETs).
Integrating Sensor Nodes into a Middleware for Ambient Intelligence
Authors: Klus Holger , Niebuhr Dirk
Published: May 2011

The development of infrastructures enabling dynamic and automated composition of IT systems is a big challenge. This paper addresses a new idea of allowing component-based systems to reconfigure themselves. Therefore, we propose DAiSI - a Dynamic Adaptive System Infrastructure for dynamic integration of components as well as their reconfiguration during runtime. Thereby, one of the features of the infrastructure is, that it is capable of binding components based on their availability. In this paper we concentrate on presenting how resource constrained sensor nodes can be integrated into a system using this infrastructure.
Intrusive Evaluation of Ambient Displays
Authors: Shen Xiaobin
Published: May 2011

Ambient display is a display, which sits on the peripheral of user’s attention. Currently, the research on ambient displays is still in initial stage, so few evaluation styles are available to evaluate ambient displays. Our previous research (Shen, Eades, Hong, & Moere, 2007) proposed two evaluation styles for ambient displays: Intrusive Evaluation and Non-Intrusive Evaluation. In this journal, we focus on the first style by applying two intrusive evaluation case studies. The first case study compares the performance of three different peripheral display systems on both large and small displays. Our results indicate there is a significant difference on a primary task performance and a peripheral comprehension task between large and small displays. Furthermore, we have found that distraction may be composed by display-distraction and self-interruption, and that animation may only influence the display-distraction. In addition, a measurement of efficiency derived from cognitive science is proposed. The second case study focuses on exploring the correct disruptive order of visual cues (animation, color, area and position). Our results show that the correct disruptive order of visual cues in ambient displays is: animation, color, area and position. Furthermore, we also revealed how display-distraction influences the comprehension of ambient display. In addition, this case study further amended the measurement of efficiency, which was proposed in previous case study, to improve its accuracy.
The Kolmogorov Spline Network for Image Processing
Authors: Leni Pierre-Emmanuel , Fougerolle Yohan D. , Truchetet Frédéric
Published: May 2011

In 1900, Hilbert stated that high order equations cannot be solved by sums and compositions of bivariate functions. In 1957, Kolmogorov proved this hypothesis wrong and presented his superposition theorem (KST) that allowed for writing every multivariate functions as sums and compositions of univariate functions. Sprecher has proposed in (Sprecher, 1996) and (Sprecher, 1997) an algorithm for exact univariate function reconstruction. Sprecher explicitly describes construction methods for univariate functions and introduces fundamental notions for the theorem comprehension (such as tilage). Köppen has presented applications of this algorithm to image processing in (Köppen, 2002) and (Köppen & Yoshida, 2005). The lack of flexibility of this scheme has been pointed out and another solution which approximates the univariate functions has been considered. More specifically, it has led us to consider Igelnik and Parikh’s approach, known as the KSN which offers several perspectives of modification of the univariate functions as well as their construction. This chapter will focus on the presentation of Igelnik and Parikh’s Kolmogorov Spline Network (KSN) for image processing and detail two applications: image compression and progressive transmission. Precisely, the developments presented in this chapter include: (1)Compression: the authors study the reconstruction quality using univariate functions containing only a fraction of the original image pixels. To improve the reconstruction quality, they apply this decomposition on images of details obtained by wavelet decomposition. The authors combine this approach into the JPEG 2000 encoder, and show that the obtained results improve JPEG 2000 compression scheme, even at low bitrates. (2)Progressive Transmission: the authors propose to modify the generation of the KSN. The image is decomposed into univariate functions that can be transmitted one after the other to add new data to the previously transmitted functions, which allows to progressively and exactly reconstruct the original image. They evaluate the transmission robustness and provide the results of the simulation of a transmission over packet-loss channels.
Cognitive Based Distributed Sensing, Processing, and Communication
Authors: Ilin Roman , Perlovsky Leonid
Published: May 2011

Perception, cognition, and higher cognitive abilities of the mind are considered here within a neural modeling fields (NMF) paradigm. Its fundamental mathematical mechanism is a process “from vague-fuzzy to crisp,” called dynamic logic. The chapter discusses why this paradigm is necessary mathematically, and relates it to a psychological description of the mind. Surprisingly, the process from “vague to crisp” corresponds to Aristotelian understanding of mental functioning. Recent fMRI measurements confirmed this process in neural mechanisms of perception. After an overview of NMF, the chapter describes solutions to two important problems: target tracking and situation recognition. Both problems can be solved within the NMF framework using the same basic algorithm. The chapter then discusses the challenges of using NMF and outlines the directions of future research.
Motivated Learning for Computational Intelligence
Authors: Starzyk Janusz A.
Published: May 2011

This chapter describes a motivated learning (ML) method that advances model building and learning techniques required for intelligent systems. Motivated learning addresses critical limitations of reinforcement learning (RL), the more common approach to coordinating a machine’s interaction with an unknown environment. RL maximizes the external reward by approximating multidimensional value functions; however, it does not work well in dynamically changing environments. The ML method overcomes RL problems by triggering internal motivations, and creating abstract goals and internal reward systems to stimulate learning. The chapter addresses the important question of how to motivate an agent to learn and enhance its own complexity? A mechanism is presented that extends low-level sensory-motor interactions towards advanced perception and motor skills, resulting in the emergence of desired cognitive properties. ML is compared to RL using a rapidly changing environment in which the agent needs to manage its motivations as well as choose and implement goals in order to succeed.
Information Processing by Chemical Reaction-Diffusion Media
Authors: Rambidi Nicholas G.
Published: May 2011

Biological roots and specific neural net architecture of reaction-diffusion media seem to enable simulating some phenomena inherent in the cerebral cortex, such as optical illusions.
Ability of the 1-n-1 Complex-Valued Neural Network to Learn Transformations
Authors: Nitta Tohru
Published: May 2011

The ability of the 1-n-1 complex-valued neural network to learn 2D affine transformations has been applied to the estimation of optical flows and the generation of fractal images. The complex-valued neural network has the adaptability and the generalization ability as inherent nature. This is the most different point between the ability of the 1-n-1 complex-valued neural network to learn 2D affine transformations and the standard techniques for 2D affine transformations such as the Fourier descriptor. It is important to clarify the properties of complex-valued neural networks in order to accelerate their practical applications more and more. In this chapter, the behavior of the 1-n-1 complex-valued neural network that has learned a transformation on the Steiner circles is demonstrated, and the relationship the values of the complex-valued weights after training and a linear transformation related to the Steiner circles is clarified via computer simulations. Furthermore, the relationship the weight values of the 1-n-1 complex-valued neural network learned 2D affine transformations and the learning patterns used is elucidated. These research results make it possible to solve complicated problems more simply and efficiently with 1-n-1 complex-valued neural networks. As a matter of fact, an application of the 1-n-1 type complex-valued neural network to an associative memory is presented.
Dynamic Negotiation Mechanism for Improving Service Quality for Replicas in Data Grids
Authors: Belalem Ghalem
Published: May 2011

In order not to be limited in term of calculation, storage and communication, the concept of grid, which does not cease evolving, makes it possible to offer a practical operation of work unified as well as a great storage and computing power. To manage the division in the data grid, technical replication is used, but in spite of their advantages, the competitor access to the data could involve inconsistencies, from where the great challenge to ensure the consistency management between replicas of object. In this chapter, we describe model double-layered adapted to the applications on a large scale and which represents the support of the hybrid approach of consistency management of replicas based on pessimistic and optimistic approaches. This hybrid approach present an adapted mechanism based on the various negotiation forms between virtual consistency agents to be able to reduce the number of conflicts between replicas in data grids.