The influence of system designer intention over collaborative tagging. an analysis of tagging behaviour in CiteULike and Delicious

Tagging provides support for retrieval and categorization of online content depending on users' tag choice. A number of models of tagging behaviour have been proposed to identify factors that are considered to affect taggers, such as users' tagging history. In this paper, we use Semiotics Analysis and Activity theory, to study the effect the system designer has over tagging behaviour. The framework we use shows the components that comprise the tagging system and how they interact together to direct tagging behaviour. We analysed two collaborative tagging systems: CiteULike and Delicious by studying their components by applying our framework. Using datasets from both systems, we found that 35% of CiteULike users did not provide tags compared to only 0.1% of Delicious users. This was directly linked to the type of tools used by the system designer to support tagging.

Timing and depositional environments of a Middle Pleistocene glaciation of northeast England: New evidence from Warren House Gill, County Durham

At various times during the Quaternary, north-eastern England was a zone of confluence between dynamic ice lobes sourced from the Pennines, northern Scotland, the Cheviots, and Scandinavia. The region thus has some of the most complex exposures of Middle to Late Pleistocene sediments in Britain, with both interglacial and glacial sediments deposited in terrestrial and marine settings. We investigated sedimentary sequences exposed on the coastline of County Durham at Warren House Gill, and present a new model of British and Fennoscandian Ice Sheet interaction in the North Sea Basin during the Middle Pleistocene. The stratigraphy at Warren House Gill consists of a lower diamicton and upper estuarine sediments, both part of the Warren House Formation. They are separated from the overlying Weichselian Blackhall and Horden tills by a substantial unconformity. The lower diamicton of the Warren House Formation is re-interpreted here as an MIS 8 to 12 glaciomarine deposit containing ice-rafted lithics from north-eastern Scotland and the northeast North Sea, and is renamed the ‘Ash Gill Member’. It is dated by lithological comparison to the Easington Raised Beach, Middle Pleistocene Amino Acid Racemisation values, and indirectly by optically stimulated luminescence. The overlying shallow subaqueous sediments were deposited in an estuarine environment by suspension settling and bottom current activity. They are named the ‘Whitesides Member’, and form the uppermost member of the Warren House Formation. During glaciation, ice-rafted material was deposited in a marine embayment. There is no evidence of a grounded, onshore Scandinavian ice sheet in County Durham during MIS 6, which has long been held as the accepted stratigraphy. This has major implications for the currently accepted British Quaternary Stratigraphy. Combined with recent work on the Middle Pleistocene North Sea Drift from Norfolk, which is now suggested to have been deposited by a Scottish ice sheet, the presence of a Scandinavian ice sheet in eastern England at any time during the Quaternary is becoming increasingly doubtful.

Collaborative personal profiling for web service ranking and recommendation

Web service is one of the most fundamental technologies in implementing service oriented architecture (SOA) based applications. One essential challenge related to web service is to find suitable candidates with regard to web service consumer’s requests, which is normally called web service discovery. During a web service discovery protocol, it is expected that the consumer will find it hard to distinguish which ones are more suitable in the retrieval set, thereby making selection of web services a critical task. In this paper, inspired by the idea that the service composition pattern is significant hint for service selection, a personal profiling mechanism is proposed to improve ranking and recommendation performance. Since service selection is highly dependent on the composition process, personal knowledge is accumulated from previous service composition process and shared via collaborative filtering where a set of users with similar interest will be firstly identified. Afterwards a web service re-ranking mechanism is employed for personalised recommendation. Experimental studies are conduced and analysed to demonstrate the promising potential of this research.

Visual sensor fusion for active security in robotic industrial environments

This work presents a method of information fusion involving data captured by both a standard CCD camera and a ToF camera to be used in the detection of the proximity between a manipulator robot and a human. Both cameras are assumed to be located above the work area of an industrial robot. The fusion of colour images and time of light information makes it possible to know the 3D localization of objects with respect to a world coordinate system. At the same time this allows to know their colour information. Considering that ToF information given by the range camera contains innacuracies including distance error, border error, and pixel saturation, some corrections over the ToF information are proposed and developed to improve the results. The proposed fusion method uses the calibration parameters of both cameras to reproject 3D ToF points, expressed in a common coordinate system for both cameras and a robot arm, in 2D colour images. In addition to this, using the 3D information, the motion detection in a robot industrial environment is achieved, and the fusion of information is applied to the foreground objects previously detected. This combination of information results in a matrix that links colour and 3D information, giving the possibility of characterising the object by its colour in addition to its 3D localization. Further development of these methods will make it possible to identify objects and their position in the real world, and to use this information to prevent possible collisions between the robot and such objects.

