Investigating microphone efficacy for facilitation of mobile speech-based data entry

Despite being nominated as a key potential interaction technique for supporting today's mobile technology user, the widespread commercialisation of speech-based input is currently being impeded by unacceptable recognition error rates. Developing effective speech-based solutions for use in mobile contexts, given the varying extent of background noise, is challenging. The research presented in this paper is part of an ongoing investigation into how best to incorporate speechbased input within mobile data collection applications. Specifically, this paper reports on a comparison of three different commercially available microphones in terms of their efficacy to facilitate mobile, speech-based data entry. We describe, in detail, our novel evaluation design as well as the results we obtained.

A Semantic-Oriented Architecture of a Functional Module for Personalized and Adaptive Access to the Knowledge in a Multimedia Digital Library

This article presents the principal results of the doctoral thesis “Semantic-oriented Architecture and Models for Personalized and Adaptive Access to the Knowledge in Multimedia Digital Library” by Desislava Ivanova Paneva-Marinova (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics), successfully defended before the Specialised Academic Council for Informatics and Mathematical Modelling on 27 October, 2008.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based air interfaces and multiple input multiple output techniques in cooperative satellite communications for 4th generation mobile systems

Recently, wireless network technology has grown at such a pace that scientific research has become a practical reality in a very short time span. Mobile wireless communications have witnessed the adoption of several generations, each of them complementing and improving the former. One mobile system that features high data rates and open network architecture is 4G. Currently, the research community and industry, in the field of wireless networks, are working on possible choices for solutions in the 4G system. 4G is a collection of technologies and standards that will allow a range of ubiquitous computing and wireless communication architectures. The researcher considers one of the most important characteristics of future 4G mobile systems the ability to guarantee reliable communications from 100 Mbps, in high mobility links, to as high as 1 Gbps for low mobility users, in addition to high efficiency in the spectrum usage. On mobile wireless communications networks, one important factor is the coverage of large geographical areas. In 4G systems, a hybrid satellite/terrestrial network is crucial to providing users with coverage wherever needed. Subscribers thus require a reliable satellite link to access their services when they are in remote locations, where a terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. Thus, they must rely upon satellite coverage. Good modulation and access technique are also required in order to transmit high data rates over satellite links to mobile users. This technique must adapt to the characteristics of the satellite channel and also be efficient in the use of allocated bandwidth. Satellite links are fading channels, when used by mobile users. Some measures designed to approach these fading environments make use of: (1) spatial diversity (two receive antenna configuration); (2) time diversity (channel interleaver/spreading techniques); and (3) upper layer FEC. The author proposes the use of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access) for the satellite link by increasing the time diversity. This technique will allow for an increase of the data rate, as primarily required by multimedia applications, and will also optimally use the available bandwidth. In addition, this dissertation approaches the use of Cooperative Satellite Communications for hybrid satellite/terrestrial networks. By using this technique, the satellite coverage can be extended to areas where there is no direct link to the satellite. For this purpose, a good channel model is necessary.

Context -aware data caching for mobile computing environments

The deployment of wireless communications coupled with the popularity of portable devices has led to significant research in the area of mobile data caching. Prior research has focused on the development of solutions that allow applications to run in wireless environments using proxy based techniques. Most of these approaches are semantic based and do not provide adequate support for representing the context of a user (i.e., the interpreted human intention.). Although the context may be treated implicitly it is still crucial to data management. In order to address this challenge this dissertation focuses on two characteristics: how to predict (i) the future location of the user and (ii) locations of the fetched data where the queried data item has valid answers. Using this approach, more complete information about the dynamics of an application environment is maintained. ^ The contribution of this dissertation is a novel data caching mechanism for pervasive computing environments that can adapt dynamically to a mobile user's context. In this dissertation, we design and develop a conceptual model and context aware protocols for wireless data caching management. Our replacement policy uses the validity of the data fetched from the server and the neighboring locations to decide which of the cache entries is less likely to be needed in the future, and therefore a good candidate for eviction when cache space is needed. The context aware driven prefetching algorithm exploits the query context to effectively guide the prefetching process. The query context is defined using a mobile user's movement pattern and requested information context. Numerical results and simulations show that the proposed prefetching and replacement policies significantly outperform conventional ones. ^ Anticipated applications of these solutions include biomedical engineering, tele-health, medical information systems and business. ^

