RESTful Discovery and Eventing for Service Provisioning in Assisted Living Environments

Service provisioning in assisted living environments faces distinct challenges due to the heterogeneity of networks, access technology, and sensing/actuation devices in such an environment. Existing solutions, such as SOAP-based web services, can interconnect heterogeneous devices and services, and can be published, discovered and invoked dynamically. However, it is considered heavier than what is required in the smart environment-like context and hence suffers from performance degradation. Alternatively, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) has gained much attention from the community and is considered as a lighter and cleaner technology compared to the SOAP-based web services. Since it is simple to publish and use a RESTful web service, more and more service providers are moving toward REST-based solutions, which promote a resource-centric conceptualization as opposed to a service-centric conceptualization. Despite such benefits of REST, the dynamic discovery and eventing of RESTful services are yet considered a major hurdle to utilization of the full potential of REST-based approaches. In this paper, we address this issue, by providing a RESTful discovery and eventing specification and demonstrate it in an assisted living healthcare scenario. We envisage that through this approach, the service provisioning in ambient assisted living or other smart environment settings will be more efficient, timely, and less resource-intensive.

Environmental judgment in early childhood and its relationship with the understanding of the concept of living beings

The evidence collected concerning the biocentric judgment that young children express when evaluating human actions on the environment leads some scholars to suggest that an essential understanding of the notion of living beings should appear earlier than previously believed. This research project aims to study that assumption. To this end, young children’s choice when they are put in situation of having to compare and choose the most negative option between environmentally harmful actions and the breaking of social conventions are examined. Afterwards, the results are categorized in relation to those obtained from the study of children’s grasp of the distinction between living beings and inanimate entities. The data is analysed according to the individuals’ age and overall, it suggests a lack of relationship between environmental judgment and the understanding of the concept of living beings. The final results are discussed in keeping with recent research in the field of moral development that underscores the role that unconscious emotional processing plays in the individual’s normative judgment.

Measurement of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ambient air by fluorescence spectroscopic techniques

250 p. + anexos

Efficient electronic implementations of adaptive systems for ambient intelligence environments

183 p.

Contributions to learning Bayesian network models from weakly supervised data: Application to Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Software Defect Classification

162 p.

Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago

The Late Cretaceous was a time of tremendous global change, as the final stages of the Age of Dinosaurs were shaped by climate and sea level fluctuations and witness to marked paleogeographic and faunal changes, before the end-Cretaceous bolide impact. The terrestrial fossil record of Late Cretaceous Europe is becoming increasingly better understood, based largely on intensive fieldwork over the past two decades, promising new insights into latest Cretaceous faunal evolution. We review the terrestrial Late Cretaceous record from Europe and discuss its importance for understanding the paleogeography, ecology, evolution, and extinction of land-dwelling vertebrates. We review the major Late Cretaceous faunas from Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania, as well as more fragmentary records from elsewhere in Europe. We discuss the paleogeographic background and history of assembly of these faunas, and argue that they are comprised of an endemic 'core' supplemented with various immigration waves. These faunas lived on an island archipelago, and we describe how this insular setting led to ecological peculiarities such as low diversity, a preponderance of primitive taxa, and marked changes in morphology (particularly body size dwarfing). We conclude by discussing the importance of the European record in understanding the end-Cretaceous extinction and show that there is no clear evidence that dinosaurs or other groups were undergoing long-term declines in Europe prior to the bolide impact.