A Spatial Faithful Cooperative System Based on Mixed Presence Groupware Model
Traditional groupware platforms are found restrained and cumbersome for supporting geographically dispersed design collaboration. This paper starts with two groupware models, which are Single Display Groupware and Mixed Presence Groupware, and then discusses some of the limitations and argues how these limitations could possibly impair efficient communication among remote designers. Next, it suggests that the support for spatial faithfulness and Tangible User Interface (TUI) could help fill the gap between Face-to-Face (F2F) collaboration and computer-mediated remote collaboration. A spatial faithful groupware with TUI support is then developed to illustrate this concept.

title: Mixed Reality-Mediated Collaborative Design System: Concept, Prototype, and Experimentation
abstract: 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: 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: 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: Solving P2P Traffic Identification Problems Via Optimized Support Vector Machines
abstract: Since the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking in the last 90s, P2P traffic has become one of the most significant portions of the network traffic. Accurate identification of P2P traffic makes great sense for efficient network management and reasonable utility of network resources. Application level classification of P2P traffic, especially without payload feature detection, is still a challenging problem. This paper proposes a new method for P2P traffic identification and application level classification, which merely uses transport layer information. The method uses support vector machines which have been optimized for performing large learning tasks, rendering that this method become more suitable for large network traffic. The experimental results show that this method achieved high efficiency and is suitable for real-time identification. And carefully tuning the parameters could make the method achieve high accuracy.

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: Bidirectional Importance Sampling for Unstructured Direct Illumination
abstract: Recent research in bidirectional importance sampling has focused primarily on structured illumination sources such as distant environment maps, while unstructured illumination has received little attention. In this paper, we present a method for bidirectional importance sampling of unstructured illumination, allowing us to use the same method for sampling both distant as well as local/indirect sources. Building upon recent work in [WFA*05], we model complex illumination as a large set of point lights. The subsequent sampling process draws samples only from this point set. We start by constructing a piecewise constant approximation for the lighting using an illumination cut [CPWAP08]. We show that this cut can be used directly for illumination importance sampling. We then use BRDF importance sampling followed by sample counting to update the cut, resulting in a bidirectional distribution that closely approximates the product of the illumination and BRDF. Drawing visibility samples from this new distribution significantly reduces the sampling variance. As a main advance over previous work, our method allows for unstructured sources, including arbitrary local direct lighting and one-bounce of indirect lighting.

title: Perceptually-motivated shape exaggeration
abstract: Image communication would appear more efficient if the visual cases of the concerned parts can be enhanced. One way to achieve this is by local shape exaggeration in rendering. In this paper, we present an interactive scheme for controllable local shape exaggeration. Our approach achieves local, direct, and consistent appearance enhancement by modifying the surface orientation in an intuitive and globally optimized manner with sparse user-specified constraints. Compared with previous approaches, the main contribution of this paper is the introduction of adaptive exaggeration function (AEF), which is capable of modulating the extent of detail enhancement to obtain a satisfactory shape exaggeration result. The AEF model is derived based on a series of experiments. We complement our new approach with a variety of examples, user studies, and provide comparisons with recent approaches.

title: On the hardness of minimizing space for all-shortest-path interval routing schemes
abstract: k-Interval Routing Scheme (k-IRS) is a compact routing method that allows up to k interval labels to be assigned to an arc; and global k-IRS allows not more than a total of k interval labels in the whole network. A fundamental problem is to characterize the networks that admit k-IRS (or global k-IRS). Many of the problems related to single-shortest-path k-IRS have already been shown to be NP-complete. For all-shortest-path k-IRS, the characterization problem remains open for k>=1. In this paper, we study the time complexity of devising minimal-space all-shortest-path k-IRSs and show that it is NP-complete to decide whether a graph admits an all-shortest-path k-IRS, for every integer k>=3, and so is that of deciding whether a graph admits an all-shortest-path k-strict IRS, for every integer k>=4. These are the first NP-completeness results for all-shortest-path k-IRS where k is a constant and the graph is unweighted. The NP-completeness holds also for the linear case. We also prove that it is NP-complete to decide whether an unweighted graph admits an all-shortest-path IRS with global compactness of at most k, which also holds for the linear and strict cases.