A user-centric approach to service creation and delivery over next generation networks

Next Generation Networks (NGN) provide Telecommunications operators with the possibility to share their resources and infrastructure, facilitate the interoperability with other networks, and simplify and unify the management, operation and maintenance of service offerings, thus enabling the fast and cost-effective creation of new personal, broadband ubiquitous services. Unfortunately, service creation over NGN is far from the success of service creation in the Web, especially when it comes to Web 2.0. This paper presents a novel approach to service creation and delivery, with a platform that opens to non-technically skilled users the possibility to create, manage and share their own convergent (NGN-based and Web-based) services. To this end, the business approach to user-generated services is analyzed and the technological bases supporting the proposal are explained.

Multipedia: Enriching DBpedia with Multimedia Information

Enriching knowledge bases with multimedia information makes it possible to complement textual descriptions with visual and audio information. Such complementary information can help users to understand the meaning of assertions, and in general improve the user experience with the knowledge base. In this paper we address the problem of how to enrich ontology instances with candidate images retrieved from existing Web search engines. DBpedia has evolved into a major hub in the Linked Data cloud, interconnecting millions of entities organized under a consistent ontology. Our approach taps into the Wikipedia corpus to gather context information for DBpedia instances and takes advantage of image tagging information when this is available to calculate semantic relatedness between instances and candidate images. We performed experiments with focus on the particularly challenging problem of highly ambiguous names. Both methods presented in this work outperformed the baseline. Our best method leveraged context words from Wikipedia, tags from Flickr and type information from DBpedia to achieve an average precision of 80%.

A New End-User Composition Model to Empower Knowledge Workers to Develop Rich Internet Applications

Enabling real end-user programming development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internetwide service-based applications. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own web-based solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless both industry and the research community rise to the ambitious challenge of devising an end-to-end compositional model for developing a new age of end-user web application development tools. This paper describes a new composition model designed to empower programming-illiterate end users to create and share their own off-the-shelf rich Internet applications in a fully visual fashion. This paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful European Union research projects. A framework implementing this model was developed as part of the European Seventh Framework Programme FAST Project and the Spanish EzWeb Project and allowed us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Ada User Guide for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT

The purpose of this guide is to introduce the robotics kit LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT to the Ada community. All the steps required to complete a working Ada application running under the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT are covered..

End-User Development Success Factors and their Application to Composite Web Development Environments

The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user-service interaction is still an open issue. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. The weakness lies in the abstraction of the underlying service front-end architecture rather than the infrastructure technologies themselves. In our opinion, the best approach is to offer end-to-end composition from user interface to service invocation, as well as an understandable abstraction of both building blocks and a visual composition technique. In this paper we formalize our vision with regard to the next-generation front-end Web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. We present a novel reference architecture designed to empower non-technical end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications. A tool implementing this architecture has been developed as part of the European FP7 FAST Project and EzWeb Project, allowing us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Using the Journalistic Metaphor to Design User Interfaces That Explain Sensor Data

Facilitating general access to data from sensor networks (including traffic, hydrology and other domains) increases their utility. In this paper we argue that the journalistic metaphor can be effectively used to automatically generate multimedia presentations that help non-expert users analyze and understand sensor data. The journalistic layout and style are familiar to most users. Furthermore, the journalistic approach of ordering information from most general to most specific helps users obtain a high-level understanding while providing them the freedom to choose the depth of analysis to which they want to go. We describe the general characteristics and architectural requirements for an interactive intelligent user interface for exploring sensor data that uses the journalistic metaphor. We also describe our experience in developing this interface in real-world domains (e.g., hydrology).

