bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Information Places
Authors: Willis Katharine S. , Geelhaar Jens
Published: May 2011

In our everyday lives, we are surrounded by information which weaves itself silently into the very fabric of our existence. Much of the time we act in the world based on recognising qualities of information which are relevant to us in the particular situation we are in. These qualities are very often spatial in nature, and in addition to information in the environment itself, we also access representations of space, such as maps and guides. Increasingly, such forms of spatial information are delivered on mobile devices, which enable a different relationship with our spatial world. We will discuss an empirical study which attempts to understand how people acquire and act on digital spatial information. In conclusion, we will draw on the outcomes of the study to discuss how we might better embed and integrate information in place so that it enables a more relational and shared experience in the interaction between people and their spatial setting.
QyoroView
Authors: Tamada Daisuke , Nakanishi Hideyuki
Published: May 2011

A lot of street view services, which present views of urban landscapes, have recently appeared. The conventional method for making street views requires on-vehicle cameras. We propose a new method, which relies on people who voluntarily take photos of an urban landscape. We have developed a system called QyoroView. The system receives photos from users, adjusts the photos’ position and orientation, and finally synthesizes them to generate a street view. We conducted two experiments in which the subjects generated a street view using our system. We also observed and interviewed the subjects who participated in order to learn their impression of the system.
Codespaces
Authors: Forlano Laura
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces the role of community wireless networks (CWNs) in reconfiguring people, places and information in cities. CWNs are important for leading users and innovators of mobile and wireless technologies in their communities. Their identities are geographically-bounded and their networks are imbued with social, political and economic values. While there has been much discussion of the networked, virtual and online implications of the Internet, the material implications in physical spaces have been overlooked. By analyzing the work of CWNs in New York and Berlin, this chapter reconceptualizes the interaction between technologies, spaces and forms of organizing. This chapter introduces the concept of codespaces in order to capture the integration of digital information, networks and interfaces with physical space.
From Social Butterfly to Urban Citizen
Authors: Satchell Christine
Published: May 2011

Early 21st century societies are evolving into a hybrid of real and synthetic worlds where everyday activities are mediated by technology. The result is a new generation of users extending their everyday experiences into these emerging digital ecologies. However, what happens when users re-create their human identity in these spaces? How do the tools of new technologies such as the mobile phone allow them to capture and share their experiences? In order to address these issues, this chapter presents the findings from a three-year study into mobile phone use in urban culture. The study revealed that for a new generation, the mobile phone was integral in the formation of fluid social interactions and had accelerated urban mobility. Users once restrained by pre-made plans were able to spontaneously traverse the city and suburbs, swarming between friendship groups and activities. Distinct user archetypes emerged from these mobile phone driven sub-cultures whose practices brought about fundamental changes in social mores with respect to engagement and commitment, to notions of fluid time versus fixed time and, ultimately, to urban mobility. Connectivity had become central to what it means to have a social identity and users responded to this by merging bits of data to create their “ideal digital self” through which they communicate socially. Yet, recent developments in mobile phone design reveal the potential for a new generation of people to recontextualize their use in a way that moves beyond “the social” as they utilise sensors and data capturing and sharing functionalities in new mobile devices to augment their “social butterfly” identity with an ideology of a “socially conscious urban citizen.”
Developing a Global CRM Strategy
Authors: Shumanov Michael
Published: May 2011

While the managerial rationale for adopting customer relationship management (CRM) has been fairly well articulated in the literature, research on strategy development is scant. Moreover, reports of “CRM failures” in the popular business press have done little to inspire confidence. To date, what little research has been conducted in the area of CRM strategy development has been confined to a single country (often the U.S.). Global CRM strategy development issues have yet to be specifically addressed, particularly which elements of CRM strategy should be centralised/decentralised. The present study examines the complexities of global CRM strategy using the case of a leading financial services company. Interviews are conducted in 20 countries. Global Head Office and external IT consultant perspectives are also considered. Our findings confirm that a hybrid approach has wide practical appeal and that subsidiary orientation towards centralisation/decentralisation is moderated by firm/market size and sophistication.
Game Theory as a Tool in Mobile Technologies and Applications
Authors: Agrawal Rajeev
Published: May 2011

