INFO2009 Text Tutorial - Accessibility

Maximizing Accessibility in Software - by Denis's Angels

INFO2009 Poster: Accessibility - Text Tutorial

Poster describing the text tutorial on accessibility, created by Denis's Angels for INFO2009.

Computational Systems

some resources on agile methods and enterprise architecture frameworks

Plan de negocio Gree-Waste

El crecimiento apresurado de la industria tecnológica en los últimos años a nivel mundial, ha generado un nuevo problema socio-ambiental: el manejo y control de los volúmenes de aparatos y componentes electrónicos obsoletos que crecen exponencialmente, específicamente los aparatos que provienen de sistemas de informática, volviéndose en una situación descontrolada y desatendida. Esta problemática empeora cada día por el desconocimiento, la imprudencia, las malas políticas adoptadas por el gobierno y el constante deseo de los consumidores por estar en contacto con los últimos modelos del mercado, reflejándose en un incremento acelerado en las ventas de aparatos electrónicos. Sin embargo, muchos se preguntaran él porque proponemos una idea de negocio caracterizada por lo social y lo ambiental, pues dicha idea viene de la experiencia que se ha tenido durante 7 años en el mercado de tecnología en computación y periféricos, que ha logrado una relación directa con empresas y personas; observando así, las verdaderas preocupaciones de los clientes y a su vez un aumento acelerado en los desechos tecnológicos. De esta manera y siguiendo con el espíritu emprendedor que nos ha caracterizado desde pequeños, hemos llegado a pensar en una idea de negocio interesante y viable, que nos permita incursionar ante competidores importantes y sobresaliendo con una idea innovadora que no se maneja de lleno en dicho sector. Para lograrlo, aprovecharemos los conocimientos y la experiencia que hemos acumulado a través de los años con el contacto directo con los clientes, quienes consideramos son el motor del negocio y llevándonos a concluir con el transcurrir del tiempo, que en Colombia no existe una cultura para desechar los elementos tecnológicos de una manera ecológica y saludable con el medio ambiente. Gracias a la oportunidad latente que muestra el mercado en el sector de reciclaje de desechos tecnológicos, nuestro equipo de trabajo se muestra inquieto ante la oportunidad de negocio encontrada, debido a que en Colombia existen pocas organizaciones que se especialicen en el proceso de reciclaje y reutilización adecuada de dichos desechos. Por esta razón, se confirma la oportunidad para generar un completo plan de negocio que gire en torno al manejo de e-waste y cuidado del medio ambiente, mediante la implementación de productos y servicios especializados para la recolección de dichos desechos electrónicos tanto para los consumidores como para las empresas.

Fletes nacionales e internacionales para perfiles logísticos de los diferentes sectores en Colombia

En la actualidad, la actividad económica de Colombia se divide en sectores y subsectores que contribuyen al crecimiento del país en términos mercantiles. Al no existir un estudio sobre la logística en cada uno de estos, muchas condiciones favorables para el desarrollo económico tales como la excelente ubicación del país, puertos estratégicamente localizados que facilitan el comercio exterior y demás, se desaprovechan y no permiten a las empresas lograr un mayor control respecto al flujo tanto de productos como de información. Ahora bien, para la movilización de los productos de cada sector se debe hacer uso de transporte terrestre, marítimo, aéreo o sistemas multimodales que sean manejados de la forma más eficiente. Sin embargo, por términos de infraestructura vial en caso del transporte terrestre, las empresas deben incurrir en altos costos que afectan todo el rendimiento de la cadena de valor, no solo a nivel monetario sino también en tiempos de respuesta. Poder evidenciar el impacto de la infraestructura vial interna en la cadena de suministro, además de las diferentes etapas que se deben tener en cuenta para el comercio a nivel internacional, permitiría a los empresarios de los diferentes sectores económicos en Colombia, poder desarrollar planes de mejora en sus procesos internos y externos, así como prósperas relaciones con clientes. Adicionalmente, respecto a los procesos de exportación, la diversificación de mercados y productos contribuye a un mejor aprovechamiento de tratados de libre comercio, factor que favorece la competitividad y la posibilidad de alianzas estratégicas que permitan hacer frente a la globalización de la economía, que a su vez asegura la perdurabilidad de una empresa en cada uno de los sectores estudiados. El desarrollo de este proyecto permitirá no solamente conocer los costos promedio en los que se incurre para movilizar productos según las condiciones de las cadenas de valor de cada sector, sino también las rutas alternativas que puede tomar la mercancía con el fin de lograr una efectividad del proceso del transporte y de igual forma, tomar medidas respecto a la competitividad de una empresa a nivel de almacenamiento y distribución.

