Evaluating ubiquitous computing environments using 3D simulation

Human activity is very dynamic and subtle, and most physical environments are also highly dynamic and support a vast range of social practices that do not map directly into any immediate ubiquitous computing functionally. Identifying what is valuable to people is very hard and obviously leads to great uncertainty regarding the type of support needed and the type of resources needed to create such support. We have addressed the issues of system development through the adoption of a Crowdsourced software development model [13]. We have designed and developed Anywhere places, an open and flexible system support infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing that is based on a balanced combination between global services and applications and situated devices. Evaluation, however, is still an open problem. The characteristics of ubiquitous computing environments make their evaluation very complex: there are no globally accepted metrics and it is very difficult to evaluate large-scale and long-term environments in real contexts. In this paper, we describe a first proposal of an hybrid 3D simulated prototype of Anywhere places that combines simulated and real components to generate a mixed reality which can be used to assess the envisaged ubiquitous computing environments [17].

Digital manipulatives as scaffolds for preschoolers’ language development

The study reported here aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of the educational possibilities offered by digital manipulatives in preschool contexts. It presents a study carried with a digital manipulative to enhance the development of lexical knowledge and language awareness, which are relevant language abilities for formal literacy learning. The study took place in a Portuguese preschool, with a class of 20 five-year-olds in collaboration with the teacher. The digital manipulative supported the construction of multiple fictional worlds, motivating children's verbal interactions, and the playing of words and sound games, thus contextualizing the learning of an extensive collection of vocabulary and language awareness abilities. The degree of engagement and involvement that the manipulative provided in supporting children’s imaginative play as well as the imitation, in their own play, of the playful pedagogical interventions that the teacher had designed, shows the importance of well- designed materials that support a child-centered learning model. As such, it sustains a discussion on the potential of digital manipulatives to enhance fundamental language development in the preschool years. Further, the study highlights the importance of multidisciplinary teams in the creation of innovative pedagogical materials.

Actualització tecnológica : una evolució cap al Green Computing

El projecte que es presenta a continuació és una planificació de migració de servidors físics a un entorn virtualitzat, allà on sigui possible. A més s'ha plantejat una renovació tecnològica de tot el parc de servidors per estalviar diners en el manteniment i en el consum d'energia.La solució de virtualització es buscarà que sigui programari lliure.

libmsvg : librería C minimalista para lectura y escritura de ficheros SVG

Este documento es la memoria de un proyecto de Fin de Máster en Software Libre cursado en la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.El nombre del proyecto es "libmsvg" y se enmarca en la especialidad de desarrollo de aplicaciones de software libre."libmsvg" es una pequeña librería software, escrita en C, para leer y grabar ficheros en un subconjunto del formato SVG.SVG son las iniciales de Scalable Vector Graphics, un formato de gráficos vectoriales definido por el World Wide Web Consortium.En esta memoria se describe la concepción, diseño y desarrollo de la librería y los trabajos realizados para su publicación y puesta a disposición de la comunidad, como software libre.

mpiGL : un projecte d'utilització del programari lliure en la visualització gràfica en xarxes de càlcul científic

S'analitzen les problemàtiques relacionades amb la presentació d'informació gràfica en temps real durant un càlcul paral·lel o col·laboratiu en un entorn distribuït, i es fa una proposta de toolkit obert que estén el llenguatge OpenGL per la seva resolució.

An Ontology for Open Rubric Exchange on the Web

While the Internet has given educators access to a steady supply of Open Educational Resources, the educational rubrics commonly shared on the Web are generally in the form of static, non-semantic presentational documents or in the proprietary data structures of commercial content and learning management systems.With the advent of Semantic Web Standards, producers of online resources have a new framework to support the open exchange of software-readable datasets. Despite these advances, the state of the art of digital representation of rubrics as sharable documents has not progressed.This paper proposes an ontological model for digital rubrics. This model is built upon the Semantic Web Standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), principally the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Contribution to Asterisk Open Source Project

With this final master thesis we are going to contribute to the Asterisk open source project. Asterisk is an open source project that started with the main objective of develop an IP telephony platform, completely based on Software (so not hardware dependent) and under an open license like GPL. This project was started on 1999 by the software engineer Mark Spencer at Digium. The main motivation of that open source project was that the telecommunications sector is lack of open solutions, and most of the available solutions are based on proprietary standards, which are close and not compatible between them. Behind the Asterisk project there is a company, Digum, which is the project leading since the project was originated in its laboratories. This company has some of its employees fully dedicated to contribute to the Asterisk project, and also provide the whole infrastructure required by the open source project. But the business of Digium isn't based on licensing of products due to the open source nature of Asterisk, but it's based on offering services around Asteriskand designing and selling some hardware components to be used with Asterisk. The Asterisk project has grown up a lot since its birth, offering in its latest versions advanced functionalities for managing calls and compatibility with some hardware that previously was exclusive of proprietary solutions. Due to that, Asterisk is becoming a serious alternative to all these proprietaries solutions because it has reached a level of maturity that makes it very stable. In addition, as it is open source, it can be fully customized to a givenrequirement, which could be impossible with the proprietaries solutions. Due to the bigness that is reaching the project, every day there are more companies which develop value added software for telephony platforms, that are seriously evaluating the option of make their software fully compatible withAsterisk platforms. All these factors make Asterisk being a consolidated project but in constant evolution, trying to offer all those functionalities offered by proprietaries solutions. This final master thesis will be divided mainly in two blocks totally complementaries. In the first block we will analyze Asterisk as an open source project and Asterisk as a telephony platform (PBX). As a result of this analysis we will generate a document, written in English because it is Asterisk project's official language, which could be used by future contributors as an starting point on joining Asterisk. On the second block we will proceed with a development contribution to the Asterisk project. We will have several options in the form that we do the contribution, such as solving bugs, developing new functionalities or start an Asterisk satellite project. The type of contribution will depend on the needs of the project on that moment.