Game theory is a tool used in the context of conflict interest among interacting decision makers. Game theory may be considered as a generalization of the decision theory that includes multiple players or decision makers. This chapter provides an introduction and overview of the game theory and demonstrates its potential applications in mobile business & technologies. Thus, the chapter provides a global outlook of game and economic theory and provides a comprehensive introduction to the more general subject of mathematical economics again in the context of mobile business. The reason for the importance of game theory in the context of mobile business & technologies is the fact that game theory deals primarily with distributed optimization. This distribution and optimization is individual user trade-users who are involved in making their own decisions in their own time and space. The chapter covers the role of game theory in different aspects of mobile applications, technologies and business.
Transitioning of Existing Business Processes to Collaborative and Mobile Business Processes
Authors: Unhelkar Bhuvan , Ghanbary Abbass
Published: May 2011

This chapter is based on a study at a selected organization to evaluate the impact of mobile technology and collaborative environment on its business processes. The existing business processes of the organization are placed within the proposed model of mobility. Also, additional collaborative business processes are engineered to operate on Collaborative Web-Based System (CWBS) in order to examine how an organization can benefit from the model. This chapter will also explain the shortcomings of the proposed re-engineered and engineered processes enabling better understanding of them. This study will help the organization under study to understand and experience the importance and value of the two important technologies of mobility and WS and the need to adapt them in order to remain competitive.
eBook Mobile Payment Process Model
Authors: Shiratuddin Norshuhada , Hassan Shahizan , Zaibon Syamsul Bahrin , Ab Salam Sobihatun Nur
Published: May 2011

Studies on the use of mobile payment (m-payment) method for buying electronic book (e-book) are very scarce, possibly not yet available. Consequently, a study was undertaken to accomplish the main aim of proposing an m-payment model for marketing and purchasing e-books. A number of process flow models are proposed to serve as diagrammatic representations of the process models that are of concerned. The models clearly specify all the entities involved, such as Telco, merchants, buyers, and e-book providers, and how the data and transactions, are flowing from one entity to another. The processes of browsing, buying, and downloading e-books are also documented. In validating the process flow models, two prototypes, a WAP and Web environments, were developed and tested to assess the model and system acceptance rating. Key findings indicate that m-payment is the most preferred payment method for buying e-book in higher learning institutions and the acceptance factors of such technology were found to be on the high and positive side.
Mobile Devices and Mobile Applications
Authors: Charsky Carol , Raisinghani Mahesh
Published: May 2011

Mobile devices are comprised of a multitude of various applications and operating systems that have significantly impacted the way people interact with each other as they go about their lives in this growing global economy. Today, businesses and organizations are facing new challenges in defining strategies, visions, and business processes in an effort to support the up and coming mobile market of devices and applications. In addition, companies are confronted with the need to monitor their critical business practices and processes throughout the organization in an effort to keep the competitive advantage in the growing mobile technology market. Since many company funds are limited with their IT budgets, organizations will need to prioritize its goals to determine how deeply committed they are to keep a vision on the future through the mobile market. This chapter will show how mobile devices with all of its various software and hardware devices can move an organization’s strategy into showing how it is important for companies to invest in this growing technology. Some of the more commonly known devices, operating systems, and critical applications will be identified. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn on the future of the mobile technology environment.
The Mobile Services Market
Authors: Gurau Calin
Published: May 2011

This paper presents the situation of the mobile services market in France, based on a survey conducted in the city of Montpellier, in November- December 2006. After a presentation of the existing research background related with mobile services, the article presents the research objectives and the research methodology applied to collect primary data for this project. The results of statistical data analysis are then presented and discussed, allowing an identification of the main consumer segments in terms of characteristics, attitudes and behaviours. The paper ends with a summary of the findings, and with suggestions for future research.
Mobile Commerce Adoption in Spain
Authors: Aldas-Manzano Joaquin , Ruiz-Mafe Carla , Sanz-Blas Silvia
Published: May 2011

The chapter aims to present an in-depth study of the factors influencing mobile commerce adoption. The authors analyze the influence of Mobile use experience, ICT ownership, Mobile affinity and Mobile Commerce compatibility in the m-commerce adoption decision. After identifying the key drivers of Mobile shopping adoption, the second part of the chapter presents an empirical study of the Spanish market. Results based on a sample of 470 Mobile users show that Mobile affinity, ICT ownership, and m-shopping compatibility are positive key drivers of M-shopping adoption. Mobile use experience has no significant influence on m-shopping adoption. This chapter will give managers and students insight into the Mobile Commerce industry and the different factors that influence m-commerce adoption. In addition, these factors can be applied to the specific context of the Spanish market.
Role of Mobile Technologies in an Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy
Authors: Trivedi Bharti , Unhelkar Bhuvan
Published: May 2011

