Using mobile device detection approaches to augment the accuracy of web delivery content

Recent studies of mobile Web trends show a continuous explosion of mobile-friendly content. However, the increasing number and heterogeneity of mobile devices poses several challenges for Web programmers who want to automatically get the delivery context and adapt the content to mobile devices. In this process, the devices detection phase assumes an important role where an inaccurate detection could result in a poor mobile experience for the enduser. In this paper we compare the most promising approaches for mobile device detection. Based on this study, we present an architecture for a system to detect and deliver uniform m-Learning content to students in a Higher School. We focus mainly on the devices capabilities repository manageable and accessible through an API. We detail the structure of the capabilities XML Schema that formalizes the data within the devices capabilities XML repository and the REST Web Service API for selecting the correspondent devices capabilities data according to a specific request. Finally, we validate our approach by presenting the access and usage statistics of the mobile web interface of the proposed system such as hits and new visitors, mobile platforms, average time on site and rejection rate.

The operation of autonomous mobile robot assistants in the environment of care facilities adopting a user-centered development design

The participation of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA (Stuttgart, Germany) and the companies User Interface Design GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) plus MLR System GmbH (Ludwigsburg, Germany) enabled the research and findings presented in this paper; we would like to namely mention Birgit Graf and Theo Jacobs (Fraunhofer IPA) furthermore Peter Klein and Christiane Hartmann (User Interface Design GmbH).

A survey on e-learning content standardization

eLearning has been evolved in a gradual and consistent way. Along with this evolution several specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfill the needs of teachers and students such as repositories of learning objects, intelligent tutors, or automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity poses issues that are necessary to address in order to promote interoperability among systems. Based on this fact, the standardization of content takes a leading role in the eLearning realm. This article presents a survey on current eLearning content standards. It gathers information on the most emergent standards and categorizes them according three distinct facets: metadata, content packaging and educational design.

Experimental study on polyester based concretes filled with glass fibre reinforced plastic recyclates – a contribution to composite materials sustainability

The development and applications of thermoset polymeric composites, namely fibre reinforced plastics (FRP), have shifted in the last decades more and more into the mass market [1]. Despite of all advantages associated to FRP based products, the increasing production and consume also lead to an increasing amount of FRP wastes, either end-of-lifecycle products, or scrap and by-products generated by the manufacturing process itself. Whereas thermoplastic FRPs can be easily recycled, by remelting and remoulding, recyclability of thermosetting FRPs constitutes a more difficult task due to cross-linked nature of resin matrix. To date, most of the thermoset based FRP waste is being incinerated or landfilled, leading to negative environmental impacts and supplementary added costs to FRP producers and suppliers. This actual framework is putting increasing pressure on the industry to address the options available for FRP waste management, being an important driver for applied research undertaken cost efficient recycling methods. [1-2]. In spite of this, research on recycling solutions for thermoset composites is still at an elementary stage. Thermal and/or chemical recycling processes, with partial fibre recovering, have been investigated mostly for carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) due to inherent value of carbon fibre reinforcement; whereas for glass fibre reinforced plastics (GFRP), mechanical recycling, by means of milling and grinding processes, has been considered a more viable recycling method [1-2]. Though, at the moment, few solutions in the reuse of mechanically-recycled GFRP composites into valueadded products are being explored. Aiming filling this gap, in this study, a new waste management solution for thermoset GFRP based products was assessed. The mechanical recycling approach, with reduction of GFRP waste to powdered and fibrous materials was applied, and the potential added value of obtained recyclates was experimentally investigated as raw material for polyester based mortars. The use of a cementless concrete as host material for GFRP recyclates, instead of a conventional Portland cement based concrete, presents an important asset in avoiding the eventual incompatibility problems arisen from alkalis silica reaction between glass fibres and cementious binder matrix. Additionally, due to hermetic nature of resin binder, polymer based concretes present greater ability for incorporating recycled waste products [3]. Under this scope, different GFRP waste admixed polymer mortar (PM) formulations were analyzed varying the size grading and content of GFRP powder and fibre mix waste. Added value of potential recycling solution was assessed by means of flexural and compressive loading capacities of modified mortars with regard to waste-free polymer mortars.

On divisors of pseudovarieties generated by some classes of full transformation semigroups

Algebra Colloquium, 15 (2008), p. 581–588

Collaborative web applications

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

Management Driven Hybrid Multicast Framework for Content Aware Networks

The need for better adaptation of networks to transported flows has led to research on new approaches such as content aware networks and network aware applications. In parallel, recent developments of multimedia and content oriented services and applications such as IPTV, video streaming, video on demand, and Internet TV reinforced interest in multicast technologies. IP multicast has not been widely deployed due to interdomain and QoS support problems; therefore, alternative solutions have been investigated. This article proposes a management driven hybrid multicast solution that is multi-domain and media oriented, and combines overlay multicast, IP multicast, and P2P. The architecture is developed in a content aware network and network aware application environment, based on light network virtualization. The multicast trees can be seen as parallel virtual content aware networks, spanning a single or multiple IP domains, customized to the type of content to be transported while fulfilling the quality of service requirements of the service provider.