Heterogeneous data source access for mobile devices

The mediator software architecture design has been developed to provide data integration and retrieval in distributed, heterogeneous environments. Since the initial conceptualization of this architecture, many new technologies have emerged that can facilitate the implementation of this design. The purpose of this thesis was to show that a mediator framework supporting users of mobile devices could be implemented using common software technologies available today. In addition, the prototype was developed with a view to providing a better understanding of what a mediator is and to expose issues that will have to be addressed in full, more robust designs. The prototype developed for this thesis was implemented using various technologies including: Java, XML, and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) among others. SOAP was used to accomplish inter-process communication. In the end, it is expected that more data intensive software applications will be possible in a world with ever-increasing demands for information.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Based Air Interfaces and Multiple Input Multiple Output Techniques in Cooperative Satellite Communications for 4th Generation Mobile Systems

Recently, wireless network technology has grown at such a pace that scientific research has become a practical reality in a very short time span. One mobile system that features high data rates and open network architecture is 4G. Currently, the research community and industry, in the field of wireless networks, are working on possible choices for solutions in the 4G system. The researcher considers one of the most important characteristics of future 4G mobile systems the ability to guarantee reliable communications at high data rates, in addition to high efficiency in the spectrum usage. On mobile wireless communication networks, one important factor is the coverage of large geographical areas. In 4G systems, a hybrid satellite/terrestrial network is crucial to providing users with coverage wherever needed. Subscribers thus require a reliable satellite link to access their services when they are in remote locations where a terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. The results show that good modulation and access technique are also required in order to transmit high data rates over satellite links to mobile users. The dissertation proposes the use of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access) for the satellite link by increasing the time diversity. This technique will allow for an increase of the data rate, as primarily required by multimedia applications, and will also optimally use the available bandwidth. In addition, this dissertation approaches the use of Cooperative Satellite Communications for hybrid satellite/terrestrial networks. By using this technique, the satellite coverage can be extended to areas where there is no direct link to the satellite. The issue of Cooperative Satellite Communications is solved through a new algorithm that forwards the received data from the fixed node to the mobile node. This algorithm is very efficient because it does not allow unnecessary transmissions and is based on signal to noise ratio (SNR) measures.

Glosario social multimedia de innovación educomunicativa y TIC (Glosario Social Expandido)

La información sobre conceptos de innovación educomunicativa en la web, sobre todo los relacionados con las TIC, suele ser confusa y presentarse de una forma divulgativa inexacta o de una manera científica compleja en artículos largos. Además, suelen utilizarse términos en inglés o en extrañas hibridaciones. Las y los estudiantes –y cualquier persona- que buscan estos términos suelen recurrir a la divulgación inexacta, lo que hace que no comprendan el término en toda su extensión y, por tanto, que los desarrollos que se realizan, tanto teóricos como prácticos, se alejen de la excelencia ya desde su inicio. Conceptos como Branding, Big Data, Force Touch, Gamificación, Geocaching, InRead video, Inroll Video, Interfaz Social, Mobile First, Mooc, Neurocomunicación, Responsive Web Design, Transmedia, Walking Cinema, Walking Documentary, Wayfinding… o no se comprenden o se comprenden sin los matices imprescindibles para un buen desarrollo académico y profesional. Los investigadores del grupo “Museum I+D+C. Laboratorio de cultura digital y museografía hipermedia” de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, pertenecientes a distintas universidades de Argentina, Brasil, España, México, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador y Reino Unido, coinciden en la necesidad de intentar clarificar esos términos. Queremos animar a cualquier persona que lea estas líneas a participar en el proyecto, bien proponiendo mejoras o aportando nuevos términos.

Integrating a mobile accessible electronic system into dockside monitoring: How can small-scale fisheries data collection programs transition from paper-based to digital data collection?