This chapter aims to investigate and expand the role of mobile technologies in an Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy (ERBS). An ERBS with mobile technologies can help organizations achieve socially responsible goals of reducing green house emissions, reducing physical movement of men and materials, and recycling materials, to name a few. Organizations are electronically collaborating globally through the medium of the Internet and by employing service-oriented architectures. This electronic collaboration amongst large numbers of globally spread businesses creates a collaborative business “ecosystem” that is also virtual. Virtual collaborations between businesses create further challenges for environmentally responsible strategies as they make it difficult to identify the precise contributors to green house emissions and pollutions. This chapter delves deeper into the role of mobile technologies in creating and enhancing what can be considered as Environmental Intelligence (EI) – extending business intelligence with mobility for a “Green” enterprise.
Techniques for Exploiting Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Bari Ataul , Jaekel Arunita
Published: May 2011

A sensor network consists of tiny, low-powered and multifunctional sensor devices and is able to perform complex tasks through the collaborative efforts of a large number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed within the sensing field. Maintaining connectivity and maximizing the network lifetime are among the critical considerations in designing sensor networks and its protocols. Conservation of limited energy reserves at each sensor node is one of the greatest challenges in a sensor network. It has been suggested that mobility of some nodes/entities in a sensor network can be exploited to improve network performance in a number of areas, including coverage, lifetime, connectivityy, and fault-tolerance. In this context, techniques for effectively utilizing the unique capabilities of mobile nodes have been attracting increasing research attention in the past few years. In this chapter, the authors focus on some of the new and innovative techniques that have been recently proposed to handle a number of important problems in this field. It also presents a number of open problems and some developing trends and directions for future work in this emerging research area.
Independent Component Analysis Algorithms in Wireless Communication Systems
Authors: Parmar Sargam , Unhelkar Bhuvan
Published: May 2011

In commercial cellular networks, like the systems based on direct sequence code division multiple access (DSCDMA), many types of interferences can appear, starting from multi-user interference inside each sector in a cell to interoperator interference. Also unintentional jamming can be present due to co-existing systems at the same band, whereas intentional jamming arises mainly in military applications. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) use as an advanced pre-processing tool for blind suppression of interfering signals in direct sequence spread spectrum communication systems utilizing antenna arrays. The role of ICA is to provide an interference-mitigated signal to the conventional detection. Several ICA algorithms exist for performing Blind Source Separation (BSS). ICA has been used to extract interference signals, but very less literature is available on the performance, that is, how does it behave in communication environment? This needs an evaluation of its performance in communication environment. This chapter evaluates the performance of some major ICA algorithms like Bell and Sejnowski’s infomax algorithm, Cardoso’s Joint Approximate Diagonalization of Eigen matrices (JADE), Pearson-ICA, and Comon’s algorithm in a communication blind source separation problem. Independent signals representing Sub-Gaussian, Super-Gaussian, and mix users, are generated and then mixed linearly to simulate communication signals. Separation performance of ICA algorithms is measured by performance index.
Data Warehousing and Decision Support in Mobile Wireless Patient Monitoring
Authors: Nag Barin N. , Siegal Mark
Published: May 2011

The recent advances in wireless communication technologies have made possible the development of wireless systems for monitoring the health and disease status of patients, in both in-patient hospital settings and outside. The volume of patient monitoring data requires Data Warehousing technologies for storage intended for analysis. The analysis is performed by Decision Support Systems (DSS) that provide clinical diagnoses and treatment methodology consistent with the urgency. The clinical DSS is critical in the analysis of a volume of data beyond the capabilities of a healthcare professional, and is effective in reducing workload, saving money, and providing better care for patients. This chapter also analyzes the technical aspects of the process.
Conceptual Customization for Learning with Multimedia
Authors: Butcher Kirsten R. , de la Chica Sebastian , Ahmad Faisal , Gu Qianyi , Sumner Tamara , Martin James H.
Published: May 2011

This chapter discusses an emerging theme in supporting effective multimedia learning: developing scalable, cognitively-grounded tools that customize learning interactions for individual students. We discuss the theoretical foundation for expected benefits of customization and current approaches in educational technology that leverage a learner’s prior knowledge. We then describe the development of a customized tool for science learning, called CliCk, that uses automatic techniques to create knowledge models that can be fed into cognitively-informed pedagogical tools. CliCk leverages existing multimedia resources in educational digital libraries for two purposes: (a) to generate rich representations of domain content relevant for learner modeling that are easily scaled to new domains and disciplines, and (b) to serve as a repository of instructional resources that support customized pedagogical interactions. The potential of the CliCk system is discussed, along with initial comparisons of knowledge models created by CliCk and human experts. Finally, the chapter discusses the remaining challenges and relevant future extensions for effective customization tools in educational technology.
Cognitive Informatics
Authors: Zhang Du , Kinsner Witold , Tsai Jeffrey , Wang Yingxu , Sheu Philip , Wang Taehyung
Published: May 2011

