User Experience of Geocaching and Its Application to Tourism and Education

Advances in technology have provided new ways of using entertainment and game technology to foster human interaction. Games and playing with games have always been an important part of people’s everyday lives. Traditionally, human-computer interaction (HCI) research was seen as a psychological cognitive science focused on human factors, with engineering sciences as the computer science part of it. Although cognitive science has made significant progress over the past decade, the influence of people’s emotions on design networks is increasingly important, especially when the primary goal is to challenge and entertain users (Norman 2002). Game developers have explored the key issues in game design and identified that the driving force in the success of games is user experience. User-centered design integrates knowledge of users’ activity practices, needs, and preferences into the design process. Geocaching is a location-based treasure hunt game created by a community of players. Players use GPS (Global Position System) technology to find “treasures” and create their own geocaches; the game can be developed when the players invent caches and used more imagination to creations the caches. This doctoral dissertation explores user experience of geocaching and its applications in tourism and education. Globally, based on the Geocaching.com webpage, geocaching has been played about 180 countries and there are more than 10 million registered geocachers worldwide (Geocaching.com, 25.11.2014). This dissertation develops and presents an interaction model called the GameFlow Experience model that can be used to support the design of treasure hunt applications in tourism and education contexts. The GameFlow Model presents and clarifies various experiences; it provides such experiences in a real-life context, offers desirable design targets to be utilized in service design, and offers a perspective to consider when evaluating the success of adventure game concepts. User-centered game designs have adapted to human factor research in mainstream computing science. For many years, the user-centered design approach has been the most important research field in software development. Research has been focusing on user-centered design in software development such as office programs, but the same ideas and theories that will reflect the needs of a user-centered research are now also being applied to game design (Charles et al. 2005.) For several years, we have seen a growing interest in user experience design. Digital games are experience providers, and game developers need tools to better understand the user experience related to products and services they have created. This thesis aims to present what the user experience is in geocaching and treasure hunt games and how it can be used to develop new concepts for the treasure hunt. Engineers, designers, and researchers should have a clear understanding of what user experience is, what its parts are, and most importantly, how we can influence user satisfaction. In addition, we need to understand how users interact with electronic products and people, and how different elements synergize their experiences. This doctoral dissertation represents pioneering work on the user experience of geocaching and treasure hunt games in the context of tourism and education. The research also provides a model for game developers who are planning treasure hunt concepts.

Computational models for and from biology : simple gene assembly and reaction systems

The advancement of science and technology makes it clear that no single perspective is any longer sufficient to describe the true nature of any phenomenon. That is why the interdisciplinary research is gaining more attention overtime. An excellent example of this type of research is natural computing which stands on the borderline between biology and computer science. The contribution of research done in natural computing is twofold: on one hand, it sheds light into how nature works and how it processes information and, on the other hand, it provides some guidelines on how to design bio-inspired technologies. The first direction in this thesis focuses on a nature-inspired process called gene assembly in ciliates. The second one studies reaction systems, as a modeling framework with its rationale built upon the biochemical interactions happening within a cell. The process of gene assembly in ciliates has attracted a lot of attention as a research topic in the past 15 years. Two main modelling frameworks have been initially proposed in the end of 1990s to capture ciliates’ gene assembly process, namely the intermolecular model and the intramolecular model. They were followed by other model proposals such as templatebased assembly and DNA rearrangement pathways recombination models. In this thesis we are interested in a variation of the intramolecular model called simple gene assembly model, which focuses on the simplest possible folds in the assembly process. We propose a new framework called directed overlap-inclusion (DOI) graphs to overcome the limitations that previously introduced models faced in capturing all the combinatorial details of the simple gene assembly process. We investigate a number of combinatorial properties of these graphs, including a necessary property in terms of forbidden induced subgraphs. We also introduce DOI graph-based rewriting rules that capture all the operations of the simple gene assembly model and prove that they are equivalent to the string-based formalization of the model. Reaction systems (RS) is another nature-inspired modeling framework that is studied in this thesis. Reaction systems’ rationale is based upon two main regulation mechanisms, facilitation and inhibition, which control the interactions between biochemical reactions. Reaction systems is a complementary modeling framework to traditional quantitative frameworks, focusing on explicit cause-effect relationships between reactions. The explicit formulation of facilitation and inhibition mechanisms behind reactions, as well as the focus on interactions between reactions (rather than dynamics of concentrations) makes their applicability potentially wide and useful beyond biological case studies. In this thesis, we construct a reaction system model corresponding to the heat shock response mechanism based on a novel concept of dominance graph that captures the competition on resources in the ODE model. We also introduce for RS various concepts inspired by biology, e.g., mass conservation, steady state, periodicity, etc., to do model checking of the reaction systems based models. We prove that the complexity of the decision problems related to these properties varies from P to NP- and coNP-complete to PSPACE-complete. We further focus on the mass conservation relation in an RS and introduce the conservation dependency graph to capture the relation between the species and also propose an algorithm to list the conserved sets of a given reaction system.