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

A Multimedia Video Player Based of FFmpeg

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, video and audio processing are among the most important parts due to the constant requirements of high quality media contents. Along with the improvement of network environment and the hardware equipment, this demand is becoming more and more imperious, people prefer high quality videos and audios as well as the net streaming media resources. FFmpeg is a set of open source program about the A/V decoding. Many commercial players use FFmpeg as their displaying cores. This paper designed a simple and easy-to-use video player based on FFmpeg. The first part is about the basic theories and related knowledge of video displaying, including some concepts like data formats, streaming media data, video coding and decoding. In a word, the realization of the video player depend on the a set of video decoding process. The general idea about the process is to get the video packets from the Internet, to read the related protocols and de-encapsulate the protocols, to de-encapsulate the packaging data and to get encoded formats data, to decode them to pixel data that can be displayed directly through graphics cards. During the coding and decoding process, there could be different degrees of data losing, which is called lossy compression, but it usually does not influence the quality of user experiences. The second part is about the principle of the FFmpeg decoding process, that is one of the key point of the paper. In this project, FFmpeg is used for the main decoding task, by call some main functions and structures from FFmpeg class libraries, packaging video formats could be transfer to pixel data, after getting the pixel data, SDL is used for the displaying process. The third part is about the SDL displaying flow. Similarly, it would invoke some important displaying functions from SDL class libraries to realize the function, though SDL is able to do not only displaying task, but also many other game playing process. After that, a independent video displayer is completed, it is provided with all the key function of a player. The fourth part make a simple users interface for the player based on the MFC program, it enable the player could be used by most people. At last, in consideration of the mobile Internet’s blossom, people nowadays can hardly ever drop their mobile phones, there is a brief introduction about how to transplant the video player to Android platform which is one of the most used mobile systems.

Progettazione ed implementazione di un'applicazione mobile per la visualizzazione di Open Data ambientali

Gli Open Data sono un'utile strumento che sta via via assumendo sempre più importanza nella società; in questa tesi vedremo la loro utilità attraverso la realizzazione di un'applicazione mobile, che utilizza questi dati per fornire informazioni circa lo stato ambientale dell'aria e dei pollini in Emilia Romagna, sfruttando i dataset forniti da un noto ente pubblico (Arpa Emilia Romagna). Tale applicazione mobile si basa su un Web Service che gestisce i vari passaggi dei dati e li immagazzina in un database Mongodb. Tale Web Service è stato creato per essere a sua volta messo a disposizione di programmatori, enti o persone comuni per studi e sviluppi futuri in tale ambito.

Secure and Privacy-aware Data Collection and Processing in Mobile Health Systems

Healthcare systems have assimilated information and communication technologies in order to improve the quality of healthcare and patient's experience at reduced costs. The increasing digitalization of people's health information raises however new threats regarding information security and privacy. Accidental or deliberate data breaches of health data may lead to societal pressures, embarrassment and discrimination. Information security and privacy are paramount to achieve high quality healthcare services, and further, to not harm individuals when providing care. With that in mind, we give special attention to the category of Mobile Health (mHealth) systems. That is, the use of mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, sensors, PDAs) to support medical and public health. Such systems, have been particularly successful in developing countries, taking advantage of the flourishing mobile market and the need to expand the coverage of primary healthcare programs. Many mHealth initiatives, however, fail to address security and privacy issues. This, coupled with the lack of specific legislation for privacy and data protection in these countries, increases the risk of harm to individuals. The overall objective of this thesis is to enhance knowledge regarding the design of security and privacy technologies for mHealth systems. In particular, we deal with mHealth Data Collection Systems (MDCSs), which consists of mobile devices for collecting and reporting health-related data, replacing paper-based approaches for health surveys and surveillance. This thesis consists of publications contributing to mHealth security and privacy in various ways: with a comprehensive literature review about mHealth in Brazil; with the design of a security framework for MDCSs (SecourHealth); with the design of a MDCS (GeoHealth); with the design of Privacy Impact Assessment template for MDCSs; and with the study of ontology-based obfuscation and anonymisation functions for health data.