The 2005 IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics (ICCI’05) was held during August 8th to 10th 2005 on the campus of University of California, Irvine. This was the fourth conference of ICCI [Kinsner et al. 05]. The previous conferences were held at Calgary, Canada (ICCI’02) [Wang et al. 02], London, UK (ICCI’03) [Patel et al. 03], and Victoria, Canada (ICCI’04) [Chan et al. 04], respectively. ICCI’05 was organized by General Co-Chairs of Jeffrey Tsai (University of Illinois) and Yingxu Wang (University of Calgary), Program Co-Chairs of Du Zhang (California State University) and Witold Kinsner (University of Manitoba), and Organization Co- Chairs of Philip Sheu (University of California), Taehyung Wang (California State University, Northridge), and Shangping Ren (Illinois Institute of Technology).
Making Image Retrieval and Classification More Accurate Using Time Series and Learned Constraints
Authors: Ratanamahatana Chotirat “Ann” , Keogh Eamonn , Niennattrakul Vit
Published: May 2011

After the generation of multimedia data turning digital, an explosion of interest in their data storage, retrieval, and processing, has drastically increased in the database and data mining community. This includes videos, images, and handwriting, where we now have higher expectations in exploiting these data at hand. We argue however, that much of this work’s narrow focus on efficiency and scalability has come at the cost of usability and effectiveness. Typical manipulations are in some forms of video/image processing, which require fairly large amounts for storage and are computationally intensive. In this work, we will demonstrate how these multimedia data can be reduced to a more compact form, that is, time series representation, while preserving the features of interest, and can then be efficiently exploited in Content-Based Image Retrieval. We also introduce a general framework that learns a distance measure with arbitrary constraints on the warping path of the Dynamic Time Warping calculation. We demonstrate utilities of our approach on both classification and query retrieval tasks for time series and other types of multimedia data including images, video frames, and handwriting archives. In addition, we show that incorporating this framework into the relevance feedback system, a query refinement can be used to further improve the precision/recall by a wide margin.
Event Detection, Query, and Retrieval for Video Surveillance
Authors: Tian Ying-li , Hampapur Arun , Brown Lisa , Feris Rogerio , Lu Max , Senior Andrew
Published: May 2011

Video surveillance automation is used in two key modes: watching for known threats in real-time and searching for events of interest after the fact. Typically, real-time alerting is a localized function, for example, an airport security center receives and reacts to a “perimeter breach alert,” while investigations often tend to encompass a large number of geographically distributed cameras like the London bombing, or Washington sniper incidents. Enabling effective event detection, query and retrieval of surveillance video for preemption, and investigation, involves indexing the video along multiple dimensions. This chapter presents a framework for event detection and surveillance search that includes: video parsing, indexing, query and retrieval mechanisms. It explores video parsing techniques that automatically extract index data from video indexing, which stores data in relational tables; retrieval which uses SQL queries to retrieve events of interest and the software architecture that integrates these technologies.
MMIR
Authors: Chen Min , Chen Shu-Ching
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces an advanced content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system, MMIR, where Markov model mediator (MMM) and multiple instance learning (MIL) techniques are integrated seamlessly and act coherently as a hierarchical learning engine to boost both the retrieval accuracy and efficiency. It is well-understood that the major bottleneck of CBIR systems is the large semantic gap between the low-level image features and the high-level semantic concepts. In addition, the perception subjectivity problem also challenges a CBIR system. To address these issues and challenges, the proposed MMIR system utilizes the MMM mechanism to direct the focus on the image level analysis together with the MIL technique (with the neural network technique as its core) to real-time capture and learn the object-level semantic concepts with some help of the user feedbacks. In addition, from a long-term learning perspective, the user feedback logs are explored by MMM to speed up the learning process and to increase the retrieval accuracy for a query. The comparative studies on a large set of real-world images demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed MMIR system.
Innovation Risks of Outsourcing within Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS)
Authors: Trott Paul , Hoecht Andreas
Published: May 2011