Holocene alluvial environments at Barking, Lower Thames Valley (London, UK)

Deposit modelling based on archived borehole logs supplemented by a small number of dedicated boreholes is used to reconstruct the main boundary surfaces and the thickness of the main sediment units within the succession of Holocene alluvial deposits underlying the floodplain in the Barking Reach of the Lower Thames Valley. The basis of the modelling exercise is discussed and the models are used to assess the significance of floodplain relief in determining patterns of sedimentation. This evidence is combined with the results of biostratigraphical and geochronological investigations to reconstruct the environmental conditions associated with each successive stage of floodplain aggradation. The two main factors affecting the history and spatial pattern of Holocene sedimentation are shown to be the regional behaviour of relative sea level and the pattern of relief on the surface of the sub-alluvial, Late Devensian Shepperton Gravel. As is generally the case in the Lower Thames Valley, three main stratigraphic units are recognised, the Lower Alluvium, a peat bed broadly equivalent to the Tilbury III peat of Devoy (1979) and an Upper Alluvium. There is no evidence to suggest that the floodplain was substantially re-shaped by erosion during the Holocene. Instead, the relief inherited from the Shepperton Gravel surface was gradually buried either by the accumulation of peat or by deposition of fine-grained sediment from suspension in standing or slow-moving water. The palaeoenvironmental record from Barking confirms important details of the Holocene record observed elsewhere in the Lower Thames Valley, including the presence of Taxus in the valley-floor fen carr woodland between about 5000 and 4000 cal BP, and the subsequent growth of Ulmus on the peat surface.

Visual sensor fusion for active security in robotic industrial environments

This work presents a method of information fusion involving data captured by both a standard charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and a time-of-flight (ToF) camera to be used in the detection of the proximity between a manipulator robot and a human. Both cameras are assumed to be located above the work area of an industrial robot. The fusion of colour images and time-of-flight information makes it possible to know the 3D localization of objects with respect to a world coordinate system. At the same time, this allows to know their colour information. Considering that ToF information given by the range camera contains innacuracies including distance error, border error, and pixel saturation, some corrections over the ToF information are proposed and developed to improve the results. The proposed fusion method uses the calibration parameters of both cameras to reproject 3D ToF points, expressed in a common coordinate system for both cameras and a robot arm, in 2D colour images. In addition to this, using the 3D information, the motion detection in a robot industrial environment is achieved, and the fusion of information is applied to the foreground objects previously detected. This combination of information results in a matrix that links colour and 3D information, giving the possibility of characterising the object by its colour in addition to its 3D localisation. Further development of these methods will make it possible to identify objects and their position in the real world and to use this information to prevent possible collisions between the robot and such objects.

Cognitive and environmental factors influencing the process of spatial knowledge acquisition within virtual reality environments

As the fidelity of virtual environments (VE) continues to increase, the possibility of using them as training platforms is becoming increasingly realistic for a variety of application domains, including military and emergency personnel training. In the past, there was much debate on whether the acquisition and subsequent transfer of spatial knowledge from VEs to the real world is possible, or whether the differences in medium during training would essentially be an obstacle to truly learning geometric space. In this paper, the authors present various cognitive and environmental factors that not only contribute to this process, but also interact with each other to a certain degree, leading to a variable exposure time requirement in order for the process of spatial knowledge acquisition (SKA) to occur. The cognitive factors that the authors discuss include a variety of individual user differences such as: knowledge and experience; cognitive gender differences; aptitude and spatial orientation skill; and finally, cognitive styles. Environmental factors discussed include: Size, Spatial layout complexity and landmark distribution. It may seem obvious that since every individual's brain is unique - not only through experience, but also through genetic predisposition that a one size fits all approach to training would be illogical. Furthermore, considering that various cognitive differences may further emerge when a certain stimulus is present (e.g. complex environmental space), it would make even more sense to understand how these factors can impact spatial memory, and to try to adapt the training session by providing visual/auditory cues as well as by changing the exposure time requirements for each individual. The impact of this research domain is important to VE training in general, however within service and military domains, guaranteeing appropriate spatial training is critical in order to ensure that disorientation does not occur in a life or death scenario.

