Mobile computer Web-application design in medicine: some research based guidelines

Designing Web-applications is considerably different for mobile computers (handhelds, Personal Digital Assistants) than for desktop computers. The screen size and system resources are more limited and end-users interact differently. Consequently, detecting handheld-browsers on the server side and delivering pages optimized for a small client form factor is inevitable. The authors discuss their experiences during the design and development of an application for medical research, which was designed for both mobile and personal desktop computers. The investigations presented in this paper highlight some ways in which Web content can be adapted to make it more accessible to mobile computing users. As a result, the authors summarize their experiences in design guidelines and provide an overview of those factors which have to be taken into consideration when designing software for mobile computers. “The old computing is about what computers can do, the new computing is about what people can do” (Leonardo’s laptop: human needs and the new computing technologies, MIT Press, 2002).     

Mobile agents for information retrieval in hybrid simulation environment

In this paper, we propose a hybrid simulation environment that incorporates with wired/wireless networks, IEEE standard 1516 high-level architecture (HLA), and IBM Aglets mobile agent system. Therefore, HLA simulations are not restricted to be participated solely by using desktop computers with cable connections. Users can use a wide variety of devices to join in HLA simulations and explicitly exclude from junk data in terms of a personalized data filtering policy. Based on data correlation between HLA objects and a client's data filtering policy, we employ the simulation environment manager in distributing a client to an appropriate federate server (FS). In particular, a mobile agent, namely data filtering agent, is devised to temporarily reside at the FS to perform mobile agent-based data distribution management for clients. As a result, the clients can receive the most interested information corresponding to their pre-defined data filtering policies. Once either the data transmission quality within the wireless network is degraded below a threshold or the clients abnormally modify the data filtering policies, their own mobile agents carry out migrations to provide the users with the ubiquitous and seamless services. Consequently, the users can use any mobile device as well as using a desktop computer in a stationary point to participate in the HLA simulations. The experimental results also show that the proposed mobile agent-based data distribution can raise adaptability and applicability to large-scale HLA simulations.     

MaTRICS: A service-based management tool for remote intelligent configuration of systems

With MaTRICS, we describe a service-oriented architecture that allows remotely connected users to modify the configuration of any service provided by a specific (application) server, like email-, news- or web-servers. Novel to our approach is that the system can manage configuration processes on heterogeneous software- and hardware-platforms, which are performed from a variety of peripherals unmatched in today’s practice, where devices like mobile phones, faxes, PDAs are enabled to be used by system managers as remote system configuration and management tools.     

Android移动平台上的目标识别

随着计算机视觉的发展和移动平台处理能力的不断提高,将计算机视觉应用搬到移动平台上的需求将日益增长.其中基于移动平台的目标识别引起了大家极大的兴趣,这主要是因为目标识别算法取得了进步和移动手机已经有能力建立起一个适宜的系统.移动平台开发者们试着使用目标识别技术来建立良好的人机交互接口.这就需要合适的应用程序框架一客户服务器,在新兴的Android移动平台上来实现并测试框架,给出了一个案例学习及其测试结果.实验结果表明了这种框架的可行性.     

Mobrex: visualizing users' mobile browsing behaviors.

This paper deals with the Mobile Browsing Explorer (Mobrex) to give analysts a set of interactive visualizations that highlight various aspects of how users browse an information space. Here, we describe the tool and demonstrate its support of a user study of three browsing techniques for mobile maps. Although we mainly focus here on PDAs and mobile map browsing, Mobrex can easily support analysts studying user interaction with other information spaces and other devices, including mobile phones and desktop computers.     

An interface for mutual disambiguation of recognition errors in a multimodal navigational assistant

Users often have tasks that can be accomplished with the aid of multiple media – for example with text, sound and pictures. For example, communicating an urban navigation route can be expressed with pictures and text. Today’s mobile devices have multimedia capabilities; cell phones have cameras, displays, sound output, and (soon) speech recognition. Potentially, these multimedia capabilities can be used for multimedia-intensive tasks, but two things stand in the way. First, recognition of visual input and speech recognition still remain unreliable. Second, the mechanics of integrating multiple media and recognition systems remains daunting for users. We address both these issues in a system, MARCO, multimodal agent for route construction. MARCO collects route information by taking pictures of landmarks, accompanied by verbal directions. We combine results from off-the-shelf speech recognition and optical character recognition to achieve better recognition of route landmarks than either recognition system alone. MARCO automatically produces an illustrated, step-by-step guide to the route.     

