Managing Next Generation Networks and Services: A Report on APNOMS 2007

This article presents a report on APNOMS 2007, which was held October 10–12, 2007 in Sapporo, Japan. The theme of APNOMS 2007 was “Managing the Next Generation Networks and Services.”

High performance motion detection: some trends toward new embedded architectures for vision systems

The goal of this article is to compare some optimised implementations on current high performance platforms in order to highlight architectural trends in the field of embedded architectures and to get an estimation of what should be the components of a next generation vision system. We present some implementations of robust motion detection algorithms on three architectures: a general purpose RISC processor—the PowerPC G4—a parallel artificial retina dedicated to low level image processing—Pvlsar34—and the Associative Mesh, a specialized architecture based on associative net. To handle the different aspects and constraints of embedded systems, execution time and power consumption of these architectures are compared.

Learning from others within the landscape of “transitional economies” and the challenge in ICT development for African countries

This paper presents the experience of good practices and bench learning in the EU for sustainable development in transitional economies. In exploring key issues of ICT development for economic growth in African countries, it will showcase how information and experience from different geographical/economic sectors within the EU have been collated into a comprehensive knowledge system, and shared among users, using both electronic and traditional methods—see The BEEP Project . It will then discuss how this good practice model could be developed further as a Pan-African Initiative, as part of the IST Africa Programme for participating countries, to enable them share experience and information in their attempt to narrow the digital divide for sustainable growth.

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Ethical regulations on robotics in Europe

There are only a few ethical regulations that deal explicitly with robots, in contrast to a vast number of regulations, which may be applied. We will focus on ethical issues with regard to “responsibility and autonomous robots”, “machines as a replacement for humans”, and “tele-presence”. Furthermore we will examine examples from special fields of application (medicine and healthcare, armed forces, and entertainment). We do not claim to present a complete list of ethical issue nor of regulations in the field of robotics, but we will demonstrate that there are legal challenges with regard to these issues.

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Cognitive difficulties and access to information systems: an interaction design perspective

People with cognitive difficulties, including memory, sequencing and attentional difficulties, face barriers to the use of conventionally designed information systems. This paper explores some of the reasons for these barriers in terms of the expectations normally placed on the user’s cognitive abilities and background knowledge. In the paper, the design and evaluation of three information systems are reported. These systems go some way towards overcoming cognitive barriers, allowing access to the advantages of computers for people with dyslexia, and for older users with no background in computer use who were able to access both email and the World Wide Web through specially designed interfaces.

Combating I-O bottleneck using prefetching: model,algorithms, and ramifications

Multiple memory models have been proposed to capture the effects of memory hierarchy culminating in the I-O model of Aggarwal and Vitter (Commun. ACM 31(9):1116–1127, [1988]). More than a decade of architectural advancements have led to new features that are not captured in the I-O model—most notably the prefetching capability. We propose a relatively simple Prefetch model that incorporates data prefetching in the traditional I-O models and show how to design optimal algorithms that can attain close to peak memory bandwidth. Unlike (the inverse of) memory latency, the memory bandwidth is much closer to the processing speed, thereby, intelligent use of prefetching can considerably mitigate the I-O bottleneck. For some fundamental problems, our algorithms attain running times approaching that of the idealized random access machines under reasonable assumptions. Our work also explains more precisely the significantly superior performance of the I-O efficient algorithms in systems that support prefetching compared to ones that do not.

Methodologies for agent systems development: underlying assumptions and implications for design

The area of agent systems design may be safely described as cluttered and disorganized, especially by those that situate themselves outside the “agent community”. Despite the wealth of bibliography on agent systems design and applications, there are few widely acknowledged design methods that have surfaced from testing and practice, mainly in laboratory settings. The paper contributes to the understanding of the field by presenting a critical review of methodologies that have emerged over the last few years to guide and explain agent systems design and development. The perspective for this review has been mainly formulated by posing important research questions in the field, and by attempting to interpret and discover latent hypotheses and underlying assumptions made by methodologies in reference to relevant research, both in agent systems and cooperative information systems practice and theory. The paper identifies significant challenges for agent systems methodologies that, if pursued, can contribute to a new understanding of the field that shifts the foci of current agent systems research, towards holistic design methods that place human users and information systems stakeholders at the centre of interest and involve them in the design process as much as possible.

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Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

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Pre-requisites for large scale coordination

Communication is in this paper seen as the foundation for purposeful human–human activity in dynamic environments. Coordination is a central issue in large systems such as military organisations, enterprises, or rescue organisations, and communication is needed in order to achieve coordination in such systems. This paper suggest a holistic approach to control, where control in a large system is seen as an emergent product of human interaction, focusing on human–human communication from a technical, organisational, temporal, and social perspective.

