Mixed Reality-Mediated Collaborative Design System: Concept, Prototype, and Experimentation
This paper introduces a Mixed Reality-mediated Collaborative design system, named MR-Collab, which combines Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Reality (AR) and various channels of communication technologies. The concept and system of MR-Collabare developed based on the Benford's Mixed-Reality boundaries theory. This paper presents how this theory is used as a tool to analyze the system framework and guide the design of the MR-Collabsystem. The technique details of prototype and application scenario of this system are also elaborated in the paper. The system, MR-Collab, is designed in the purpose of facilitating collaboration between distributed users through the Mixed Reality environment. Experimentation that can measure the correlations between the design performance/behaviors with the increased degree of co-presence is also planned in this paper.

title: Motivated learning agent model for distributed collaborative systems
abstract: The paper develops and discusses a conceptual model for a Mixed Reality-based remote collaborative system (MR-Collab) based on motivated learning Agents. The proposed MR-Collab system is described in details as well to help better understand this model. Self-Development Agent based on previous work is an intelligent Agent, which not only receives information from sensors in the environment, but also gives valuable suggestions that could help to improve the system. The model is not limited to this specific system, but could be adapted to other collaboration systems as well.

title: User-Centered Design and Visualization of Service Oriented Recommender Agents: An Approach to Achieve Better Consumers' Involvement in E-Commerce Systems
abstract: This paper identifies some issues related to consumers’ involvement in current e-commerce systems and presents a possible solution. In this paper, it is assumed that adopting user-centered design concept to establish service oriented recommender agents and visualizing those agents into human-look-alike avatars in virtual environments (VEs) could be a proper concept and approach to increase consumers’ involvement. This paper develops a conceptual model of how consumers’ involvement could be increased to a higher level by adopting those design concepts. The proposed experimentation that could test this model is also illustrated.

title: Precomputed Radiance Transfer Field for Rendering Interreflections in Dynamic Scenes
abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new representation – radiance transfer fields (RTF) – for rendering interreflections in dynamic scenes under low frequency illumination. The RTF describes the radiance transferred by an individual object to its surrounding space as a function of the incident radiance. An important property of RTF is its independence of the scene configuration, enabling interreflection computation in dynamic scenes. Secondly, RTFs naturally fit in with the rendering framework of precomputed shadow fields, incurring negligible cost to add interreflection effects. In addition, RTFs can be used to compute interreflections for both diffuse and glossy objects. We also show that RTF data can be highly compressed by clustered principal component analysis (CPCA), which not only reduces the memory cost but also accelerates rendering. Finally, we present some experimental results demonstrating our techniques.

title: Transaction Support for Log-Based Middleware Server Recovery
abstract: We have developed log-based recovery for middleware servers that access back-end transaction systems (DBMSs). Transactional consistency is provided between in-memory state stored in middleware servers and persistent state stored in transaction systems. A new logging method called results logging is exploited to ensure coordinated recovery of in-memory state with persistent database state. Results logging incurs low logging overhead for middleware servers and requires little or no modification to existing transaction systems. This makes our approach a practical coordinated recovery technique.

title: SketchML a representation language for novel sketch recognition approach
abstract: Multimodal interfaces can be profitably used to support increasingly complex services in assistive environments. In particular, sketch-based interfaces offer users an effortless and powerful communication way to represent concepts and commands on different devices. Unlike other modalities, sketch-based interaction can be easily fitted according to heterogeneous services. Moreover it can be quickly personalized according to the user needs.
 Developing a sketch-based interface for a specific service is a time-consuming operation that requires the re-engineering and/or the re-designing of the whole recognizer framework. This paper describes a definitive framework by which the user, simply by using freehand drawing, can define every kind of sketch-based interface. The definition of the interface and its recognition process are performed by using our developed Sketch Modeling Language (SketchML).

title: Closed-loop cross-layer SDMA designs with outdated CSIT
abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel closed-loop approach for robust downlink multi-antenna cross-layer design with outdated channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Based on the ACK/NAK feedbacks from the mobiles, the proposed cross-layer design does not require the knowledge of CSIT error statistics. We formulate the cross-layer design as a mixed combinatorial search and Markov decision process (MDP). While it is well-known that general solutions for MDP are very complex, one important contribution of this paper is that we obtain simple closed-form power, rate and user allocation policies which are asymptotically optimal for small target frame error rate (FER). Simulation results illustrate that the performance of the proposed closed-loop cross-layer design is very robust with respect to the outdated CSIT, CSIT error model mismatch as well as channel variations due to Doppler.

title: Fast, realistic lighting and material design using nonlinear cut approximation
abstract: We present an efficient computational algorithm for functions represented by a nonlinear piecewise constant approximation called cuts. Our main contribution is a single traversal algorithm for merging cuts that allows for arbitrary pointwise computation, such as addition, multiplication, linear interpolation, and multi-product integration. A theoretical error bound of this approach can be proved using a statistical interpretation of cuts. Our algorithm extends naturally to computation with many cuts and maps easily to modern GPUs, leading to significant advantages over existing methods based on wavelet approximation. We apply this technique to the problem of realistic lighting and material design under complex illumination with arbitrary BRDFs. Our system smoothly integrates all-frequency relighting of shadows and reflections with dynamic per-pixel shading effects, such as bump mapping and spatially varying BRDFs. This combination of capabilities is typically missing in current systems. We represent illumination and precomputed visibility as nonlinear sparse vectors; we then use our cut merging algorithm to simultaneously interpolate visibility cuts at each pixel, and compute the triple product integral of the illumination, interpolated visibility, and dynamic BRDF samples. Finally, we present a two-pass, data-driven approach that exploits pilot visibility samples to optimize the construction of the light tree, leading to more efficient cuts and reduced datasets.