VLSI Watermark Implementations and Applications

This paper presents an up to date review of digital watermarking (WM) from a VLSI designer point of view. The reader is introduced to basic principles and terms in the field of image watermarking. It goes through a brief survey on WM theory, laying out common classification criterions and discussing important design considerations and trade-offs. Elementary WM properties such as robustness, computational complexity and their influence on image quality are discussed. Common attacks and testing benchmarks are also briefly mentioned. It is shown that WM design must take the intended application into account. The difference between software and hardware implementations is explained through the introduction of a general scheme of a WM system and two examples from previous works. A versatile methodology to aid in a reliable and modular design process is suggested. Relating to mixed-signal VLSI design and testing, the proposed methodology allows an efficient development of a CMOS image sensor with WM capabilities.

Experiences on Application Generators

The National Institute for Statistics is the organism responsible for acquiring economical data for governmental statistics purposes. Lisbon agreements establish a framework in which this acquisition process shall be available through Internet, so each survey should be considered as a little software project to be developed and maintained. Considering the great amount of different surveys and all changes produced per year on each make impossible this task. An application generator has been developed to automate this task, taking as a start point the Word or PDF template of a survey, and going through a graphical form designer as all human effort, all HTML, Java classes and Oracle database resources are generated and sent from backoffice to frontoffice servers, reducing the team to carry out the whole set of electronic surveys to two people from non I.T. staff.

INFRAWEBS Semantic Web Service Development on the Base of Knowledge Management Layer

The paper gives an overview about the ongoing FP6-IST INFRAWEBS project and describes the main layers and software components embedded in an application oriented realisation framework. An important part of INFRAWEBS is a Semantic Web Unit (SWU) – a collaboration platform and interoperable middleware for ontology-based handling and maintaining of SWS. The framework provides knowledge about a specific domain and relies on ontologies to structure and exchange this knowledge to semantic service development modules. INFRAWEBS Designer and Composer are sub-modules of SWU responsible for creating Semantic Web Services using Case-Based Reasoning approach. The Service Access Middleware (SAM) is responsible for building up the communication channels between users and various other modules. It serves as a generic middleware for deployment of Semantic Web Services. This software toolset provides a development framework for creating and maintaining the full-life-cycle of Semantic Web Services with specific application support.

A Software Platform for Educational Board Games

Educational games such as quizzes, quests, puzzles, mazes and logical problems may be modeled as multimedia board games. In the scope of the ADOPTA project1 being under development at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University, a formal model for presentation of such educational board games was invented and elaborated. Educational games can be modeled as special board mini-games, with a board of any form and any types of positions. Over defined positions, figures (objects) with certain properties are placed and, next, there are to be defined formal rules for manipulation of these figures and resulted effects. The model has been found to be general enough in order to allow description and execution control of more complex logical problems to be solved by several actions delivered to/by the player according some formal rules and context conditions and, in general, of any learning activities and their workflow. It is used as a base for creation of a software platform providing facilities for easy construction of multimedia board games and their execution. The platform consists of game designer (i.e., a game authoring tool) and game run-time controller communicating each other through game repository. There are created and modeled many examples of educational board games appropriate for didactic purposes, self evaluations, etc., which are supposed to be designed easily by authors with no IT skills and experience. By means of game metadata descriptions, these games are going be included into narrative storyboards and, next, delivered to learners with appropriate profile according their learning style, preferences, etc. Moreover, usage of artificial intelligence agents is planned as well – once as playing virtual opponents of the player or, otherwise, being virtual advisers of the gamer helping him/her in finding the right problem solution within given domain such as discovering a treasure using a location map, finding best tour in a virtual museum, guessing an unknown word in a hangman game, and many others.

A Super-Dimension Approach in ROLAP Environments

Often the designer of ROLAP applications follows up with the question “can I create a little joiner table with just the two dimension keys and then connect that table to the fact table?” In a classic dimensional model there are two options - (a) both dimensions are modeled independently or (b) two dimensions are combined into a super-dimension with a single key. The second approach is not widely used in ROLAP environments but it is an important sparsity handling method in MOLAP systems. In ROLAP this design technique can also bring storage and performance benefits, although the model becomes more complicated. The dependency between dimensions is a key factor that the designers have to consider when choosing between the two options. In this paper we present the results of our storage and performance experiments over a real life data cubes in reference to these design approaches. Some conclusions are drawn.