Intellectual property law on architectural design in collaborative design communication as digital assets

Digital Economy is one of the crucial elements promoted by the Digital Britain Report June 2009 and its Implementation Plan August 2009 in order to maintain and further the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies. Therefore, the application of Digital Technologies is high in the agenda. As pervasive digital technologies become more widely available, it becomes increasingly important to understand the legal implications of digital assets produced via digital technologies in collaborative design communication. Architects and engineers depend on intellectual property law to protect their original works. Copyright protection is automatic once a tangible medium of expression in any form of an innovative material, conforming the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, is created. Although copyright law provides automatic protection to all original architectural plans, the limitation is that it only protects the expression of ideas but not the ideas themselves. The purpose of this research is to explore how effective the UK’s copyright law regime is for protecting the rights and interests of architects and engineers in their works as digital assets. The UK’s copyright law is ripe for modernisation not only to protect the rights of designers but also to further UK’s position in digital economy.

Radon in homes and risk of lung cancer: collaborative analysis of individual data from 13 European case-control studies

Objective: To determine the risk of lung cancer associated with exposure at home to the radioactive disintegration products of naturally Occurring radon gas. Design: Collaborative analysis of individual data from 13 case-control studies of residential radon and lung cancer. Setting Nine European countries. Subjects 7148 cases Of lung cancer and 14 208 controls. Main outcome measures: Relative risks of lung cancer and radon gas concentrations in homes inhabited during the previous 5-34 years measured in becquerels (radon disintegrations per second) per cubic incite (Bq/m(3)) Of household air. Results: The mean measured radon concentration in homes of people in tire control group was 97 Bq/m(3), with 11% measuring > 200 and 4% measuring > 400 Bq/m(3). For cases of lung cancer the mean concentration was 104 Bq/m(3). The risk of lung cancer increased by 8.4% (95% confidence interval 3.0% to 15.8%) per 100 Bq/m(3) increase in measured radon (P = 0.0007). This corresponds to an increase of 16% (5% to 31%) per 100 Bq/m(3) increase in usual radon-that is, after correction for the dilution caused by random uncertainties in measuring radon concentrations. The dose-response relation seemed to be linear with no threshold and remained significant (P=0.04) in analyses limited to individuals from homes with measured radon < 200 Bq/m(3). The proportionate excess risk did not differ significantly with study, age, sex, or smoking. In the absence of other causes of death, the absolute risks of lung cancer by age 75 years at usual radon concentrations of 0, 100, and 400 Bq/m(3) would be about 0.4%, 0.5%, and 0.7%, respectively, for lifelong non-smokers, and about 25 times greater (10%, 12%, and 16%) for cigarette smokers. Conclusions: Collectively, though not separately, these studies show appreciable hazards from residential radon, particularly for smokers and recent ex-smokers, and indicate that it is responsible for about 2% of all deaths from cancer in Europe.

Intelligent wireless web services: context-aware computing in construction-logistics supply chain

The construction industry has incurred a considerable amount of waste as a result of poor logistics supply chain network management. Therefore, managing logistics in the construction industry is critical. An effective logistic system ensures delivery of the right products and services to the right players at the right time while minimising costs and rewarding all sectors based on value added to the supply chain. This paper reports on an on-going research study on the concept of context-aware services delivery in the construction project supply chain logistics. As part of the emerging wireless technologies, an Intelligent Wireless Web (IWW) using context-aware computing capability represents the next generation ICT application to construction-logistics management. This intelligent system has the potential of serving and improving the construction logistics through access to context-specific data, information and services. Existing mobile communication deployments in the construction industry rely on static modes of information delivery and do not take into account the worker’s changing context and dynamic project conditions. The major problems in these applications are lack of context-specificity in the distribution of information, services and other project resources, and lack of cohesion with the existing desktop based ICT infrastructure. The research works focus on identifying the context dimension such as user context, environmental context and project context, selection of technologies to capture context-parameters such wireless sensors and RFID, selection of supporting technologies such as wireless communication, Semantic Web, Web Services, agents, etc. The process of integration of Context-Aware Computing and Web-Services to facilitate the creation of intelligent collaboration environment for managing construction logistics will take into account all the necessary critical parameters such as storage, transportation, distribution, assembly, etc. within off and on-site project.