The United States and European economies have witnessed an enormous increase in the amount of specialized business services, which now provide critical inputs to firms in all sectors. It is this area of the economy which has witnessed huge expansion and development. KIBS include traditional professional business services such as accountancy and law, but also a new generation of KIBS such as IT expertise and internet development. Coupled to this growth has been an increase in the level of outsourcing. Outsourcing was originally confined to peripheral business functions and mainly motivated by a cost saving logic, but has now developed into a routine strategic management move that affects not only peripheral functions but the heart of the competitive core of organisations. This chapter analyses previous research and adopts a conceptual perspective in investigating the innovation-related risks to the organisation that can arise from strategic outsourcing. It uses the example of KIBS outsourcing to highlight the increased risks that arise from a move from traditional to strategic outsourcing and discusses some measures that managers can take to attempt to control these risks.
Knowledge Management and IT Research and Analysis Firms
Authors: Klincewicz Krzysztof
Published: May 2011

The chapter discusses the role of IT Research & Analysis firms in the diffusion of knowledge management. The research is based on content analysis of reports and research notes concerning knowledge management, issued by the most influential analyst firm Gartner in years 1997-2003. It identifies three predominant roles of analysts: agenda-setters (focusing the public discourse on selected issues), oracles (offering ambiguous promises) and judges (selecting concepts, technologies and vendors). While critically evaluating the influence of IT Research & Analysis firms, the chapter documents important passages in the history of knowledge management.
Balancing Stability and Innovation in Knowledge-Intensive Firms
Authors: Ditillo Angelo
Published: May 2011

Knowledge-intensive firms are composed of various communities, each characterized by specialized knowledge. These communities operate as critical agents in the organizational action because the relevant processes and the variety/variability of environment and technology are too complex for a single individual to understand in their entirety. They generate new models for interpreting reality and responding to customer needs thanks to the integration of knowledge taking place within and between them. The objective of this chapter is to provide some criteria for evaluating the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of combinations of control mechanisms in the regulation of these knowledge integration processes. On the basis of the characteristics of knowledge (level of complexity and diversity), a different set of control mechanisms is proposed, with a variation in their specific features to guarantee that the resulting modes of communication and cognition can guarantee the required level innovation, without however preventing a certain level of stability.
Basics to Multirate Systems
Authors: Milic Ljiljana
Published: May 2011

Linear time-invariant systems operate at a single sampling rate i.e. the sampling rate is the same at the input and at the output of the system, and at all the nodes inside the system. Thus, in an LTI system, the sampling rate doesn’t change in different stages of the system. Systems that use different sampling rates at different stages are called the multirate systems. The multirate techniques are used to convert the given sampling rate to the desired sampling rate, and to provide different sampling rates through the system without destroying the signal components of interest. In this chapter, we consider the sampling rate alterations when changing the sampling rate by an integer factor. We describe the basic sampling rate alteration operations, and the effects of those operations on the spectrum of the signal.
Dependability and Fault-Tolerance
Authors: De Florio Vincenzo
Published: May 2011

The general objective of this chapter is to introduce the basic concepts and terminology of the domain of dependability. Concepts such as reliability, safety, or security, have been used inconsistently by different communities of researchers: The realtime system community, the secure computing community, and so forth, each had its own “lingo” and was referring to concepts such as faults, errors, and failures without the required formal foundation. This changed in the early 1990s, when Jean-Claude Laprie finally introduced a tentative model for dependable computing. To date, the Laprie model of dependability is the most widespread and accepted formal definition for the terms that play a key role in this book. As a consequence, the rest of this chapter introduces that model.
Hybrid Approaches
Authors: De Florio Vincenzo
Published: May 2011

This chapter describes some hybrid approaches for application-level software fault-tolerance. All the approaches reported in the rest of this chapter exploit the recovery language approach introduced in Chapter VI and couple it with other tools and paradigms described in other parts of this book. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how ReL can serve as a tool to further enhance some of the application- level fault-tolerance paradigms introduced in previous chapters. But why hybrid approaches in the first place? The main reason is that joining two or more concepts and their “system structures” (Randell, 1975), that is, the conceptual and syntactical axioms used in disparate application-level software fault-tolerance provisions, one comes up with a tool with better Syntactical Adequacy (the SA attribute introduced in Chapter II). As already mentioned, a wider syntactical structure can facilitate the expression of our codes, while on the contrary awkward structures often lead to clumsy, buggy applications. Hybrid approaches are often more versatile and can also inspire brand new designs. A drawback of hybrid approaches is that they are modifications of existing designs. The extra design complexity must be carefully added to prevent the introduction if design faults in the architecture.
Conclusion
Authors: De Florio Vincenzo
Published: May 2011

