Developing and evaluating a pictogram-based Instant Messaging service for individuals with cognitive disabilities

Information and communication technologies pose accessibility problems to people with disabilities because its design fails to take into account their communication and usability requirements. The impossibility to access the services provided by these technologies creates a situation of exclusion that reduces the self-suficiency of disabled individuals and causes social isolation, which in turn diminishes their overall quality of life. Considering the importance of these technologies and services in our society, we have developed a pictogram-based Instant Messaging service for individuals with cognitive disabilities who have reading and writing problems. Along the paper we introduce and discuss the User Centred Design methodology that we have used to develop and evaluate the pictogram-based Instant Messaging service and client with individuals with cognitive disabilities taking into account their communication and usability requirements. From the results obtained in the evaluation process we can state that individuals with cognitive disabilities have been able to use the pictogram-based Instant Messaging service and client to communicate with their relatives and acquaintances, thus serving as a tool to help reducing their social and digital exclusion situation.

Extension and evaluation of JXTA protocols for supporting reliable P2P distributed computing

Peer-reviewed

Sistema de validació amb proveïdor deidentitat extern per a serveis de VideoOn Demand

El producte a realitzar es composa de 2 aplicacions web, 1 Web Service i 1applet, tots ells desenvolupats utilitzant la tecnologia J2EE 6.0. S¿ha escollitla versió J2EE de Java, per la facilitat que proporciona perdesenvolupaments web i client-servidor.

Proveïment de serveis segurs

Aquest projecte és una mostra de les possibilitats de dotar de seguretat a les aplicacions web i d¿arquitectura Client/Servidor basades en Java

TV Advertisement and the clever audience

Els anuncis televisius –i els mitjans publicitaris en general– tenen entre els seus propòsits els de captar l’atenció dels espectadors i arribar a una audiència de consumidors potencials. Aquestes dues finalitats no acostumen a representar processos separats o nivells de percepció diferents per part de l’espectador: si l’anunci assoleix la seva meta, despertarà un interès que serà l’interès d’aquells que es considera que tenen més probabilitats de comprar el producte o de realitzar l’acció que l’anunci vol promoure. Com més gran sigui la precisió a l’hora d’establir contacte amb aquestes persones, més específic, directe i, en conseqüència, reeixit, serà l’efecte del missatge. Pot semblar una paradoxa el fet que un dels procediments utilitzats per a atraure l’atenció de l’audiència sigui presentar un anunci el significat del qual no s’entén a primera vista. Però es tracta d’un recurs útil. La percepció d’alguns anuncis és semblant a la que es produeix al llegir poemes o certs relats curts, tenim la tendència a rellegir-los. Potser en una primera lectura no acabem de copsar-ne el significat, però això mateix es converteix en un repte que ens porta a llegir-lo una i altra vegada fins que descobrim el missatge del text. Quan arribem a aquest punt, l’esforç esdevé plaer estètic i el filtre que selecciona l’audiència també serveix per a seleccionar el client potencial.

Escenari Client - Servidor Segur

Consisteix en la implementació d¿un escenari segur client - servidor amb un proveïdor d¿identitat i un control d¿accés extern. En concret, s¿hand¿implementar principalment dos components web, el proveïdor de servei i el proveïdor d¿identitat.

Del Dreambox 7000S al Nokia 770 Internet Tablet : Port de VideoLan Client a Maeno per a la reproducció d'un flux mpeg2 per mitjà d'una xarxa sense fils

L'objectiu d'aquest projecte és connectar el sintonitzador de televisió per satèl·lit Dreambox 7000S amb el Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. El propòsit d'aquesta aplicació és utilitzar el Dreambox 7000S com una font de streaming mpeg2 i el Nokia 770 com a reproductor portàtil.

Escenari segur client-servidor amb un proveïdor d'identitat i control d'accés extern

El projecte consisteix en desenvolupar un sistema que permeti a un client poder connectar-se auna pàgina web, validar-se sense contrasenya (amb un certificat idCat), i accedir als seus recursos.

Anàlisi de la tecnologia XML a partir del desenvolupament d'una aplicació client-servidor.

L'objectiu d'aquest projecte és analitzar la tecnologia XML, amb la finalitat d'esbrinar per a quins casos és realment útil i en quins casos és discutible.

Disseny i implementació en Java d'un sistema segur de descàrrega anònima de fitxers format per aplicacions web basades en XML i amb autenticació del client per part d'un tercer mitjançant una PKI

En aquest TFC s'ha proposat dissenyar i implementar en llenguatge Java un sistema segur de descàrrega anònima de fitxers. Per fer aquesta tasca es proposa un conjunt d'aplicacions web que es s'intercanviaran dades en format XML de forma segura, sempre sota protocol HTTPS i mantenint la integritat, autenticitat i autenticació de les parts amb l'ajut d'un PKI.