Energy aware software for many-core systems

Many-core systems provide a great potential in application performance with the massively parallel structure. Such systems are currently being integrated into most parts of daily life from high-end server farms to desktop systems, laptops and mobile devices. Yet, these systems are facing increasing challenges such as high temperature causing physical damage, high electrical bills both for servers and individual users, unpleasant noise levels due to active cooling and unrealistic battery drainage in mobile devices; factors caused directly by poor energy efficiency. Power management has traditionally been an area of research providing hardware solutions or runtime power management in the operating system in form of frequency governors. Energy awareness in application software is currently non-existent. This means that applications are not involved in the power management decisions, nor does any interface between the applications and the runtime system to provide such facilities exist. Power management in the operating system is therefore performed purely based on indirect implications of software execution, usually referred to as the workload. It often results in over-allocation of resources, hence power waste. This thesis discusses power management strategies in many-core systems in the form of increasing application software awareness of energy efficiency. The presented approach allows meta-data descriptions in the applications and is manifested in two design recommendations: 1) Energy-aware mapping 2) Energy-aware execution which allow the applications to directly influence the power management decisions. The recommendations eliminate over-allocation of resources and increase the energy efficiency of the computing system. Both recommendations are fully supported in a provided interface in combination with a novel power management runtime system called Bricktop. The work presented in this thesis allows both new- and legacy software to execute with the most energy efficient mapping on a many-core CPU and with the most energy efficient performance level. A set of case study examples demonstrate realworld energy savings in a wide range of applications without performance degradation.

Resoluutio ennen, nyt ja tulevaisuudessa. Onko 8K tarpeeksi ja kuinka paljon 16K oikeastaan on?

Tämä työ on kirjallisuuskatsaus digitaalisen teräväpiirtoresoluution historiaan, nykyhetkeen ja tulevaisuuteen. Lisäksi käydään läpi eri medioista löytyviä termejä ja pyritään selvittämään näiden termien merkitys lukijalle. Työ on tehty Lappeenrannan teknillisen yliopiston Tietotekniikan osastolle. Teräväpiirtotelevision historia alkaa jo 1960-luvulta ja ensimmäiset teräväpiirtoresoluutiot kehitettiin 1970-luvulla. Kun resoluutiota kasvatetaan, myös kuvatiedoston ja vaadittavan tallennustilan koko kasvaa. Se aiheuttaa uusia haasteita muun muassa lähetys-, pakkaus- ja vastaanotintekniikoille. 4K-resoluutiot ovat jo täällä, mutta miten käy 16K-resoluution. Onko suuresta resoluutiosta hyötyä esimerkiksi Virtual Reality –sovelluksissa?

Decoding algorithms using side-effect machines

Bioinformatics applies computers to problems in molecular biology. Previous research has not addressed edit metric decoders. Decoders for quaternary edit metric codes are finding use in bioinformatics problems with applications to DNA. By using side effect machines we hope to be able to provide efficient decoding algorithms for this open problem. Two ideas for decoding algorithms are presented and examined. Both decoders use Side Effect Machines(SEMs) which are generalizations of finite state automata. Single Classifier Machines(SCMs) use a single side effect machine to classify all words within a code. Locking Side Effect Machines(LSEMs) use multiple side effect machines to create a tree structure of subclassification. The goal is to examine these techniques and provide new decoders for existing codes. Presented are ideas for best practices for the creation of these two types of new edit metric decoders.

Quadtree representation and compression of spatial data

Spatial data representation and compression has become a focus issue in computer graphics and image processing applications. Quadtrees, as one of hierarchical data structures, basing on the principle of recursive decomposition of space, always offer a compact and efficient representation of an image. For a given image, the choice of quadtree root node plays an important role in its quadtree representation and final data compression. The goal of this thesis is to present a heuristic algorithm for finding a root node of a region quadtree, which is able to reduce the number of leaf nodes when compared with the standard quadtree decomposition. The empirical results indicate that, this proposed algorithm has quadtree representation and data compression improvement when in comparison with the traditional method.