An automatic correction tool for relational database schemas

A Web-based tool developed to automatically correct relational database schemas is presented. This tool has been integrated into a more general e-learning platform and is used to reinforce teaching and learning on database courses. This platform assigns to each student a set of database problems selected from a common repository. The student has to design a relational database schema and enter it into the system through a user friendly interface specifically designed for it. The correction tool corrects the design and shows detected errors. The student has the chance to correct them and send a new solution. These steps can be repeated as many times as required until a correct solution is obtained. Currently, this system is being used in different introductory database courses at the University of Girona with very promising results

ACME - Mòdul d'usuaris convidats

El projecte ACME va néixer, l’any 1998, amb la finalitat de millorar la docència de les matemàtiques en els estudis d’Enginyeria Industrial i Enginyeries Tècniques de l’Escola Politècnica de la Universitat de Girona, amb la intenció de buscar la manera de que els alumnes s’impliquessin i participessin més activament en aquesta matèria fent ús de la xarxa com a via de comunicació. El projecte ACME, Avaluació Continuada i Millora de l’Ensenyament, és una eina d’e-learning que té com a objectiu fer una avaluació continuada dels alumnes a través d’uns dossiers personalitzats de problemes que el professor proposa. El sistema permet fer el seguiment, per part del professor, del progrés del conjunt de la classe, o d’un alumne individual, en una assignatura concreta. Això fa que l’ACME tingui un gran valor pedagògic. Els objectius d’aquest projecte final de carrera són els següents: • Desenvolupar un sistema de gestió d’usuaris convidats que ens permeti acceptar o denegar l’accés a usuaris que prèviament han fet una petició per poder utilitzar l’ACME. • Crear un sistema que faciliti la tasca d’assignar als usuaris els temes i els problemes més adients pel seu perfil. • Desenvolupar tot un seguit de millores i ampliacions amb la intenció d’integrar el nou mòdul dins les interfícies existents: Ampliar la interfície d’administració en l’apartat d’usuari amb la opció per gestionar els usuaris convidats. Ampliar la interfície d’administració en l’apartat del quadern de problemes amb les opcions adients per tal de gestionar les assignatures dels convidats.

Grid Remote Execution (G-Rex) of Climate Models

G-Rex is light-weight Java middleware that allows scientific applications deployed on remote computer systems to be launched and controlled as if they are running on the user's own computer. G-Rex is particularly suited to ocean and climate modelling applications because output from the model is transferred back to the user while the run is in progress, which prevents the accumulation of large amounts of data on the remote cluster. The G-Rex server is a RESTful Web application that runs inside a servlet container on the remote system, and the client component is a Java command line program that can easily be incorporated into existing scientific work-flow scripts. The NEMO and POLCOMS ocean models have been deployed as G-Rex services in the NERC Cluster Grid, and G-Rex is the core grid middleware in the GCEP and GCOMS e-science projects.