Tecnologies de cloud computing Openstack/StackOps

El propòsit d'aquest TFC és investigar i fer una instal·lació des de zero d'un model de negoci basat en l'allotjament web fent servir tecnologies de Cloud Computing. El software open-source que es farà servir per aquesta finalitat serà Openstack el qual es basa en un model de servei com infraestructura (IaaS). La nostra finalitat és poder implementar el model IaaS basat en Openstack. Per duu a terme aquest desplegament es farà servir dos hipervisors (KVM i VMware ESXi) per tal de testejar diferents sistemes d¿hipervisors treballant conjuntament.

Free-and open source software for a course on network management: authoring and enactment of scripts based on collaborative learning strategies

This paper describes a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) case study in engineering education carried out within the context of a network management course. The case study shows that the use of two computing tools developed by the authors and based on Free- and Open-Source Software (FOSS) provide significant educational benefits over traditional engineering pedagogical approaches in terms of both concepts and engineering competencies acquisition. First, the Collage authoring tool guides and supports the course teacher in the process of authoring computer-interpretable representations (using the IMS Learning Design standard notation) of effective collaborative pedagogical designs. Besides, the Gridcole system supports the enactment of that design by guiding the students throughout the prescribed sequence of learning activities. The paper introduces the goals and context of the case study, elaborates onhow Collage and Gridcole were employed, describes the applied evaluation methodology, anddiscusses the most significant findings derived from the case study.

Implementing interactive computing in an object-oriented environment

Statistical computing when input/output is driven by a Graphical User Interface is considered. A proposal is made for automatic control ofcomputational flow to ensure that only strictly required computationsare actually carried on. The computational flow is modeled by a directed graph for implementation in any object-oriented programming language with symbolic manipulation capabilities. A complete implementation example is presented to compute and display frequency based piecewise linear density estimators such as histograms or frequency polygons.

Editorial: Language, frequency and bibliometric indexes

This editorial examines the actions undertaken in number 5 and announces two important changes for the numbers 6 and 7, namely frequency and languages. Furthermore, the use of some bibliometric indicators, such as impact factor and refusal rate, is critically analyzed.

The M-Coffee web server: a meta-method for computing multiple sequence alignments by combining alternative alignment methods.

The M-Coffee server is a web server that makes it possible to compute multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) by running several MSA methods and combining their output into one single model. This allows the user to simultaneously run all his methods of choice without having to arbitrarily choose one of them. The MSA is delivered along with a local estimation of its consistency with the individual MSAs it was derived from. The computation of the consensus multiple alignment is carried out using a special mode of the T-Coffee package [Notredame, Higgins and Heringa (T-Coffee: a novel method for fast and accurate multiple sequence alignment. J. Mol. Biol. 2000; 302: 205-217); Wallace, O'Sullivan, Higgins and Notredame (M-Coffee: combining multiple sequence alignment methods with T-Coffee. Nucleic Acids Res. 2006; 34: 1692-1699)] Given a set of sequences (DNA or proteins) in FASTA format, M-Coffee delivers a multiple alignment in the most common formats. M-Coffee is a freeware open source package distributed under a GPL license and it is available either as a standalone package or as a web service from www.tcoffee.org.

Apertium Advanced Web Interface : A first step towards interactivity and language tools convergence

This documents sums up a projectaimed at building a new web interfaceto the Apertium machine translationplatform, including pre-editing andpost-editing environments. It containsa description of the accomplished workon this project, as well as an overviewof possible evolutions.

An Italian to Catalan RBMT system reusing data from existing language pairs

This paper presents an Italian to CatalanRBMT system automatically built bycombining the linguistic data of theexisting pairs Spanish-Catalan andSpanish-Italian. A lightweight manualpostprocessing is carried out in order tofix inconsistencies in the automaticallyderived dictionaries and to add very frequentwords that are missing accordingto a corpus analysis. The system isevaluated on the KDE4 corpus and outperformsGoogle Translate by approximatelyten absolute points in terms ofboth TER and GTM.

Juan Luis Vives and Richard Mulcaster: a humanist view of language

Humanist writers were multifaceted and thcir writings eclectic, delving into a wide range of fields of enquiry Many issues wcre raised and addressed, pursued ur abandoned, uftcn unsystematically. ‘[his hetcrogeneity has frequently lcd tu the neglect of specific facets of authurs who have gained renuwn in uthcr fzelds. ‘[his 1 believe tu be the case fur Richard Mulcaster and Juan Luis Vives, whuse contribution tu language Éhcory has been eclipsed by their rclatively mudem views un educatiun. ‘[heir views un language merit mure attention, if not fur their originality as such, at least fur te testimony they pruvide uf a periud in transition. ‘[he work uf these authors show 1mw views un language evolved thruughout te periud mié convey a sense uf its dynamic character. Profoundly cunservative attitudes coexist with progressive unes and, tliough ruoted in the past, thcy strain tuwards a new vision uf the nature and functioning uf language in human sucicty.