Designing hospital bedside systems for use by patients with a visual impairments

This paper describes the development of an interface to a hospital portal system for information, communication and entertainment such that it can be used easily and effectively by all patients regardless of their age, disability, computer experience or native language. Specifically, this paper reports on the work conducted to ensure that the interface design took into account the needs of visually impaired users.

Truth in complex adaptive systems models should be based on truth by constructive verification

It is argued that the truth status of emergent properties of complex adaptive systems models should be based on an epistemology of proof by constructive verification and therefore on the ontological axioms of a non-realist logical system such as constructivism or intuitionism. ‘Emergent’ properties of complex adaptive systems (CAS) models create particular epistemological and ontological challenges. These challenges bear directly on current debates in the philosophy of mathematics and in theoretical computer science. CAS research, with its emphasis on computer simulation, is heavily reliant on models which explore the entailments of Formal Axiomatic Systems (FAS). The incompleteness results of Gödel, the incomputability results of Turing, and the Algorithmic Information Theory results of Chaitin, undermine a realist (platonic) truth model of emergent properties. These same findings support the hegemony of epistemology over ontology and point to alternative truth models such as intuitionism, constructivism and quasi-empiricism.

The internet, information architecture and community memory

This article reviews current technological developments, particularly Peer-to-Peer technologies and Distributed Data Systems, and their value to community memory projects, particularly those concerned with the preservation of the cultural, literary and administrative data of cultures which have suffered genocide or are at risk of genocide. It draws attention to the comparatively good representation online of genocide denial groups and changes in the technological strategies of holocaust denial and other far-right groups. It draws on the author's work in providing IT support for a UK-based Non-Governmental Organization providing support for survivors of genocide in Rwanda.

Neural systems in the visual control of steering

Visual control of locomotion is essential for most mammals and requires coordination between perceptual processes and action systems. Previous research on the neural systems engaged by self-motion has focused on heading perception, which is only one perceptual subcomponent. For effective steering, it is necessary to perceive an appropriate future path and then bring about the required change to heading. Using function magnetic resonance imaging in humans, we reveal a role for the parietal eye fields (PEFs) in directing spatially selective processes relating to future path information. A parietal area close to PEFs appears to be specialized for processing the future path information itself. Furthermore, a separate parietal area responds to visual position error signals, which occur when steering adjustments are imprecise. A network of three areas, the cerebellum, the supplementary eye fields, and dorsal premotor cortex, was found to be involved in generating appropriate motor responses for steering adjustments. This may reflect the demands of integrating visual inputs with the output response for the control device.

Semiotic modelling for complex enterprise systems

An enterprise is viewed as a complex system which can be engineered to accomplish organisational objectives. Systems analysis and modelling will enable to the planning and development of the enterprise and IT systems. Many IT systems design methods focus on functional and non-functional requirements of the IT systems. Most methods are normally capable of one but leave out other aspects. Analysing and modelling of both business and IT systems may often have to call on techniques from various suites of methods which may be placed on different philosophic and methodological underpinnings. Coherence and consistency between the analyses are hard to ensure. This paper introduces the Problem Articulation Method (PAM) which facilitates the design of an enterprise system infrastructure on which an IT system is built. Outcomes of this analysis represent requirements which can be further used for planning and designing a technical system. As a case study, a finance system, Agresso, for e-procurement has been used in this paper to illustrate the applicability of PAM in modelling complex systems.

Preliminary results from a real time control system using optical information

Successful results from training an adaptive controller to use optical information to balance an inverted pendulum are presented in comparison to the training requirements using traditional controller inputs. Results from research into the psychology of the sense of balance in humans are presented as the motivation for the investigation of this new type of controller. The simulated model of the inverted pendulum and the virtual reality environments used to provide the optical input are described The successful introduction of optical information is found to require the preservation of at least two of the traditional input types and entail increased training time for the adaptive controller and reduced performance (measured as the time the pendulum remains upright).

Articulation of stakeholders requirements for complex e-government systems development

Requirements analysis focuses on stakeholders concerns and their influence towards e-government systems. Some characteristics of stakeholders concerns clearly show the complexity and conflicts. This imposes a number of questions in the requirements analysis, such as how are they relevant to stakeholders? What are their needs? How conflicts among the different stakeholders can be resolved? And what coherent requirements can be methodologically produced? This paper describes the problem articulation method in organizational semiotics which can be used to conduct such complex requirements analysis. The outcomes of the analysis enable e-government systems development and management to meet userspsila needs. A case study of Yantai Citizen Card is chosen to illustrate a process of analysing stakeholders in the lifecycle of requirements analysis.

Analysis of the dominant enterprise information assurance mechanisms

The purpose of this study is to analyse current data continuity mechanisms employed by the target group of businesses and to identify any inadequacies in the mechanisms as a whole. The questionnaire responses indicate that 47% of respondents do perceive backup methodologies as important, with a total of 70% of respondents having some backup methodology already in place. Businesses in Moulton Park perceive the loss of data to have a significant effect upon their business’ ability to function. Only 14% of respondents indicated that loss of data on computer systems would not affect their business at all, with 54% of respondents indicating that there would be either a “major effect” (or greater) on their ability to operate. Respondents that have experienced data loss were more likely to have backup methodologies in place (53%) than respondents that had not experienced data loss (18%). Although the number of respondents clearly affected the quality and conclusiveness of the results returned, the level of backup methodologies in place appears to be proportional to the company size. Further investigation is recommended into the subject in order to validate the information gleaned from the small number of respondents.

A conceptual model for group support systems in local councils

This paper proposes a conceptual model of a context-aware group support system (GSS) to assist local council employees to perform collaborative tasks in conjunction with inter- and intra-organisational stakeholders. Most discussions about e-government focus on the use of ICT to improve the relationship between government and citizen, not on the relationship between government and employees. This paper seeks to expose the unique culture of UK local councils and to show how a GSS could support local government employer and employee needs.

Swarms of computational resources and swarms of tasks for building reliable systems

Space applications demand the need for building reliable systems. Autonomic computing defines such reliable systems as self-managing systems. The work reported in this paper combines agent based and swarm robotic approaches leading to swarm-array computing, a novel technique to achieve autonomy for distributed parallel computing systems. Two swarm-array computing approaches based on swarms of computational resources and swarms of tasks are explored. FPGA is considered as the computing system. The feasibility of the two proposed approaches that binds the computing system and the task together is simulated on the SeSAm multi-agent simulator.

A policy model for secure information flow

When a computer program requires legitimate access to confidential data, the question arises whether such a program may illegally reveal sensitive information. This paper proposes a policy model to specify what information flow is permitted in a computational system. The security definition, which is based on a general notion of information lattices, allows various representations of information to be used in the enforcement of secure information flow in deterministic or nondeterministic systems. A flexible semantics-based analysis technique is presented, which uses the input-output relational model induced by an attacker's observational power, to compute the information released by the computational system. An illustrative attacker model demonstrates the use of the technique to develop a termination-sensitive analysis. The technique allows the development of various information flow analyses, parametrised by the attacker's observational power, which can be used to enforce what declassification policies.

KAIFIA: Knowledge assisted intelligent framework for information access

Accessing information, which is spread across multiple sources, in a structured and connected way, is a general problem for enterprises. A unified structure for knowledge representation is urgently needed to enable integration of heterogeneous information resources. Topic Maps seem to be a solution for this problem. The Topic Map technology enables connecting information, through concepts and relationships, and their occurrences across multiple systems. In this paper, we address this problem by describing a framework built on topic maps, to support the current need of knowledge management. New approaches for information integration, intelligent search and topic map exploration are introduced within this framework.