We have reached the end of our discussion about application-level fault-tolerance protocols, which were defined as the methods, architectures, and tools that allow the expression of fault-tolerance in the application software of our computers. Several “messages” have been given: • First of all, fault-tolerance is a “pervasive” concern, spanning the whole of the system layers. Neglecting one layer, for instance the application, means leaving a backdoor open for problems. • Next, fault-tolerance is not abstract: It is a function of the target platform, the target environment, and the target quality of service. The tools to deal with this are the system model and the fault model, plus the awareness that (1) all assumptions have coverage and (2) coverage means that, sooner or later, maybe quite later but “as sure as eggs is eggs,” cases will show up where each coverage assumptions will fail. • This means that there is a (even ethical) need to design our systems thinking of the consequences of coverage failures at mission time, especially considering safety critical missions. I coined a word for those supposed fault-tolerant software engineers that do not take this need into account: Endangeneers. Three well-known accidents have been presented and interpreted in view of coverage failures in the fault and system models. • Next, the critical role of the system structure for the expression of fault-tolerance in computer applications was put forth: From this stemmed the three properties characterizing any application-level fault-tolerance protocol: Separation of concerns, adequacy to host different solutions, and support for adaptability. Those properties address the following question: Given a certain fault-tolerance provision, is it able to guarantee an adequate separation of the functional and non-functional design concerns? Does it tolerate a fixed set of faulty scenarios, or does it dynamically change that set? And, is it flexible enough as to host a large number of different strategies? • Then it has been shown that there exist a large number of techniques and hence of system structures able to enhance the fault-tolerance of the application. Each of these techniques has its pros and cons, which we tried to point out as best as we could. We also attempted to qualify each technique with respect to the above mentioned properties1. A summary of the results of this process is depicted in Fig. 1. • Another key message is that complexity is a threat to dependability, and we must make sure that the extra complexity to manage fault-tolerance does not become another source of potential failures. In other words, simplicity must be a key ingredient of our fault-tolerance protocols, and a faulty fault-tolerant software may produce the same consequence of a faulty non fault-tolerant software—or maybe direr. • Finally, we showed with some examples that adaptive behavior is the only way to match the ever mutating and unstable environments characterizing mobile systems. As an example, static designs would make bad use of the available redundancy.
Bio-Inspired Grid Resource Management
Authors: Khare Vineet R. , Wang Frank Zhigang
Published: May 2011

The need for a dynamic and scalable expansion of the grid infrastructure and resources and other scalability issues in terms of execution efficiency and fault tolerance present centralized management techniques with numerous difficulties. This chapter presents the case for biologically inspired grid resource management techniques that are decentralized and self organized in nature. To achieve the desired de-centralized resource management, these techniques model the self-organization observed in many natural complex adaptive systems. Using a few representative techniques, the authors review the literature on Bio-inspired Grid Resource Management. Based on this review the authors conclude that many such techniques have been successfully applied to resource discovery, service placement, scheduling and load balancing.
Service Oriented Storage System Grid
Authors: Deng Yuhui , Wang Frank Zhigang , Helian Na
Published: May 2011

Storage Grid is a new model for deploying and managing the heterogeneous, dynamic, large-scale, and geographically distributed storage resources. This chapter discusses the challenges and solutions involved in building a Service Oriented Storage (SOS) Grid. By wrapping the diverse storage resources into atomic Grid services and federating multiple atomic Grid services into composite services, the SOS Grid can tackle the heterogeneity and interoperability. Peer-to-peer philosophy and techniques are employed in the SOS Grid to eliminate the system bottleneck and single point of failure of the traditional centralized or hierarchical Grid architecture, while providing dynamicity and scalability. Because Grid service is not designed for critical and real-time applications, the SOS Grid adopts Grid service to glue the distributed and heterogeneous storage resources, while using binary code to transfer data. The proposed methods strike a good balance among the heterogeneity, interoperability, scalability and performance of the SOS Grid.
Pricing Computational Resources in Grid Economies
Authors: Vanmechelen Kurt , Broeckhove Jan , Depoorter Wim , Abdelkader Khalid
Published: May 2011

As grid computing technology moves further up the adoption curve, the issues of dealing with conflicting user requirements formulated by different users become more prevalent. In addition, the need to negotiate static sharing agreements between the different stakeholders in a grid system is time-consuming and offers limited incentive for resource owners to step into the grid’s infrastructure in a provider role. Resource management approaches that are currently adopted in grids are not able to deal with these issues in a flexible, value-maximizing way because of their system-centric approach. This contribution presents a clear motivation for the use of economic forms of scheduling in grid computing environments to address these shortcomings. The authors also provide an introductory overview of the different forms of market mechanisms that have been adopted by researchers in the field. In addition, the authors present simulation results concerning the use of Vickrey auctions and commodity markets as market mechanisms for dynamic pricing in grid resource markets.
Distributed Image Processing on a Blackboard System
Authors: Schaefer Gerald , Tait Roger
Published: May 2011