Automatic Structure Generation using Genetic Programming and Fractal Geometry

Three dimensional model design is a well-known and studied field, with numerous real-world applications. However, the manual construction of these models can often be time-consuming to the average user, despite the advantages o ffered through computational advances. This thesis presents an approach to the design of 3D structures using evolutionary computation and L-systems, which involves the automated production of such designs using a strict set of fitness functions. These functions focus on the geometric properties of the models produced, as well as their quantifiable aesthetic value - a topic which has not been widely investigated with respect to 3D models. New extensions to existing aesthetic measures are discussed and implemented in the presented system in order to produce designs which are visually pleasing. The system itself facilitates the construction of models requiring minimal user initialization and no user-based feedback throughout the evolutionary cycle. The genetic programming evolved models are shown to satisfy multiple criteria, conveying a relationship between their assigned aesthetic value and their perceived aesthetic value. Exploration into the applicability and e ffectiveness of a multi-objective approach to the problem is also presented, with a focus on both performance and visual results. Although subjective, these results o er insight into future applications and study in the fi eld of computational aesthetics and automated structure design.

Formalizing affordances in situation

The representation of a perceptual scene by a computer is usually limited to numbers representing dimensions and colours. The theory of affordances attempted to provide a new way of representing an environment, with respect to a particular agent. The view was introduced as part of an entire field of psychology labeled as 'ecological,' which has since branched into computer science through the field of robotics, and formal methods. This thesis will describe the concept of affordances, review several existing formalizations, and take a brief look at applications to robotics. The formalizations put forth in the last 20 years have no agreed upon structure, only that both the agent and the environment must be taken in relation to one another. Situation theory has also been evolving since its inception in 1983 by Barwise & Perry. The theory provided a formal way to represent any arbitrary piece of information in terms of relations. This thesis will take a toy version of situation theory published in CSLI lecture notes no. 22, and add to the given ontologies. This thesis extends the given ontologies to include specialized affordance types, and individual object types. This allows for the definition of semantic objects called environments, which support a situation and a set of affordances, and niches which refer to a set of actions for an individual. Finally, a possible way for an environment to change into a new environment is suggested via the activation of an affordance.

An Interactive Theorem Prover for First-Order Dynamic Logic

Dynamic logic is an extension of modal logic originally intended for reasoning about computer programs. The method of proving correctness of properties of a computer program using the well-known Hoare Logic can be implemented by utilizing the robustness of dynamic logic. For a very broad range of languages and applications in program veri cation, a theorem prover named KIV (Karlsruhe Interactive Veri er) Theorem Prover has already been developed. But a high degree of automation and its complexity make it di cult to use it for educational purposes. My research work is motivated towards the design and implementation of a similar interactive theorem prover with educational use as its main design criteria. As the key purpose of this system is to serve as an educational tool, it is a self-explanatory system that explains every step of creating a derivation, i.e., proving a theorem. This deductive system is implemented in the platform-independent programming language Java. In addition, a very popular combination of a lexical analyzer generator, JFlex, and the parser generator BYacc/J for parsing formulas and programs has been used.

Hyperspectral Mineral Identification using SVM and SOM

Remote sensing techniques involving hyperspectral imagery have applications in a number of sciences that study some aspects of the surface of the planet. The analysis of hyperspectral images is complex because of the large amount of information involved and the noise within that data. Investigating images with regard to identify minerals, rocks, vegetation and other materials is an application of hyperspectral remote sensing in the earth sciences. This thesis evaluates the performance of two classification and clustering techniques on hyperspectral images for mineral identification. Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) are applied as classification and clustering techniques, respectively. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to prepare the data to be analyzed. The purpose of using PCA is to reduce the amount of data that needs to be processed by identifying the most important components within the data. A well-studied dataset from Cuprite, Nevada and a dataset of more complex data from Baffin Island were used to assess the performance of these techniques. The main goal of this research study is to evaluate the advantage of training a classifier based on a small amount of data compared to an unsupervised method. Determining the effect of feature extraction on the accuracy of the clustering and classification method is another goal of this research. This thesis concludes that using PCA increases the learning accuracy, and especially so in classification. SVM classifies Cuprite data with a high precision and the SOM challenges SVM on datasets with high level of noise (like Baffin Island).