Phenylketonuria: Protein content and amino acids profile of dishes for phenylketonuric patients. The relevance of phenylalanine

Phenylketonuria is an inborn error of metabolism, involving, in most cases, a deficient activity of phenylalanine hydroxylase. Neonatal diagnosis and a prompt special diet (low phenylalanine and natural-protein restricted diets) are essential to the treatment. The lack of data concerning phenylalanine contents of processed foodstuffs is an additional limitation for an already very restrictive diet. Our goals were to quantify protein (Kjeldahl method) and amino acid (18) content (HPLC/fluorescence) in 16 dishes specifically conceived for phenylketonuric patients, and compare the most relevant results with those of several international food composition databases. As might be expected, all the meals contained low protein levels (0.67–3.15 g/100 g) with the highest ones occurring in boiled rice and potatoes. These foods also contained the highest amounts of phenylalanine (158.51 and 62.65 mg/100 g, respectively). In contrast to the other amino acids, it was possible to predict phenylalanine content based on protein alone. Slight deviations were observed when comparing results with the different food composition databases.

TV Recommendation and Personalization Systems: Integrating Broadcast and Video On-demand Services

he expansion of Digital Television and the convergence between conventional broadcasting and television over IP contributed to the gradual increase of the number of available channels and on demand video content. Moreover, the dissemination of the use of mobile devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets on everyday activities resulted in a shift of the traditional television viewing paradigm from the couch to everywhere, anytime from any device. Although this new scenario enables a great improvement in viewing experiences, it also brings new challenges given the overload of information that the viewer faces. Recommendation systems stand out as a possible solution to help a watcher on the selection of the content that best fits his/her preferences. This paper describes a web based system that helps the user navigating on broadcasted and online television content by implementing recommendations based on collaborative and content based filtering. The algorithms developed estimate the similarity between items and users and predict the rating that a user would assign to a particular item (television program, movie, etc.). To enable interoperability between different systems, programs characteristics (title, genre, actors, etc.) are stored according to the TV-Anytime standard. The set of recommendations produced are presented through a Web Application that allows the user to interact with the system based on the obtained recommendations.

Relatório de estágio em marketing corporativo na empresa Insite IT GmbH

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Publicidade e Marketing.

Large-area homogeneous periodic surface structures generated on the surface sputtered boron carbide thin films by femtosecond laser processing

Amorphous and crystalline sputtered boron carbide thin films have a very high hardness even surpassing that of bulk crystalline boron carbide (≈41 GPa). However, magnetron sputtered B-C films have high friction coefficients (C.o.F) which limit their industrial application. Nanopatterning of materials surfaces has been proposed as a solution to decrease the C.o.F. The contact area of the nanopatterned surfaces is decreased due to the nanometre size of the asperities which results in a significant reduction of adhesion and friction. In the present work, the surface of amorphous and polycrystalline B-C thin films deposited by magnetron sputtering was nanopatterned using infrared femtosecond laser radiation. Successive parallel laser tracks 10 μm apart were overlapped in order to obtain a processed area of about 3 mm2. Sinusoidal-like undulations with the same spatial period as the laser tracks were formed on the surface of the amorphous boron carbide films after laser processing. The undulations amplitude increases with increasing laser fluence. The formation of undulations with a 10 μm period was also observed on the surface of the crystalline boron carbide film processed with a pulse energy of 72 μJ. The amplitude of the undulations is about 10 times higher than in the amorphous films processed at the same pulse energy due to the higher roughness of the films and consequent increase in laser radiation absorption. LIPSS formation on the surface of the films was achieved for the three B-C films under study. However, LIPSS are formed under different circumstances. Processing of the amorphous films at low fluence (72 μJ) results in LIPSS formation only on localized spots on the film surface. LIPSS formation was also observed on the top of the undulations formed after laser processing with 78 μJ of the amorphous film deposited at 800 °C. Finally, large-area homogeneous LIPSS coverage of the boron carbide crystalline films surface was achieved within a large range of laser fluences although holes are also formed at higher laser fluences.

A survey of e-learning content aggregation standards

As e-learning gradually evolved many specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfil the needs of teachers and students, such as repositories of learning objects, authoring tools, intelligent tutors and automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity raises interoperability issues giving the standardization of content an important role in e-learning. This article presents a survey on current e-learning content aggregation standards focusing on their internal organization and packaging. This study is part of an effort to choose the most suitable specifications and standards for an e-learning framework called Ensemble defined as a conceptual tool to organize a network of e-learning systems and services for domains with complex evaluation.

Propagation of waves generated by a pressure disturbance moving in a channel

This paper studies the effect of ship speed and water depth on the propagation of ship generated waves. The ship is represented by a moving pressure distribution function at the free surface that is able to reproduce most of the phenomena involved in wave propagation. Results are obtained for a ship sailing along a coastal stretch made of a sloping bottom and a constant depth region. The results show that in the sloping bottom the crests of waves are bent along the slope and in the constant depth the standard Kelvin wave patterns can be found for the subcritical regime. In the critical regime the wave system is characterized by significant diverging waves and for a supercritical regime, the transverse waves disappear. © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, London.