Aumentare la consapevolezza sul benessere digitale: Data Visualization e Sonification in un’applicazione mobile

La tecnologia gioca un ruolo importante nella vita della maggior parte delle persone, ma come possiamo assicurarci che migliori effettivamente la vita piuttosto che distrarci da essa? Con gli smartphone di oggi, i social media e i flussi infiniti di contenuti, molte persone sono pronte a condannare la tecnologia sulla base della loro convinzione che questi prodotti siano dannosi per la salute mentale e il benessere. Ma concentrarsi solo su questi effetti potenzialmente dannosi non ci aiuta a raccogliere tutti i vantaggi che questi strumenti hanno da offrire, gestendo anche i loro rischi. Da qui nasce il digital wellbeing: un termine utilizzato per descrivere l’impatto delle tecnologie e dei servizi digitali sulla salute mentale, fisica, sociale ed emotiva delle persone. Lo scopo di questa tesi è quello di aumentare la consapevolezza sul reale utilizzo dei dispositivi e sulle proprie abitudini salutari attraverso la sonificazione, un processo di traduzione dei dati in suono, a volte in un contesto musicale utilizzato come metodo per superare le barriere della comunicazione scientifica. Questo metodo è particolarmente vantaggioso per la sua capacità di rappresentare i dati scientifici per le persone con disabilità visive, che spesso non sono in grado di interagire con le tradizionali visualizzazioni dei dati. Per raggiungere l'obiettivo della tesi viene preso in esame una solo tipologia di dispositivi, gli iPhone, per la quale verrà creata un'applicazione che riesca ad ottenere i dati sulla salute, sulla forma fisica e di utilizzo dello smartphone.

Insulin and leptin relations in obesity: a multimedia approach

Obesity has been recognized as a worldwide public health problem. It significantly increases the chances of developing several diseases, including Type II diabetes. The roles of insulin and leptin in obesity involve reactions that can be better understood when they are presented step by step. The aim of this work was to design software with data from some of the most recent publications on obesity, especially those concerning the roles of insulin and leptin in this metabolic disturbance. The most notable characteristic of this software is the use of animations representing the cellular response together with the presentation of recently discovered mechanisms on the participation of insulin and leptin in processes leading to obesity. The software was field tested in the Biochemistry of Nutrition web-based course. After using the software and discussing its contents in chatrooms, students were asked to answer an evaluation survey about the whole activity and the usefulness of the software within the learning process. The teaching assistants (TA) evaluated the software as a tool to help in the teaching process. The students' and TAs' satisfaction was very evident and encouraged us to move forward with the software development and to improve the use of this kind of educational tool in biochemistry classes.

A synchronous multimedia annotation system for secure collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies.

Migrating eprints.org data to a Fez repository

This document records the process of migrating eprints.org data to a Fez repository. Fez is a Web-based digital repository and workflow management system based on Fedora (http://www.fedora.info/). At the time of migration, the University of Queensland Library was using EPrints 2.2.1 [pepper] for its ePrintsUQ repository. Once we began to develop Fez, we did not upgrade to later versions of eprints.org software since we knew we would be migrating data from ePrintsUQ to the Fez-based UQ eSpace. Since this document records our experiences of migration from an earlier version of eprints.org, anyone seeking to migrate eprints.org data into a Fez repository might encounter some small differences. Moving UQ publication data from an eprints.org repository into a Fez repository (hereafter called UQ eSpace (http://espace.uq.edu.au/) was part of a plan to integrate metadata (and, in some cases, full texts) about all UQ research outputs, including theses, images, multimedia and datasets, in a single repository. This tied in with the plan to identify and capture the research output of a single institution, the main task of the eScholarshipUQ testbed for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories project (http://www.apsr.edu.au/). The migration could not occur at UQ until the functionality in Fez was at least equal to that of the existing ePrintsUQ repository. Accordingly, as Fez development occurred throughout 2006, a list of eprints.org functionality not currently supported in Fez was created so that programming of such development could be planned for and implemented.