Efficient approaches to computationally intensive image processing tasks are currently highly sought after. In this chapter, the authors show how a blackboard paradigm, originally developed for collaborative problem solving, can be used as an efficient and effective vehicle for distributed computation. Through the design of dedicated intelligent agents, typical image processing algorithms can be applied in parallel on multiple loosely coupled machines leading to a significant overall speedup as is verified in a series of experiments.
Grid Computing
Authors: Goteng Gokop , Tiwari Ashutosh , Roy Rajkumar
Published: May 2011

The emerging grid technology provides a secured platform for multidisciplinary experts in the security intelligence profession to collaborate and fight global terrorism. This chapter developed grid architecture and implementation strategy on how to connect the dots between security agents such as the CIA, FBI, police, custom officers and transport industry to share data and information on terrorists and their movements. The major grid components that featured in the architecture are the grid security portal, data grid, computational grid, semantic grid and collaboratory. The challenges of implementing this architecture are conflicting laws, cooperation among governments, and information on terrorist’s network and interoperability problem.
Hidden Markov Model Based Visemes Recognition, Part II
Authors: Foo Say Wei , Donga Liang
Published: May 2011

The basic building blocks of visual speech are the visemes. Unlike phonemes, the visemes are, however, confusable and easily distorted by the contexts in which they appear. Classifiers capable of distinguishing the minute difference among the different categories are desirable. In this chapter, we describe two Hidden Markov Model based techniques using the discriminative approach to increase the accuracy of visual speech recognition. The approaches investigated include Maximum Separable Distance (MSD) training strategy (Dong, 2005) and Two-channel training approach (Dong, 2005; Foo, 2003; Foo, 2002) The MSD training strategy and the Two-channel training approach adopt a proposed criterion function called separable distance to improve the discriminative power of an HMM. The methods are applied to identify confusable visemes. Experimental results indicate that higher recognition accuracy can be attained using these approaches than that using conventional HMM.
Applications of Semantic Mining on Biological Process Engineering
Authors: Gabbar Hossam A. , Mahmut Naila
Published: May 2011

Semantic mining is an essential part in knowledgebase and decision support systems where it enables the extraction of useful knowledge form available databases with the ultimate goal of supporting the decision making process. In process systems engineering, decisions are made throughout plant / process / product life cycles. The provision of smart semantic mining techniques will improve the decision making process for all life cycle activities. In particular, safety and environmental related decisions are highly dependent on process internal and external conditions and dynamics with respect to equipment geometry and plant layout. This chapter discusses practical methods for semantic mining using systematic knowledge representation as integrated with process modeling and domain knowledge. POOM or plant/process object oriented modeling methodology is explained and used as a basis to implement semantic mining as applied on process systems engineering. Case studies are illustrated for biological process engineering, in particular MoFlo systems focusing on process safety and operation design support.
Active Video Annotation
Authors: Wang Meng , Hua Xian-Sheng , Tang Jinhui , Qi Guo-Jun
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces the application of active learning in video annotation. The insufficiency of training data is a major obstacle in learning-based video annotation. Active learning is a promising approach to dealing with this difficulty. It iteratively annotates a selected set of most informative samples, such that the obtained training set is more effective than that gathered randomly. The authors present a brief review of the typical active learning approaches. They categorize the sample selection strategies in these methods into five criteria, that is, risk reduction, uncertainty, positivity, density, and diversity. In particular, they introduce the Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based active learning scheme which has been widely applied. Afterwards, they analyze the deficiency of the existing active learning methods for video annotation, that is, in most of these methods the to-be-annotated concepts are treated equally without preference and only one modality is applied. To address these two issues, the authors introduce a multi-concept multi-modality active learning scheme. This scheme is able to better explore human labeling effort by considering both the learnabilities of different concepts and the potential of different modalities.
Semantic Classification and Annotation of Images
Authors: Tian Yonghong , Jiang Shuqiang , Huang Tiejun , Gao Wen
Published: May 2011

With the rapid growth of image collections, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been an active area of research with notable recent progress. However, automatic image retrieval by semantics still remains a challenging problem. In this chapter, the authors will describe two promising techniques towards semantic image retrieval—semantic image classification and automatic image annotation. For each technique, four aspects are presented: task definition, image representation, computational models, and evaluation. Finally, they will give a brief discussion of their application in image retrieval.
Compressed-Domain Image Retrieval Based on Colour Visual Patterns
Authors: Schaefer Gerald
Published: May 2011

