Categorization of ambient media projects on their business models, innovativeness, and characteristics—evaluation of Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award Projects of 2010

Ambient Media describe media environments, where the medium is embedded within the natural environment. They follow the anytime, anywhere, and anyhow principle for media access. The Nokia Ubimedia MindTreks Awards have been established a few years ago to explore the potential of ambient media. In this article we analyze the total project portfolio submitted to the 4th Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards in 2010 according to their business value, innovativeness, and use of ambient media. The aim of this article is to gain insights into the general characteristics of ambient media, their properties, and business functions. The article rounds up in providing a substantial framework and guidelines for ambient media developers in their product designs.     

Connecting the real world with the digital overlay with smart ambient media—applying Peirce’s categories in the context of ambient media

This article is based on the keynote held at the workshop on Events in Multimedia (EiMM09) that took place in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia conference in Beijing in October 2009. The idea of the keynote was to develop and explain the idea of ambient media in general, it is principles, and additionally relate ambient media to information theoretical approaches such as Peirce’s categories, to the theories of decision making, and to theories discussing how smart objects can be made ‘smart’ by simulating the human mind. This article rounds up with practical examples underlining the presented ideas and theories.     

Applying “Design Thinking” in the context of media management education

“Design Thinking” – a cross-disciplinary and user centered method – is an approach towards the discovery of solutions and sparks innovative thinking in many ways. It also can be argued, that designers put themselves in the place of the user rather than co-creating with the consumer. Innovation is one of the current keywords across many industries, and many attempt to find new solutions to daily problems. Design Thinking as method allows to understand user needs and understand their principle problems in daily life. The design process uses intensive collaboration in cross-disciplinary settings and is divided into the exploration of the problem space and the solution space to achieve new ways of solving existing problems. Design Thinking has to integrate into the innovation process and into organizational structures right from the beginning. It constitutes a complement to classical analytical processes for problems that require lateral, not linear thinking. This article reviews the practical application of this energetic methodology in the academic context and presents some hands-on examples. The course series has been established by the Entertainment and Media Management Lab. (EMMi Lab.) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and was held in cooperation with students from the University of Tampere (UTA), and the Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK). One course has been held in cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal, Germany. This article describes how to train students especially with strong technical background and analytical mind-sets in the development of innovations in the field of media, foster creative thinking, and achieve problem solutions beyond the current state of the art. We present the basic curriculum, course structure, goals & objectives, applied methods, settings, and theoretical aspects of Design Thinking. Our experience and reflections on conducting the courses concludes this article. The article shall be an introductory guide for anyone who intends to organize a similar course in the university context.     

Fatigue crack growth in asphalt and asphalt-interfaces

Fatigue cracking due to traffic load is a major factor in road damage. Therefore, durability and lifetime prediction of roads plays a substantial role for road maintenance and cost planning. This paper reports a study of fatigue crack performance of solid asphalt and asphalt–asphalt interfaces by means of the wedge-splitting test. Instead of beams and the three- or four-point bending test, the wedge splitting method was used for the first time to observe crack growth on bituminous drilling cores. Samples of solid asphalt and samples with asphalt-interfaces were tested. One group of asphalt interfaces was untreated and the other was sandblasted before spreading the top layer during manufacturing. Due to the temperature dependency of material properties of asphalt, the tests were performed in a compact climate chamber at −10°, 0° and +10 °C. The challenge of determining the crack length and the crack tip were detected with an optical measurement system and picture analysis after testing. The results prove that the wedge splitting method is a highly practicable and repeatable method for crack growth testing of bituminous materials.     

Stent implantation in solitary aneurysm of the common iliac artery

A 56-year-old man had intermittent claudication in the right leg for 11 months, gradually worsening of late. Digital subtraction angiography demonstrated an aneurysm, 8 x 2.5 cm, of the right common iliac artery and 70% stenosis of the right external iliac artery. As the patient refused full surgical intervention the aneurysm was treated by the insertion of two exactly adjoining wall stents (diameter 9 mm, length 7 cm), and the arterial stenosis was balloon-dilated. One month after stent implantation the aneurysm had thrombosed outside of the stent and the stent lumen was being perfused normally. 6 months later the local findings were identically. The patient remained symptom-free. --The case illustrates that management of circumscribed aneurysms by stent implantation could well be an alternative to surgical treatment, as long as the stent can prevent enlargement and rupture of the aneurysm.     

The postoperative x-ray morphology of the maxillary sinuses in the conventional x-ray of the paranasal sinuses

Fifty-six male wistar rats were selected to study the effects of selenium and DTPA on cadmium excretion. Cadmium levels in urine, feces and tissues of the rats were determined with graphite stove method, and their kidneys were examined pathohistologically. Results showed selenium had stronger effects on cadmium excretion via feces in rats than DTPA did, and combination of both of them showed synergistic effects on it. Also, selenium could accelerate the recovery from kidney injury caused by cadmium, and combination of both of them showed synergism on it.     

Distributing the personal digital environment throughout your entertainment environment: handling personal metadata across domains

It is a fact, that we are surrounded by more and more ubiquitous services in entertainment computation. All sorts of devices are more and more connected, and personalization becomes more and more a major issue. We are living in a world with two layers: the real physical layer being our real-world, and its synthetic overlay consisting of location-based services, chatting applications, or Web 2.0 offers. In the real-world, communication between humans is a matter of personality of different persons: exchanging information about each other, finding common interests, or finding common conversation themes. In the synthetic overlay, communication becomes a matter of distribution of personal profiles or automating profile matching. The open-source platform Portable Personality (P2) () faces this challenge, and provides a platform for cross-service interchange of personal context information based on any generic metadata type. P2’s software architecture is designed for mining, enriching, and exchanging personal profiles between arbitrary multimedia services. The long-term vision of P2 is to provide a personality profile rather than a personal context information profile to enable communication between human and device as a matter of personalities, rather than automated matching of profiles. Two different scenarios, the Smart Social Network (SSN), and the personalization of audio-visual data are presented as practical use-case for P2.     

Ambient media today and tomorrow

Ambient media are novel, and this new media form alters our daily-living experience in many ways. Ambient media refer to media environments that are embedded throughout the natural space where people are following their daily activities. These digital media environments become part of the living space and altering our daily-living experience in many ways. The goal of this article is to elaborate the status of ambient media today and to forecast how ambient media will develop in the next decade. It clearly identifies megatrends and develops scenarios (e. g., ambient-assisted living) for the future. These scenarios shall shed light on the potentials and give a glimpse on the potential future development of embedding digital objects into the daily living space. This paper is based on a future wheel approach and on an analysis of the results of an expert workshop. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and an evaluation of the impact of each scenario.