Optimal collaboration of thin–thick clients and resource allocation in cloud computing

Cloud computing (CC) has recently become a rising paradigm in the information and communications technology industry, drawing a lot of attentions to professionals and researchers. During the last decade, the dominance of smart phones or tablet computers (known as thin clients) over traditional desktop or laptop computers (known as thick clients) has become more and more evident, reflecting a great change in the way people access the Internet. Despite the recent technology advancements that manufacture a new generation of mobile devices with generous resources, the fact that they can offer only limited processing capacity still remains a painful experience. This problem, fortunately, has been made less severe thanks to the recent adoption of CC platform. CC enables offloading heavy processing tasks up to the “cloud”, leaving only simple jobs to the user-end capacity-limited thin clients. So far, a number of research studies have been carried out, trying to eliminate problems arising from shortcomings in the connection between thin clients and cloud networks, yet little have been found efficient. In this paper, we present a novel architecture, taking advantage of collaboration of thin and thick clients, particularly aiming at optimizing data distribution and utilizing CC resources so that expected Quality-of-Service requirements can be met. We also propose an algorithm to select an optimal resource allocation strategy to satisfy various Service Level Agreements. In order to justify our proposal, we have used both numerical analysis and programming approaches. Simulation result shows that our proposed schemes can improve resource allocation efficiency and achieve better performance than the existing ones.     

移动互联时代下的社区服务信息化模式探究

目前社区服务信息化平台多为依托于个人电脑和桌面互联网,但这种平台对于用户的使用和体验都有着诸多条件的限制。而随着宽带无线接入技术和移动终端技术的迅速发展,社区服务信息化的建设模式具备了从单一的桌面互联网转变至结合移动互联网的跨平台模式的可能性。在探寻面向主导型社区居民的真实需求及社区中特殊人群的需求差异的同时,我们需要依托移动终端为社区服务信息化提供更加定制化的信息设计,以帮助实现社区内部、社区与社会之间更好的交流互动;并将碎片化的内容整合为对公众更加有效的信息服务!     

A novel agent-based concept of household appliances

Mass production, such as white goods manufacturing, is traditionally bound to hierarchical factory-floor procedures and accepts only gradual changes in technology and product architecture. This paper introduces an idea on how to upgrade from classical to network-connected reconfigurable devices. A generic multi-agent architecture was created, derived from belief-desire-and-intention (BDI) agents. It covers all types of white goods in the form of rational home assistant, and enables reconfiguration of agent-based household appliances during the design, production and implementation phases. The introduced concept involves a multi-agent architecture which utilizes distributed processing power at different levels: higher-level agents run on more powerful devices than embedded appliance’s controllers, personal assistant (PDAs), or Windows or Linux based personal computers (PCs). PDAs can run a single agent, for example a GUI agent, whereas the embedded controllers execute lower-level device (embedded) agents. In this way, all the appliance’s basic functionality, such as its hardware units (e.g., electrical motors, valves, heaters, etc.), are initially simulated by auxiliary agents running together with higher-level agents on a PC or PDA. Using this simulator in the design phase, all vital functions and capabilities of the agent-based appliance under development are thoroughly tested first. Afterwards, the agents that simulate the device’s hardware units and environment are simply replaced by the communication to the corresponding device units. In such way, any new functionality or device’s behaviour can be upgraded any time just by adapting the core of the multi-agent architecture on the PC and individual agents on the PDA or the embedded agents in appliances. A thorough design and implementation cycle of the proposed solution using two freeware development tools is also described, i.e., the Prometheus agent design methodology and the agent simulation/execution environment called Jadex. The approach is exemplified by building a simulator of an agent-based household appliance, namely a Multi-agent Washing Assistant as a special instance of rational home assistant.     

手机恶意软件潜在威胁研究

探讨了手机恶意软件快速增长的几个关键因素。用几个实例说明了手机恶意软件的创建实际上并不如想象的困难，而且它有多种可利用的传播途径，意味着智能手机将面临与桌面计算机相同的恶意软件攻击的风险。最后归纳了防范手机恶意软件的有效措施。     

一个基于移动视觉搜索技术的博物馆导览系统

为了对游客的参观过程提供个性化导览服务,使游客可以通过手机拍照的方式获取展品的相关资讯.提出一个基于移动视觉搜索技术的博物馆导览系统.针对手机性能的差异性,提出一种改进的移动视觉搜索系统的框架,使得系统既能在服务器端对海量展品进行识别,又能在手机端对特定区域内展品实时识别;并基于这一框架实现了一个原型系统.与现有的导览系统相比,文中系统的交互方式更加人性化,提供的展品信息更丰富、全面,且无需在馆内安装任何辅助设备,能够更广泛地适用于博物馆导览.实验结果证明了该系统的可行性和实用性.     

