Camera Canvas: Image Editor for People with Severe Disabilities

Camera Canvas is an image editing software package for users with severe disabilities that limit their mobility. It is specially designed for Camera Mouse, a camera-based mouse-substitute input system. Users can manipulate images through various head movements, tracked by Camera Mouse. The system is also fully usable with traditional mouse or touch-pad input. Designing the system, we studied the requirements and solutions for image editing and content creation using Camera Mouse. Experiments with 20 subjects, each testing Camera Canvas with Camera Mouse as the input mechanism, showed that users found the software easy to understand and operate. User feedback was taken into account to make the software more usable and the interface more intuitive. We suggest that the Camera Canvas software makes important progress in providing a new medium of utility and creativity in computing for users with severe disabilities.

KInNeSS: A Modular Framework for Computational Neuroscience

Making use of very detailed neurophysiological, anatomical, and behavioral data to build biological-realistic computational models of animal behavior is often a difficult task. Until recently, many software packages have tried to resolve this mismatched granularity with different approaches. This paper presents KInNeSS, the KDE Integrated NeuroSimulation Software environment, as an alternative solution to bridge the gap between data and model behavior. This open source neural simulation software package provides an expandable framework incorporating features such as ease of use, scalabiltiy, an XML based schema, and multiple levels of granularity within a modern object oriented programming design. KInNeSS is best suited to simulate networks of hundreds to thousands of branched multu-compartmental neurons with biophysical properties such as membrane potential, voltage-gated and ligand-gated channels, the presence of gap junctions of ionic diffusion, neuromodulation channel gating, the mechanism for habituative or depressive synapses, axonal delays, and synaptic plasticity. KInNeSS outputs include compartment membrane voltage, spikes, local-field potentials, and current source densities, as well as visualization of the behavior of a simulated agent. An explanation of the modeling philosophy and plug-in development is also presented. Further developement of KInNeSS is ongoing with the ultimate goal of creating a modular framework that will help researchers across different disciplines to effecitively collaborate using a modern neural simulation platform.

KInNeSS: A Modular Framework for Computational Neuroscience

Making use of very detailed neurophysiological, anatomical, and behavioral data to build biologically-realistic computational models of animal behavior is often a difficult task. Until recently, many software packages have tried to resolve this mismatched granularity with different approaches. This paper presents KInNeSS, the KDE Integrated NeuroSimulation Software environment, as an alternative solution to bridge the gap between data and model behavior. This open source neural simulation software package provides an expandable framework incorporating features such as ease of use, scalability, an XML based schema, and multiple levels of granularity within a modern object oriented programming design. KInNeSS is best suited to simulate networks of hundreds to thousands of branched multi-compartmental neurons with biophysical properties such as membrane potential, voltage-gated and ligand-gated channels, the presence of gap junctions or ionic diffusion, neuromodulation channel gating, the mechanism for habituative or depressive synapses, axonal delays, and synaptic plasticity. KInNeSS outputs include compartment membrane voltage, spikes, local-field potentials, and current source densities, as well as visualization of the behavior of a simulated agent. An explanation of the modeling philosophy and plug-in development is also presented. Further development of KInNeSS is ongoing with the ultimate goal of creating a modular framework that will help researchers across different disciplines to effectively collaborate using a modern neural simulation platform.

DSpace Manual: Software version 1.5

DSpace is an open source software platform that enables organizations to: - Capture and describe digital material using a submission workflow module, or a variety of programmatic ingest options - Distribute an organization's digital assets over the web through a search and retrieval system - Preserve digital assets over the long term This system documentation includes a functional overview of the system, which is a good introduction to the capabilities of the system, and should be readable by nontechnical personnel. Everyone should read this section first because it introduces some terminology used throughout the rest of the documentation. For people actually running a DSpace service, there is an installation guide, and sections on configuration and the directory structure. Note that as of DSpace 1.2, the administration user interface guide is now on-line help available from within the DSpace system. Finally, for those interested in the details of how DSpace works, and those potentially interested in modifying the code for their own purposes, there is a detailed architecture and design section.

Camera Canvas: Image Editing Software for People with Disabilities

Poster is based on the following paper: C. Kwan and M. Betke. Camera Canvas: Image editing software for people with disabilities. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI International 2011), Orlando, Florida, July 2011.

Measuring Bottleneck Link Speed in Package-Switched Networks

The quality of available network connections can often have a large impact on the performance of distributed applications. For example, document transfer applications such as FTP, Gopher and the World Wide Web suffer increased response times as a result of network congestion. For these applications, the document transfer time is directly related to the available bandwidth of the connection. Available bandwidth depends on two things: 1) the underlying capacity of the path from client to server, which is limited by the bottleneck link; and 2) the amount of other traffic competing for links on the path. If measurements of these quantities were available to the application, the current utilization of connections could be calculated. Network utilization could then be used as a basis for selection from a set of alternative connections or servers, thus providing reduced response time. Such a dynamic server selection scheme would be especially important in a mobile computing environment in which the set of available servers is frequently changing. In order to provide these measurements at the application level, we introduce two tools: bprobe, which provides an estimate of the uncongested bandwidth of a path; and cprobe, which gives an estimate of the current congestion along a path. These two measures may be used in combination to provide the application with an estimate of available bandwidth between server and client thereby enabling application-level congestion avoidance. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of our probe tools, specifically illustrating the techniques used to achieve accuracy and robustness. We present validation studies for both tools which demonstrate their reliability in the face of actual Internet conditions; and we give results of a survey of available bandwidth to a random set of WWW servers as a sample application of our probe technique. We conclude with descriptions of other applications of our measurement tools, several of which are currently under development.

Camera-Based Interfaces and Assistive Software for People with Sever Motion Impairments

Intelligent assistive technology can greatly improve the daily lives of people with severe paralysis, who have limited communication abilities. People with motion impairments often prefer camera-based communication interfaces, because these are customizable, comfortable, and do not require user-borne accessories that could draw attention to their disability. We present an overview of assistive software that we specifically designed for camera-based interfaces such as the Camera Mouse, which serves as a mouse-replacement input system. The applications include software for text-entry, web browsing, image editing, animation, and music therapy. Using this software, people with severe motion impairments can communicate with friends and family and have a medium to explore their creativity.

Integrating Sensor-Network Research and Development into a Software Engineering Curriculum

The emergence of a sensor-networked world produces a clear and urgent need for well-planned, safe and secure software engineering. It is the role of universities to prepare graduates with the knowledge and experience to enter the work-force with a clear understanding of software design and its application to the future safety of computing. The snBench (Sensor Network WorkBench) project aims to provide support to the programming and deployment of Sensor Network Applications, enabling shared sensor embedded spaces to be easily tasked with various sensory applications by different users for simultaneous execution. In this report we discus our experience using the snBench research project as the foundation for semester-long project in a graduate level software engineering class at Boston University (CS511).