Parallel and distributed computing with Java

The Java language first came to public attention in 1995. Within a year, it was being speculated that Java may be a good language for parallel and distributed computing. Its core features, including being objected oriented and platform independence, as well as having built-in network support and threads, has encouraged this view. Today, Java is being used in almost every type of computer-based system, ranging from sensor networks to high performance computing platforms, and from enterprise applications through to complex research-based.simulations. In this paper the key features that make Java a good language for parallel and distributed computing are first discussed. Two Java-based middleware systems, namely MPJ Express, an MPI-like Java messaging system, and Tycho, a wide-area asynchronous messaging framework with an integrated virtual registry are then discussed. The paper concludes by highlighting the advantages of using Java as middleware to support distributed applications.

Requirements analysis for an e-government system to support multi-organisational collaborative groups

We present a conceptual architecture for a Group Support System (GSS) to facilitate Multi-Organisational Collaborative Groups (MOCGs) initiated by local government and including external organisations of various types. Multi-Organisational Collaborative Groups (MOCGs) consist of individuals from several organisations which have agreed to work together to solve a problem. The expectation is that more can be achieved working in harmony than separately. Work is done interdependently, rather than independently in diverse directions. Local government, faced with solving complex social problems, deploy MOCGs to enable solutions across organisational, functional, professional and juridical boundaries, by involving statutory, voluntary, community, not-for-profit and private organisations. This is not a silver bullet as it introduces new pressures. Each member organisation has its own goals, operating context and particular approaches, which can be expressed as their norms and business processes. Organisations working together must find ways of eliminating differences or mitigating their impact in order to reduce the risks of collaborative inertia and conflict. A GSS is an electronic collaboration system that facilitates group working and can offer assistance to MOCGs. Since many existing GSSs have been primarily developed for single organisation collaborative groups, even though there are some common issues, there are some difficulties peculiar to MOCGs, and others that they experience to a greater extent: a diversity of primary organisational goals among members; different funding models and other pressures; more significant differences in other information systems both technologically and in their use than single organisations; greater variation in acceptable approaches to solve problems. In this paper, we analyse the requirements of MOCGs led by local government agencies, leading to a conceptual architecture for an e-government GSS that captures the relationships between 'goal', 'context', 'norm', and 'business process'. Our models capture the dynamics of the circumstances surrounding each individual representing an organisation in a MOCG along with the dynamics of the MOCG itself as a separate community.

Collaborative tele-rehabilitation: A strategy for increasing engagement

This paper examines the influence of a collaborative rehabilitation environment that encourages a long-distance collaborative "play" using two robot-mediated environments. This study presents a strategy for increasing motivation on able-bodied persons, applicable to impaired persons, to engage, sustain play and relate during a shared task. The study consisted of a series of eighteen single case studies, each involved in two distinct phases and assessed using a multidimensional measurement intended to assess participant' subjective experience. The results showed a clear positive trend in favour of the robot-mediated game environment. Subjects found the collaborative environment more valuable and more interesting and enjoyable. As a consequence, it appears subjects were willing to spend more time at a task.

A technique for evaluation of interactive evolutionary systems

Very large scale scheduling and planning tasks cannot be effectively addressed by fully automated schedule optimisation systems, since many key factors which govern 'fitness' in such cases are unformalisable. This raises the question of an interactive (or collaborative) approach, where fitness is assigned by the expert user. Though well-researched in the domains of interactively evolved art and music, this method is as yet rarely used in logistics. This paper concerns a difficulty shared by all interactive evolutionary systems (IESs), but especially those used for logistics or design problems. The difficulty is that objective evaluation of IESs is severely hampered by the need for expert humans in the loop. This makes it effectively impossible to, for example, determine with statistical confidence any ranking among a decent number of configurations for the parameters and strategy choices. We make headway into this difficulty with an Automated Tester (AT) for such systems. The AT replaces the human in experiments, and has parameters controlling its decision-making accuracy (modelling human error) and a built-in notion of a target solution which may typically be at odds with the solution which is optimal in terms of formalisable fitness. Using the AT, plausible evaluations of alternative designs for the IES can be done, allowing for (and examining the effects of) different levels of user error. We describe such an AT for evaluating an IES for very large scale planning.

Autonomous execution of tasks by swarm carrier agents in swarm-array computing

How can a bridge be built between autonomic computing approaches and parallel computing system? The work reported in this paper is motivated towards bridging this gap by proposing swarm-array computing, a novel technique to achieve autonomy for distributed parallel computing systems. Among three proposed approaches, the second approach, namely 'Intelligent Agents' is of focus in this paper. The task to be executed on parallel computing cores is considered as a swarm of autonomous agents. A task is carried to a computing core by carrier. agents and can be seamlessly transferred between cores in the event of a pre-dicted failure, thereby achieving self-ware objectives of autonomic computing. The feasibility of the proposed approach is validated on a multi-agent simulator.