融合动作特征的多模态情绪识别

近年来,利用计算机技术实现基于多模态数据的情绪识别成为自然人机交互和人工智能领域重要 的研究方向之一。利用视觉模态信息的情绪识别工作通常都将重点放在脸部特征上,很少考虑动作特征以及融合 动作特征的多模态特征。虽然动作与情绪之间有着紧密的联系,但是从视觉模态中提取有效的动作信息用于情绪 识别的难度较大。以动作与情绪的关系作为出发点,在经典的 MELD 多模态情绪识别数据集中引入视觉模态的 动作数据,采用 ST-GCN 网络模型提取肢体动作特征,并利用该特征实现基于 LSTM 网络模型的单模态情绪识别。 进一步在 MELD 数据集文本特征和音频特征的基础上引入肢体动作特征,提升了基于 LSTM 网络融合模型的多 模态情绪识别准确率,并且结合文本特征和肢体动作特征提升了上下文记忆模型的文本单模态情绪识别准确率, 实验显示虽然肢体动作特征用于单模态情绪识别的准确度无法超越传统的文本特征和音频特征,但是该特征对于 多模态情绪识别具有重要作用。基于单模态和多模态特征的情绪识别实验验证了人体动作中含有情绪信息,利用 肢体动作特征实现多模态情绪识别具有重要的发展潜力。     

FIRME: Face and Iris Recognition for Mobile Engagement

Mobile devices, namely phones and tablets, have long gone “smart”. Their growing use is both a cause and an effect of their technological advancement. Among the others, their increasing ability to store and exchange sensitive information, has caused interest in exploiting their vulnerabilities, and the opposite need to protect users and their data through secure protocols for access and identification on mobile platforms. Face and iris recognition are especially attractive, since they are sufficiently reliable, and just require the webcam normally equipping the involved devices. On the contrary, the alternative use of fingerprints requires a dedicated sensor. Moreover, some kinds of biometrics lend themselves to uses that go beyond security. Ambient intelligence services bound to the recognition of a user, as well as social applications, such as automatic photo tagging on social networks, can especially exploit face recognition. This paper describes FIRME (Face and Iris Recognition for Mobile Engagement) as a biometric application based on a multimodal recognition of face and iris, which is designed to be embedded in mobile devices. Both design and implementation of FIRME rely on a modular architecture, whose workflow includes separate and replaceable packages. The starting one handles image acquisition. From this point, different branches perform detection, segmentation, feature extraction, and matching for face and iris separately. As for face, an antispoofing step is also performed after segmentation. Finally, results from the two branches are fused. In order to address also security-critical applications, FIRME can perform continuous reidentification and best sample selection. To further address the possible limited resources of mobile devices, all algorithms are optimized to be low-demanding and computation-light.     

Supporting casual interactions between board games on public tabletop displays and mobile devices

As more interactive surfaces enter public life, casual interactions from passersby are bound to increase. Most of these users can be expected to carry a mobile phone or PDA, which nowadays offers significant computing capabilities of its own. This offers new possibilities for interaction between these users’ private displays and large public ones. In this paper, we present a system that supports such casual interactions. We first explore a method to track mobile phones that are placed on a horizontal interactive surface by examining the shadows which are cast on the surface. This approach detects the presence of a mobile device, as opposed to any other opaque object, through the signal strength emitted by the built-in Bluetooth transceiver without requiring any modifications to the devices’ software or hardware. We then go on to investigate interaction between a Sudoku game running in parallel on the public display and on mobile devices carried by passing users. Mobile users can join a running game by placing their devices on a designated area. The only requirement is that the device is in discoverable Bluetooth mode. After a specific device has been recognized, a client software is sent to the device which then enables the user to interact with the running game. Finally, we explore the results of a study which we conducted to determine the effectiveness and intrusiveness of interactions between users on the tabletop and users with mobile devices.     

A scalable architecture for 3D map navigation on mobile devices

Mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets are rapidly increasing their graphics and networking capabilities. However, real-time visualization of 3D maps is still a challenging task to accomplish on such limited devices. In this paper, we describe the principles involved in the design and development of a scalable client–server architecture for delivering 3D maps over wireless networks to mobile devices. We have developed a hybrid adaptive streaming and rendering method that distributes the 3D map rendering task between the mobile clients and a remote server. This architecture provides support for efficient delivery of 3D contents to mobile clients according to their capabilities. As a proof of concept, we have implemented a prototype and carried out exhaustive experiments considering different scenarios and hundreds of concurrent connected clients. The analysis of the server workload and the mobile clients performance show that our architecture achieves a great scalability and performance even when using low-end hardware.     