Properties and Algorithms of the KCube Graphs

The KCube interconnection topology was rst introduced in 2010. The KCube graph is a compound graph of a Kautz digraph and hypercubes. Compared with the at- tractive Kautz digraph and well known hypercube graph, the KCube graph could accommodate as many nodes as possible for a given indegree (and outdegree) and the diameter of interconnection networks. However, there are few algorithms designed for the KCube graph. In this thesis, we will concentrate on nding graph theoretical properties of the KCube graph and designing parallel algorithms that run on this network. We will explore several topological properties, such as bipartiteness, Hamiltonianicity, and symmetry property. These properties for the KCube graph are very useful to develop efficient algorithms on this network. We will then study the KCube network from the algorithmic point of view, and will give an improved routing algorithm. In addition, we will present two optimal broadcasting algorithms. They are fundamental algorithms to many applications. A literature review of the state of the art network designs in relation to the KCube network as well as some open problems in this field will also be given.

Timing verification in transaction modeling

Les systèmes Matériels/Logiciels deviennent indispensables dans tous les aspects de la vie quotidienne. La présence croissante de ces systèmes dans les différents produits et services incite à trouver des méthodes pour les développer efficacement. Mais une conception efficace de ces systèmes est limitée par plusieurs facteurs, certains d'entre eux sont: la complexité croissante des applications, une augmentation de la densité d'intégration, la nature hétérogène des produits et services, la diminution de temps d’accès au marché. Une modélisation transactionnelle (TLM) est considérée comme un paradigme prometteur permettant de gérer la complexité de conception et fournissant des moyens d’exploration et de validation d'alternatives de conception à des niveaux d’abstraction élevés. Cette recherche propose une méthodologie d’expression de temps dans TLM basée sur une analyse de contraintes temporelles. Nous proposons d'utiliser une combinaison de deux paradigmes de développement pour accélérer la conception: le TLM d'une part et une méthodologie d’expression de temps entre différentes transactions d’autre part. Cette synergie nous permet de combiner dans un seul environnement des méthodes de simulation performantes et des méthodes analytiques formelles. Nous avons proposé un nouvel algorithme de vérification temporelle basé sur la procédure de linéarisation des contraintes de type min/max et une technique d'optimisation afin d'améliorer l'efficacité de l'algorithme. Nous avons complété la description mathématique de tous les types de contraintes présentées dans la littérature. Nous avons développé des méthodes d'exploration et raffinement de système de communication qui nous a permis d'utiliser les algorithmes de vérification temporelle à différents niveaux TLM. Comme il existe plusieurs définitions du TLM, dans le cadre de notre recherche, nous avons défini une méthodologie de spécification et simulation pour des systèmes Matériel/Logiciel basée sur le paradigme de TLM. Dans cette méthodologie plusieurs concepts de modélisation peuvent être considérés séparément. Basée sur l'utilisation des technologies modernes de génie logiciel telles que XML, XSLT, XSD, la programmation orientée objet et plusieurs autres fournies par l’environnement .Net, la méthodologie proposée présente une approche qui rend possible une réutilisation des modèles intermédiaires afin de faire face à la contrainte de temps d’accès au marché. Elle fournit une approche générale dans la modélisation du système qui sépare les différents aspects de conception tels que des modèles de calculs utilisés pour décrire le système à des niveaux d’abstraction multiples. En conséquence, dans le modèle du système nous pouvons clairement identifier la fonctionnalité du système sans les détails reliés aux plateformes de développement et ceci mènera à améliorer la "portabilité" du modèle d'application.

Désambiguisation de sens par modèles de contextes et son application à la Recherche d’Information