Running Climate Models On The NERC Cluster Grid Using G-Rex

Compute grids are used widely in many areas of environmental science, but there has been limited uptake of grid computing by the climate modelling community, partly because the characteristics of many climate models make them difficult to use with popular grid middleware systems. In particular, climate models usually produce large volumes of output data, and running them usually involves complicated workflows implemented as shell scripts. For example, NEMO (Smith et al. 2008) is a state-of-the-art ocean model that is used currently for operational ocean forecasting in France, and will soon be used in the UK for both ocean forecasting and climate modelling. On a typical modern cluster, a particular one year global ocean simulation at 1-degree resolution takes about three hours when running on 40 processors, and produces roughly 20 GB of output as 50000 separate files. 50-year simulations are common, during which the model is resubmitted as a new job after each year. Running NEMO relies on a set of complicated shell scripts and command utilities for data pre-processing and post-processing prior to job resubmission. Grid Remote Execution (G-Rex) is a pure Java grid middleware system that allows scientific applications to be deployed as Web services on remote computer systems, and then launched and controlled as if they are running on the user's own computer. Although G-Rex is general purpose middleware it has two key features that make it particularly suitable for remote execution of climate models: (1) Output from the model is transferred back to the user while the run is in progress to prevent it from accumulating on the remote system and to allow the user to monitor the model; (2) The client component is a command-line program that can easily be incorporated into existing model work-flow scripts. G-Rex has a REST (Fielding, 2000) architectural style, which allows client programs to be very simple and lightweight and allows users to interact with model runs using only a basic HTTP client (such as a Web browser or the curl utility) if they wish. This design also allows for new client interfaces to be developed in other programming languages with relatively little effort. The G-Rex server is a standard Web application that runs inside a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat and is therefore easy to install and maintain by system administrators. G-Rex is employed as the middleware for the NERC1 Cluster Grid, a small grid of HPC2 clusters belonging to collaborating NERC research institutes. Currently the NEMO (Smith et al. 2008) and POLCOMS (Holt et al, 2008) ocean models are installed, and there are plans to install the Hadley Centre’s HadCM3 model for use in the decadal climate prediction project GCEP (Haines et al., 2008). The science projects involving NEMO on the Grid have a particular focus on data assimilation (Smith et al. 2008), a technique that involves constraining model simulations with observations. The POLCOMS model will play an important part in the GCOMS project (Holt et al, 2008), which aims to simulate the world’s coastal oceans. A typical use of G-Rex by a scientist to run a climate model on the NERC Cluster Grid proceeds as follows :(1) The scientist prepares input files on his or her local machine. (2) Using information provided by the Grid’s Ganglia3 monitoring system, the scientist selects an appropriate compute resource. (3) The scientist runs the relevant workflow script on his or her local machine. This is unmodified except that calls to run the model (e.g. with “mpirun”) are simply replaced with calls to "GRexRun" (4) The G-Rex middleware automatically handles the uploading of input files to the remote resource, and the downloading of output files back to the user, including their deletion from the remote system, during the run. (5) The scientist monitors the output files, using familiar analysis and visualization tools on his or her own local machine. G-Rex is well suited to climate modelling because it addresses many of the middleware usability issues that have led to limited uptake of grid computing by climate scientists. It is a lightweight, low-impact and easy-to-install solution that is currently designed for use in relatively small grids such as the NERC Cluster Grid. A current topic of research is the use of G-Rex as an easy-to-use front-end to larger-scale Grid resources such as the UK National Grid service.

The implementation of a low-cost production-line inspection system

This article describes an application of computers to a consumer-based production engineering environment. Particular consideration is given to the utilisation of low-cost computer systems for the visual inspection of components on a production line in real time. The process of installation is discussed, from identifying the need for artificial vision and justifying the cost, through to choosing a particular system and designing the physical and program structure.

BodyCloud: a SaaS approach for community body sensor networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) have been recently introduced for the remote monitoring of human activities in a broad range of application domains, such as health care, emergency management, fitness and behaviour surveillance. BSNs can be deployed in a community of people and can generate large amounts of contextual data that require a scalable approach for storage, processing and analysis. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of data streams generated in BSNs. This paper proposes BodyCloud, a SaaS approach for community BSNs that supports the development and deployment of Cloud-assisted BSN applications. BodyCloud is a multi-tier application-level architecture that integrates a Cloud computing platform and BSN data streams middleware. BodyCloud provides programming abstractions that allow the rapid development of community BSN applications. This work describes the general architecture of the proposed approach and presents a case study for the real-time monitoring and analysis of cardiac data streams of many individuals.