Image retrieval and image compression have been typically pursued separately. Only little research has been done on a synthesis of the two by allowing image retrieval to be performed directly in the compressed domain of images without the need to uncompress them first. In this chapter the authors show that such compressed domain image retrieval can indeed be done and lead to effective and efficient retrieval performance. They introduce a novel compression algorithm – colour visual pattern image coding (CVPIC) – and present several retrieval algorithms that operate directly on compressed CVPIC data. Their experiments demonstrate that it is not only possible to realise such midstream content access, but also that the presented techniques outperform standard retrieval techniques such as colour histograms and colour correlograms.
Skype-Based Tandem Language Learning and Web 2.0
Authors: Mullen Tony , Appel Christine , Shanklin Trevor
Published: May 2011

An important aspect of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is the use of Web-embedded and integrated non-browser Internet applications to facilitate community-building and direct user participation and interaction. Social Networking Services, online noticeboards, chat rooms, and other interactive environments enable students to engage directly with native speakers of their target languages. As a way of bringing language learners together, Web 2.0 technologies promise an enormous transformation in language learning. With regard to voice communications specifically, synchronous, peer-to-peer voice-over-IP (P2P VoIP) tools such as Skype, GoogleTalk, and others are an example of a new channel of online interaction that is likely to play an increasingly important role in online community-building and language learning. This chapter analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the Skype service as a tool for tandem language learning. It presents a variety of ways in which Skype’s strengths can be enhanced and its weaknesses overcome by incorporating the exchange into a wider Web 2.0 environment, based on insights we have gained over the course of an ongoing study. In particular, the importance of a task-based approach informed by the principles of tandem learning is emphasized. Preliminary qualitative results are reported of two years of ongoing Skype-based tandem exchanges between Japanese students of English at Tsuda College, Tokyo, and American students of Japanese at San Diego State University. Finally, a prototype is presented for a new dedicated Web 2.0 environment designed to optimize the Skype tandem learning experience and to facilitate further research in the field.
The Use of Communities in a Virtual Learning Environment
Authors: Baten Lut , Bouckaert Nicolas , Yingli Kan
Published: May 2011

This case study describes how a project-based approach offers valuable new opportunities for graduate students to equip them with the necessary competencies and skills for bridging the gap from university to company performance in English. The project focused on the development of a Web 2.0 learning community in a virtual learning environment (VLE) using Google. Throughout the project, a group of business and economics students reported to each other and to external experts about their progress. Google was compared to Blackboard, the official university VLE. Google does not score as well as on privacy and structure, but a qualitative results questionnaire revealed that it performs better as a learnerpulled VLE. Our Google community led to (i) intensive interaction in discussion forums in the target language, (ii) confidence building as to spoken and written performance in an international business setting, (iii) meaningful content learning, and (iv) successful project management skills. The strengths of a Google community lie in user-friendliness, interaction, and the application of new technological tools and means.
Concordancing 2.0
Authors: Krajka Jaroslaw
Published: May 2011

This chapter contrasts the use of corpora and concordancing in the Web 1.0 era with the opportunities presented to the language teachers by the Web 2.0 stand-alone concordancing software, which make it much easier to access, compile, and consult the corpora that are more relevant for particular classroom contexts. It is argued here that once trained in the basic corpus consultation procedures with demo interfaces, teachers can exercise their autonomy by using texts available locally and globally to compile custom-made collections. In the chapter the two basic approaches to custom-made concordancing, namely the Web as Corpus and the compilation of ad-hoc collections will be described, together with a summary of sample tools. It is hoped that given careful selection of relevant sources, the learning process will become significantly enhanced thanks to more authentic and relevant language data, promoting teacher autonomy and discovery-based procedures.
A Techno-Economic Analysis of Mobile Virtual Network Operators
Authors: Shin Dong Hee
Published: May 2011

The purpose of this study is to examine cross-national data in order to identify possible factors related to the observable patterns of Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) penetration. For this purpose, a mobile market structure is analyzed considering important economic factors related to the penetration of MVNOs. MVNOs have gained popularity in the Western markets, but have a dismal track record in non-Western regions. In comparing the different regions, this study analyzes how the MVNO market has changed and what opportunities and/or threats network operators and potential MVNO entrants are likely to face. This study conducts an economic assessment of market structure and environment for different countries’ MVNO penetration. The data on market structure is analyzed by means of cluster/factor analysis techniques in order to group countries according to their market environments. Then, regression equation analysis is used to investigate the relations of MVNO penetration and independent variables. The results show that MVNO penetration significantly relates to market structure and performance. These results also imply an appropriate policy to promote MVNO diffusion.