IDT-3D: Identification and tracking in controlled environments using a 3D unified user interface

Identification and tracking of objects in specific environments such as harbors or security areas is a matter of great importance nowadays. With this purpose, numerous systems based on different technologies have been developed, resulting in a great amount of gathered data displayed through a variety of interfaces. Such amount of information has to be evaluated by human operators in order to take the correct decisions, sometimes under highly critical situations demanding both speed and accuracy. In order to face this problem we describe IDT-3D, a platform for identification and tracking of vessels in a harbour environment able to represent fused information in real time using a Virtual Reality application. The effectiveness of using IDT-3D as an integrated surveillance system is currently under evaluation. Preliminary results point to a significant decrease in the times of reaction and decision making of operators facing up a critical situation. Although the current application focus of IDT-3D is quite specific, the results of this research could be extended to the identification and tracking of targets in other controlled environments of interest as coastlines, borders or even urban areas.

A User Centered Design Approach for Patient Interfaces to a Diabetes IT Platform

Improving patient self-management can have a greater impact than improving any clinical treatment (WHO). We propose here a systematic and comprehensive user centered design approach for delivering a technological platform for diabetes disease management. The system was developed under the METABO research project framework, involving patients from 3 different clinical centers in Parma, Modena and Madrid.

Evaluation of a User-Adapted Spoken Language Dialogue System: Measuring the Relevance of the Contextual Information Sources

We present an evaluation of a spoken language dialogue system with a module for the management of userrelated information, stored as user preferences and privileges. The flexibility of our dialogue management approach, based on Bayesian Networks (BN), together with a contextual information module, which performs different strategies for handling such information, allows us to include user information as a new level into the Context Manager hierarchy. We propose a set of objective and subjective metrics to measure the relevance of the different contextual information sources. The analysis of our evaluation scenarios shows that the relevance of the short-term information (i.e. the system status) remains pretty stable throughout the dialogue, whereas the dialogue history and the user profile (i.e. the middle-term and the long-term information, respectively) play a complementary role, evolving their usefulness as the dialogue evolves.

Using SCXML to integrate semantic sensor information into context-aware user interfaces

This paper describes a novel architecture to introduce automatic annotation and processing of semantic sensor data within context-aware applications. Based on the well-known state-charts technologies, and represented using W3C SCXML language combined with Semantic Web technologies, our architecture is able to provide enriched higher-level semantic representations of user’s context. This capability to detect and model relevant user situations allows a seamless modeling of the actual interaction situation, which can be integrated during the design of multimodal user interfaces (also based on SCXML) for them to be adequately adapted. Therefore, the final result of this contribution can be described as a flexible context-aware SCXML-based architecture, suitable for both designing a wide range of multimodal context-aware user interfaces, and implementing the automatic enrichment of sensor data, making it available to the entire Semantic Sensor Web

VLC-based light-weight portable user interface for in-house applications.

Advances in solid-state lighting have overcome common limitations on optical wireless such as power needs due to light dispersion. It's been recently proposed the modification of lamp's drivers to take advantages of its switching behaviour to include data links maintaining the illumination control they provide. In this paper, a remote access application using visible light communications is presented that provides wireless access to a remote computer using a touchscreen as user interface

Analyzing Query Success and User Context

This paper describes the participation of DAEDALUS at the LogCLEF lab in CLEF 2011. This year, the objectives of our participation are twofold. The first topic is to analyze if there is any measurable effect on the success of the search queries if the native language and the interface language chosen by the user are different. The idea is to determine if this difference may condition the way in which the user interacts with the search application. The second topic is to analyze the user context and his/her interaction with the system in the case of successful queries, to discover out any relation among the user native language, the language of the resource involved and the interaction strategy adopted by the user to find out such resource. Only 6.89% of queries are successful out of the 628,607 queries in the 320,001 sessions with at least one search query in the log. The main conclusion that can be drawn is that, in general for all languages, whether the native language matches the interface language or not does not seem to affect the success rate of the search queries. On the other hand, the analysis of the strategy adopted by users when looking for a particular resource shows that people tend to use the simple search tool, frequently first running short queries build up of just one specific term and then browsing through the results to locate the expected resource

Dense Map Inference with User-Defined Priors: From Priorlets to Scan Eigenvariations