Improving transmission reliability of low-power medium access control protocols using average diversity combining

Embedded computer systems equipped with wireless communication transceivers are nowadays used in a vast number of application scenarios. Energy consumption is important in many of these scenarios, as systems are battery operated and long maintenance-free operation is required. To achieve this goal, embedded systems employ low-power communication transceivers and protocols. However, currently used protocols cannot operate efficiently when communication channels are highly erroneous. In this study, we show how average diversity combining (ADC) can be used in state-of-the-art low-power communication protocols. This novel approach improves transmission reliability and in consequence energy consumption and transmission latency in the presence of erroneous channels. Using a testbed, we show that highly erroneous channels are indeed a common occurrence in situations, where low-power systems are used and we demonstrate that ADC improves low-power communication dramatically.

Hand Gesture Detection & Recognition System

The project introduces an application using computer vision for Hand gesture recognition. A camera records a live video stream, from which a snapshot is taken with the help of interface. The system is trained for each type of count hand gestures (one, two, three, four, and five) at least once. After that a test gesture is given to it and the system tries to recognize it.A research was carried out on a number of algorithms that could best differentiate a hand gesture. It was found that the diagonal sum algorithm gave the highest accuracy rate. In the preprocessing phase, a self-developed algorithm removes the background of each training gesture. After that the image is converted into a binary image and the sums of all diagonal elements of the picture are taken. This sum helps us in differentiating and classifying different hand gestures.Previous systems have used data gloves or markers for input in the system. I have no such constraints for using the system. The user can give hand gestures in view of the camera naturally. A completely robust hand gesture recognition system is still under heavy research and development; the implemented system serves as an extendible foundation for future work.

Automatic and objective assessment of alternating tapping performance in Parkinson’s disease

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a method for enabling quantitative and automatic scoring of alternating tapping performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Ten healthy elderly subjects and 95 patients in different clinical stages of PD have utilized a touch-pad handheld computer to perform alternate tapping tests in their home environments. First, a neurologist used a web-based system to visually assess impairments in four tapping dimensions (‘speed’, ‘accuracy’, ‘fatigue’ and ‘arrhythmia’) and a global tapping severity (GTS). Second, tapping signals were processed with time series analysis and statistical methods to derive 24 quantitative parameters. Third, principal component analysis was used to reduce the dimensions of these parameters and to obtain scores for the four dimensions. Finally, a logistic regression classifier was trained using a 10-fold stratified cross-validation to map the reduced parameters to the corresponding visually assessed GTS scores. Results showed that the computed scores correlated well to visually assessed scores and were significantly different across Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores of upper limb motor performance. In addition, they had good internal consistency, had good ability to discriminate between healthy elderly and patients in different disease stages, had good sensitivity to treatment interventions and could reflect the natural disease progression over time. In conclusion, the automatic method can be useful to objectively assess the tapping performance of PD patients and can be included in telemedicine tools for remote monitoring of tapping.

Convex Hulls in Image Processing : A Scoping Review

The demands of image processing related systems are robustness, high recognition rates, capability to handle incomplete digital information, and magnanimous flexibility in capturing shape of an object in an image. It is exactly here that, the role of convex hulls comes to play. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we summarize the state of the art in computational convex hull development for researchers interested in using convex hull image processing to build their intuition, or generate nontrivial models. Secondly, we present several applications involving convex hulls in image processing related tasks. By this, we have striven to show researchers the rich and varied set of applications they can contribute to. This paper also makes a humble effort to enthuse prospective researchers in this area. We hope that the resulting awareness will result in new advances for specific image recognition applications.