Improving performance on object recognition for real-time on mobile devices

Augmented reality has been on the rise due to the proliferation of mobile devices. At the same time, object recognition has also come to the fore. In particular, many studies have focused on object recognition based on markerless matching. However, most of these studies have focused on desktop systems, which can have high performance in terms of CPU and memory, rather than investigating the use of mobile systems, which have been previously unable to provide high-performance object recognition based on markerless matching. In this paper, we propose a method that uses the OpenCV mobile library to improve real-time object recognition performance on mobile systems. First, we investigate the original object recognition algorithm to identify performance bottlenecks. Second, we optimize the algorithm by analyzing each module and applying appropriate code enhancements. Last, we change the operational structure of the algorithm to improve its performance, changing the execution frequency of the object recognition task from every frame to every four frames for real-time operation. During the three frames in which the original method is not executed, the object is instead recognized using the mobile devices accelerometer. We carry out experiments to reveal how much each aspect of our method improves the overall object recognition performance; overall, experimental performance improves by approximately 800 %, with a corresponding reduction of approximately 1 % in object recognition accuracy. Therefore, the proposed technique can be used to significantly improve the performance of object recognition based on markerless matching on mobile systems for real-time operation.     

A three-tier view-based methodology for M-services adaptation

With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to networked services. These services, generally known as m-services, extend supports from Web browsers on personal computers to handheld devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. However, in general, the capabilities and bandwidth of these devices are significantly inferior to desktop computers over wired connections, which have been assumed by most Internet services. Instead of redesigning or adapting m-services in an ad-hoc manner for multiple platforms available in handheld devices, we propose a methodology for such adaptation based on three tiers: user interface views, data views, and process views. These views provide customization and help balance security and trust. User interface views provide alternative presentations of inputs and outputs. Data views summarize data over limited bandwidth and map heterogeneous data sources. In addition, we introduce a novel approach of applying process views to m-service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures of the original process. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. In addition, we present a formal model on view consistency and integrity in our methodology. We demonstrate the feasibility of our methodology by extending a service negotiation subsystem into an m-service with multi-platform support.     

多Agent系统在遥感图像目标识别中的一种应用

遥感图像处理技术的发展无论对民用还是军用都有重要的意义。多Agent系统因其智能性和并行计算能力在各种领域都有了广泛的应用。针对遥感图像处理中对于自适应、快速识别目标的需要，提出将多Agent系统应用于遥感图像目标识别，设计并开发了一个分布式目标识别系统。它利用多个边缘检测算子Agent检测边缘，将检测结果序列送人神经网络Agent进行分类，并与纹理统计Agent的结果相融合，判决目标类别。实验结果表明，该系统对不同种类、不同分辨率的图像有一定的普适性，有较高的实用价值。对今后多Agent系统在图像处理中的研究和应用有很大的意义。     

An energy-efficient video transport protocol for personal cloud-based computing

Recently, we are surrounded by a collection of heterogeneous computing devices such as desktop computers, laptops, smart phones, smart televisions, and tablet PCs. Each device is operated with its own host operating system, has its own internal architecture, and performs its independent tasks with its own applications and data. A common property amongst these devices, namely that of internet-connectivity, allows them to configure personal virtual cloud system by interconnecting each other through an intermediate switching device. The personal cloud service should provide a seamlessly unified computing environment across multiple devices with synchronized data and application programs. As such, it allows users to freely switch their workspace from one device to another while continuing the interaction with the available applications. In order to support video applications, the cloud system should provide seamless video synchronization among the multiple devices. However, we note that the current cloud services do not provide efficient data flow among devices. In this paper, we propose and develop a new reliable transport protocol to support video synchronization for the personal virtual cloud system. In order to cope with battery limitation of many mobile devices in personal virtual cloud system, the proposed protocol is designed to provide energy efficient video communications. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol can reduce end users power consumption up to 25 % compared to the legacy TCP with given packet loss probabilities and the average length of error bursts.     

Mobile phones as computing devices: the viruses are coming!

Understanding existing threats against mobile phones helps us better protect our information and prepare for future dangers. Mobile phones have evolved from their roots as analog walkie-talkies to full-scale Internet-enabled computers. Today, mobile phone handsets are arguably the dominant computer form factor consumers purchase. But having such powerful networked computers leads to a new class of malware: viruses, worms, and trojans specifically designed for the mobile environment. Merely enumerating known attacks doesn't help us understand all possible threats. Instead, we present a taxonomy of attacks against mobile phones that shows known as well as potential attacks.