Analysis and regeneration of hypermedia contents through Java and XML tools

This paper presents a tool for the analysis and regeneration of Web contents, implemented through XML and Java. At the moment, the Web content delivery from server to clients is carried out without taking into account clients' characteristics. Heterogeneous and diverse characteristics, such as user's preferences, different capacities of the client's devices, different types of access, state of the network and current load on the server, directly affect the behavior of Web services. On the other hand, the growing use of multimedia objects in the design of Web contents is made without taking into account this diversity and heterogeneity. It affects, even more, the appropriate content delivery. Thus, the objective of the presented tool is the treatment of Web pages taking into account the mentioned heterogeneity and adapting contents in order to improve the performance on the Web

Earnings management and audit adjustments: An empirical study of IBEX 35 constituents

Doubts about the reliability of a company's qualitative financial disclosure increase market participant expectations from the auditor's report. The auditing process is supposed to serve as a monitoring device that reduces management incentives to manipulate reported earnings. Empirical research confirms that it could be an efficient device under some circumstancesand recognizes that our estimates of the informativeness of audit reports are unavoidably biased (e.g., because of a client's anticipation of the auditing process). This empirical study supports the significant role of auditors in the financial market, in particular in the prevention of earnings management practice. We focus on earnings misstatements, which auditors correct with anadjustment, using a sample of past and current constituents of the benchmark market index in Spain, IBEX 35, and manually collected audit adjustments reported over the 1997-2004 period (42 companies, 336 annual reports, 75 earnings misstatements). Our findings confirm that companies more often overstate than understate their earnings. An investor may foresee earningsmisreporting, as manipulators have a similar profile (e.g., more leveraged and with lower sales). However, he may receive valuable information from the audit adjustment on the size of earnings misstatement, which can be significantly large (i.e., material in almost all cases). We suggest that the magnitude of an audit adjustment depends, other things constant, on annual revenues and free cash levels. We also examine how the audit adjustment relates to the observed market price, trading volume and stock returns. Our findings are that earnings manipulators have a lower price and larger trading volume compared to their rivals. Their returns are positively associated with the magnitude of earnings misreporting, which is not consistent with the possible pricing of audit information.

Family burden related to clinical and functional variables of people with intellectual disability with and without a mental disorder

Few studies have been found that to assess the factors that explain higher levels of familyburden in adults with intellectualdisability (ID) and intellectualdisability and mental disorders (ID-MD). The aims of this study were to assess familyburden in people with ID and ID-MD and to determine which sociodemographic, clinical and functionaldisabilityvariables account for familyburden. The sample is composed of pairs of 203 participants with disability and their caregivers, of which 33.5% are caregivers of people with ID and 66.5% of ID-MD. Assessments were performed using scales of clinical and functionaldisability as the following instruments: Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III), Inventory for Client and Agency Planning (ICAP), Psychiatric Assessment Schedule for Adults with Development Disability (PAS-ADD checklist), Disability Assessment Schedule of the World Health Organization (WHO-DAS-II) and familyburden (Subjective and Objective FamilyBurden Inventory - SOFBI/ECFOS-II). People with ID-MD presented higher levels of functionaldisability than those with ID only. Higher levels of familyburden were related to higher functionaldisability in all the areas (p < 0.006-0.001), lower intelligence quotient (p < 0.001), diagnosis of ID-MD (p < 0.001) and presence of organic, affective, psychotic and behavioral disorders (p < 0.001). Stepwise multiple regression showed that behavioral problems, affective and psychotic disorder, disability in participation in society, disability in personal care and presence of ID-MD explained more than 61% of the variance in familyburden. An integrated approach using effective multidimensional interventions is essential for both people with ID and ID-MD and their caregivers in order to reduce familyburden.

Multi-purpose infrastructure for delivering and supporting mobile context-aware applications

The use of contextual information in mobile devices is receiving increasing attention in mobile and ubiquitous computing research. An important requirement for mobile development today is that devices should be able to interact with the context. In this paper we present a series of contributions regarding previous work on context-awareness. In the first place, we describe a client-server architecture that provides a mechanism for preparing target non context-aware applications in order to be delivered as context-aware applications in a semi-automatic way. Secondly, the framework used in the server to instantiate specific components for context-awareness, the Implicit Plasticity Framework, provides independence from the underlying mobile technology used in client device, as it is shown in the case studies presented. Finally, proposed infrastructure deals with the interaction among different context constraints provided by diverse sensors. All of these contributions are extensions to the infrastructure based on the Dichotomic View of plasticity, which now offers multi-purpose support.

Incumbent audit firm-provided tax services and the clients with low financial reporting quality

This study investigates whether incumbent audit firm-provided tax services enhance or impair the likelihood of acknowledging client companies’ low financial reporting quality. In particular, we examine the association between tax-related fees and the likelihood of timely restatements, and internal control weakness disclosures among a sample of US companies that all have misstatements in financial information. The empirical findings indicate that companies paying higher tax-related fees are less likely to disclose SOX 404 internal control weakness disclosures, implying that underlying control problems are unacknowledged when incumbent audit firm provided tax-related fees are higher. However, the findings suggest that just providing both audit and tax-related services does not have an impact on audit quality per se, but rather it is the magnitude of the tax-related fees in particular that counts. We also find some evidence suggesting that companies paying higher tax-related fees have higher likelihood of restatement lags, whereas companies paying smaller tax-related fees to their audit firm restate financial statements in a timelier manner. Overall, the findings suggest that audit scrutiny of client companies with low quality financial reporting is weaker when the magnitude of tax-related fees is higher.