Il est connu que les problèmes d'ambiguïté de la langue ont un effet néfaste sur les résultats des systèmes de Recherche d'Information (RI). Toutefois, les efforts de recherche visant à intégrer des techniques de Désambiguisation de Sens (DS) à la RI n'ont pas porté fruit. La plupart des études sur le sujet obtiennent effectivement des résultats négatifs ou peu convaincants. De plus, des investigations basées sur l'ajout d'ambiguïté artificielle concluent qu'il faudrait une très haute précision de désambiguation pour arriver à un effet positif. Ce mémoire vise à développer de nouvelles approches plus performantes et efficaces, se concentrant sur l'utilisation de statistiques de cooccurrence afin de construire des modèles de contexte. Ces modèles pourront ensuite servir à effectuer une discrimination de sens entre une requête et les documents d'une collection. Dans ce mémoire à deux parties, nous ferons tout d'abord une investigation de la force de la relation entre un mot et les mots présents dans son contexte, proposant une méthode d'apprentissage du poids d'un mot de contexte en fonction de sa distance du mot modélisé dans le document. Cette méthode repose sur l'idée que des modèles de contextes faits à partir d'échantillons aléatoires de mots en contexte devraient être similaires. Des expériences en anglais et en japonais montrent que la force de relation en fonction de la distance suit généralement une loi de puissance négative. Les poids résultant des expériences sont ensuite utilisés dans la construction de systèmes de DS Bayes Naïfs. Des évaluations de ces systèmes sur les données de l'atelier Semeval en anglais pour la tâche Semeval-2007 English Lexical Sample, puis en japonais pour la tâche Semeval-2010 Japanese WSD, montrent que les systèmes ont des résultats comparables à l'état de l'art, bien qu'ils soient bien plus légers, et ne dépendent pas d'outils ou de ressources linguistiques. La deuxième partie de ce mémoire vise à adapter les méthodes développées à des applications de Recherche d'Information. Ces applications ont la difficulté additionnelle de ne pas pouvoir dépendre de données créées manuellement. Nous proposons donc des modèles de contextes à variables latentes basés sur l'Allocation Dirichlet Latente (LDA). Ceux-ci seront combinés à la méthodes de vraisemblance de requête par modèles de langue. En évaluant le système résultant sur trois collections de la conférence TREC (Text REtrieval Conference), nous observons une amélioration proportionnelle moyenne de 12% du MAP et 23% du GMAP. Les gains se font surtout sur les requêtes difficiles, augmentant la stabilité des résultats. Ces expériences seraient la première application positive de techniques de DS sur des tâches de RI standard.

Déploiement automatique d’une application de routage téléphonique d’une langue source vers une langue cible

Les modèles de compréhension statistiques appliqués à des applications vocales nécessitent beaucoup de données pour être entraînés. Souvent, une même application doit pouvoir supporter plusieurs langues, c’est le cas avec les pays ayant plusieurs langues officielles. Il s’agit donc de gérer les mêmes requêtes des utilisateurs, lesquelles présentent une sémantique similaire, mais dans plusieurs langues différentes. Ce projet présente des techniques pour déployer automatiquement un modèle de compréhension statistique d’une langue source vers une langue cible. Ceci afin de réduire le nombre de données nécessaires ainsi que le temps relié au déploiement d’une application dans une nouvelle langue. Premièrement, une approche basée sur les techniques de traduction automatique est présentée. Ensuite une approche utilisant un espace sémantique commun pour comparer plusieurs langues a été développée. Ces deux méthodes sont comparées pour vérifier leurs limites et leurs faisabilités. L’apport de ce projet se situe dans l’amélioration d’un modèle de traduction grâce à l’ajout de données très proche de l’application ainsi que d’une nouvelle façon d’inférer un espace sémantique multilingue.

Protocole de routage basé sur des passerelles mobiles pour un accès Internet dans les réseaux véhiculaires

La rapide progression des technologies sans fil au cours de ces dernières années a vu naître de nouveaux systèmes de communication dont les réseaux véhiculaires. Ces réseaux visent à intégrer les nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication dans le domaine automobile en vue d’améliorer la sécurité et le confort sur le réseau routier. Offrir un accès Internet aux véhicules et à leurs occupants peut sans doute aider à anticiper certains dangers sur la route tout en rendant plus agréables les déplacements à bord des véhicules. Le déploiement de ce service nécessite que des messages soient échangés entre les véhicules. Le routage constitue un élément crucial dans un réseau, car définissant la façon dont les différentes entités échangent des messages. Le routage dans les VANETS constitue un grand défi car ces derniers sont caractérisés par une forte mobilité entraînant une topologie très dynamique. Des protocoles ont été proposés pour étendre Internet aux réseaux véhiculaires. Toutefois, la plupart d’entre eux nécessitent un coût élevé de messages de contrôle pour l’établissement et le maintien des communications. Ceci a pour conséquence la saturation de la bande passante entrainant ainsi une baisse de performance du réseau. Nous proposons dans ce mémoire, un protocole de routage qui s’appuie sur des passerelles mobiles pour étendre Internet aux réseaux véhiculaires. Le protocole prend en compte la mobilité des véhicules et la charge du réseau pour l’établissement et le maintien des routes.