The interaction between the physical environments and people

Buildings affect people in various ways. They can help us to work more effectively; they also present a wide range of stimuli for our senses to react to. Intelligent buildings are designed to be aesthetic in sensory terms not just visually appealing but ones in which occupants experience delight, freshness, airiness, daylight, views out and social ambience. All these factors contribute to a general aesthetic which gives pleasure and affects one’s mood. If there is to be a common vision, it is essential for architects, engineers and clients to work closely together throughout the planning, design, construction and operational stages which represent the conception, birth and life of the building. There has to be an understanding of how patterns of work are best suited to a particular building form served by appropriate environmental systems. A host of technologies are emerging that help these processes, but in the end it is how we think about achieving responsive buildings that matters. Intelligent buildings should cope with social and technological changes and also be adaptable to short-term and long-term human needs. We live through our senses. They rely on stimulation from the tasks we are focused on; people around us but also the physical environment. We breathe air and its quality affects the olfactory system; temperature is felt by thermoreceptors in the skin; sound enters our ears; the visual scene is beheld by our eyes. All these stimuli are transmitted along the sensory nervous system to the brain for processing from which physiological and psychological reactions and judgments are formed depending on perception, expectancies and past experiences. It is clear that the environmental setting plays a role in this sensory process. This is the essence of sensory design. Space plays its part as well. The flow of communication is partly electronic but also largely by people meeting face to face. Our sense of space wants different things at different times. Sometimes privacy but other times social needs have to be satisfied besides the organizational requirement to have effective human communications throughout the building. In general if the senses are satisfied people feel better and work better.

Using virtual environments for trigger identification in addiction treatment

This paper presents a novel application of virtual environments to assist in encouraging behavior change in individuals who misuse drugs or alcohol. We describe the user-centered design of a series of scenes to engage users in the identification of triggers and to encourage discussions about relevant coping skills. Results from the initial testing of this application with six service users showed variation in user responses. Results also suggested that the system should encourage group discussion and that it was linked to a small improvement in users’ confidence in understanding and identifying triggers.

Situation assessment through multi-modal sensing of dynamic environments to support cognitive robot control

Awareness of emerging situations in a dynamic operational environment of a robotic assistive device is an essential capability of such a cognitive system, based on its effective and efficient assessment of the prevailing situation. This allows the system to interact with the environment in a sensible (semi)autonomous / pro-active manner without the need for frequent interventions from a supervisor. In this paper, we report a novel generic Situation Assessment Architecture for robotic systems directly assisting humans as developed in the CORBYS project. This paper presents the overall architecture for situation assessment and its application in proof-of-concept Demonstrators as developed and validated within the CORBYS project. These include a robotic human follower and a mobile gait rehabilitation robotic system. We present an overview of the structure and functionality of the Situation Assessment Architecture for robotic systems with results and observations as collected from initial validation on the two CORBYS Demonstrators.

Assessing pragmatic interoperability for process alignment in collaborative working environment

This paper is an extension of our previous study on pragmatic interoperability assessment for process alignment. In this study, we conduct four case studies in industrial companies and hospitals in order to gather their viewpoints regarding the concerns when condensing process alignment in a collaborative working environment. Used techniques include interview, observation, and documentation. The collected results firstly are summarised into three layers based on our previous developed pragmatic assessment model, and then are transformed into the elements which constitutes the purposed method, and finally based on the summarised results we purpose a method for assessing pragmatic interoperability for process alignment in collaborative working environment. The method contains two parts: one gives all the elements of pragmatic interoperability that should be concerned when considering process alignment in collaborative working environment, and the other one is a supplementary method for dealing with technical concerns.