When mapping is formulated in a Bayesian framework, the need of specifying a prior for the environment arises naturally. However, so far, the use of a particular structure prior has been coupled to working with a particular representation. We describe a system that supports inference with multiple priors while keeping the same dense representation. The priors are rigorously described by the user in a domain-specific language. Even though we work very close to the measurement space, we are able to represent structure constraints with the same expressivity as methods based on geometric primitives. This approach allows the intrinsic degrees of freedom of the environment’s shape to be recovered. Experiments with simulated and real data sets will be presented

A Method for Developing Ontologies from User-Generated Classication Systems

Abstract Web 2.0 applications enabled users to classify information resources using their own vocabularies. The bottom-up nature of these user-generated classification systems have turned them into interesting knowledge sources, since they provide a rich terminology generated by potentially large user communities. Previous research has shown that it is possible to elicit some emergent semantics from the aggregation of individual classifications in these systems. However the generation of ontologies from them is still an open research problem. In this thesis we address the problem of how to tap into user-generated classification systems for building domain ontologies. Our objective is to design a method to develop domain ontologies from user-generated classifications systems. To do so, we rely on ontologies in the Web of Data to formalize the semantics of the knowledge collected from the classification system. Current ontology development methodologies have recognized the importance of reusing knowledge from existing resources. Thus, our work is framed within the NeOn methodology scenario for building ontologies by reusing and reengineering non-ontological resources. The main contributions of this work are: An integrated method to develop ontologies from user-generated classification systems. With this method we extract a domain terminology from the classification system and then we formalize the semantics of this terminology by reusing ontologies in the Web of Data. Identification and adaptation of existing techniques for implementing the activities in the method so that they can fulfill the requirements of each activity. A novel study about emerging semantics in user-generated lists. Resumen La web 2.0 permitió a los usuarios clasificar recursos de información usando su propio vocabulario. Estos sistemas de clasificación generados por usuarios son recursos interesantes para la extracción de conocimiento debido principalmente a que proveen una extensa terminología generada por grandes comunidades de usuarios. Se ha demostrado en investigaciones previas que es posible obtener una semántica emergente de estos sistemas. Sin embargo la generación de ontologías a partir de ellos es todavía un problema de investigación abierto. Esta tesis trata el problema de cómo aprovechar los sistemas de clasificación generados por usuarios en la construcción de ontologías de dominio. Así el objetivo de la tesis es diseñar un método para desarrollar ontologías de dominio a partir de sistemas de clasificación generados por usuarios. El método propuesto reutiliza conceptualizaciones existentes en ontologías publicadas en la Web de Datos para formalizar la semántica del conocimiento que se extrae del sistema de clasificación. Por tanto, este trabajo está enmarcado dentro del escenario para desarrollar ontologías mediante la reutilización y reingeniería de recursos no ontológicos que se ha definido en la Metodología NeOn. Las principales contribuciones de este trabajo son: Un método integrado para desarrollar una ontología de dominio a partir de sistemas de clasificación generados por usuarios. En este método se extrae una terminología de dominio del sistema de clasificación y posteriormente se formaliza su semántica reutilizando ontologías en la Web de Datos. La identificación y adaptación de un conjunto de técnicas para implementar las actividades propuestas en el método de tal manera que puedan cumplir automáticamente los requerimientos de cada actividad. Un novedoso estudio acerca de la semántica emergente en las listas generadas por usuarios en la Web.

User-definable resource bounds analysis for logic programs

We present a static analysis that infers both upper and lower bounds on the usage that a logic program makes of a set of user-definable resources. The inferred bounds will in general be functions of input data sizes. A resource in our approach is a quite general, user-defined notion which associates a basic cost function with elementary operations. The analysis then derives the related (upper- and lower-bound) resource usage functions for all predicates in the program. We also present an assertion language which is used to define both such resources and resourcerelated properties that the system can then check based on the results of the analysis. We have performed some preliminary experiments with some concrete resources such as execution steps, bytes sent or received by an application, number of files left open, number of accesses to a datábase, number of calis to a procedure, number of asserts/retracts, etc. Applications of our analysis include resource consumption verification and debugging (including for mobile code), resource control in parallel/distributed computing, and resource-oriented specialization.