Scientific models and ethical issues in hybrid bionic systems research

Research on hybrid bionic systems (HBSs) is still in its infancy but promising results have already been achieved in laboratories. Experiments on humans and animals show that artificial devices can be controlled by neural signals. These results suggest that HBS technologies can be employed to restore sensorimotor functionalities in disabled and elderly people. At the same time, HBS research raises ethical concerns related to possible exogenous and endogenous limitations to human autonomy and freedom. The analysis of these concerns requires reflecting on the availability of scientific models accounting for key aspects of sensorimotor coordination and plastic adaptation mechanisms in the brain.

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Advanced networking services for distributed multimedia streaming applications

Increased network speeds coupled with new services delivered via the Internet have increased the demand for intelligence and flexibility in network systems. This paper argues that both can be provided by new hardware platforms comprised of heterogeneous multi-core systems with specialized communication support. We present and evaluate an experimental network service platform that uses an emergent class of devices—network processors—as its communication support, coupled via a dedicated interconnect to a host processor acting as a computational core. A software infrastructure spanning both enables the dynamic creation of application-specific services on the network processor, mediated by middleware and controlled by kernel-level communication support. Experimental evaluations use a Pentium IV-based computational core coupled with an IXP 2400 network processor. The sample application services run on both include an image manipulation application and application-level multicasting.

An exploratory study for analyzing interactional processes of group discussion: the case of a focus group interview

The purposes of this study are (a) to establish a measurement for evaluating conversational impressions of group discussions, and (b) to make an exploratory investigation on their interactional processes which may affect to form those impressions. The impression rating and factor analysis undertaken first give us four factors concerning conversational impressions of “focus group interviews (FGIs)”: conversational activeness, conversational sequencing, the attitudes of participants and the relationships of participants. In relation to the factors of conversational activeness and conversational sequencing in particular, the microanalysis of four selected topical scenes from our database further shows that the behavior of the moderator and the interviewees is organized not independently but with reference to each other. The study thus emphasizes the importance of the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches towards human interactions.

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One in a million: picking the right patterns

Constrained pattern mining extracts patterns based on their individual merit. Usually this results in far more patterns than a human expert or a machine leaning technique could make use of. Often different patterns or combinations of patterns cover a similar subset of the examples, thus being redundant and not carrying any new information. To remove the redundant information contained in such pattern sets, we propose two general heuristic algorithms—Bouncer and Picker—for selecting a small subset of patterns. We identify several selection techniques for use in this general algorithm and evaluate those on several data sets. The results show that both techniques succeed in severely reducing the number of patterns, while at the same time apparently retaining much of the original information. Additionally, the experiments show that reducing the pattern set indeed improves the quality of classification results. Both results show that the developed solutions are very well suited for the goals we aim at.

TimeBank evolution as a community resource for TimeML parsing

TimeBank is the only reference corpus for TimeML, an expressive language for annotating complex temporal information. It is a rich resource for a broad range of research into various aspects of the expression of time and temporally related events. This paper traces the development of TimeBank from its initial—and somewhat noisy—version (1.1) to a substantially revised release (1.2), now available via the Linguistic Data Consortium. The development path is motivated by the encouraging empirical results of TimeML-compliant annotators developed on the basis of TimeBank 1.1, and is informed by a detailed study of the characteristics of that initial release, which guides a clean-up process turning TimeBank 1.2 into a consistent and robust community resource.

Formal analysis of human operator behavioural patterns in interactive surveillance systems

An important area of Human Reliability Assessment in interactive systems is the ability to understand the causes of human error and to model their occurrence. This paper investigates a new approach to analysis of task failures based on patterns of operator behaviour, in contrast with more traditional event-based approaches. It considers, as a case study, a formal model of an Air Traffic Control system operator’s task which incorporates a simple model of the high-level cognitive processes involved. The cognitive model is formalised in the CSP process algebra. Various patterns of behaviour that could lead to task failure are described using temporal logic. Then a model-checking technique is used to verify whether the set of selected behavioural patterns is sound and complete with respect to the definition of task failure. The decomposition is shown to be incomplete and a new behavioural pattern is identified, which appears to have been overlooked in the informal analysis of the problem. This illustrates how formal analysis of operator models can yield fresh insights into how failures may arise in interactive systems.

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A conceptual framework for component context specification and representation in a metaCASE environment

A lack of design information can be a significant barrier for systems developers when developing and reusing a component. This paper tackles this problem by presenting and exemplifying the conceptual framework of component context and its hypertext representation in a metaCASE environment. It discusses the linking of contextual knowledge to components in systems analysis and design. The contextual knowledge includes the conceptual dependencies of component definition, reuse, and implementation, as well as the reasoning and rationale behind design and reuse processes. We also illustrate the hypertext approach to contextual knowledge representation that enables designers to express, record, explore, recognize, and negotiate their shared context within a metaCASE environment.

COMUNICAR: designing a multimedia, context-aware human-machine interface for cars

The European Union co-funded COMUNICAR (communication multimedia unit inside car) project designed and developed an integrated multimedia human–machine interface (HMI) able to manage a wide variety of driver information systems (from entertainment to safety). COMUNICAR proposed an innovative information provision paradigm, in which the on-vehicle HMI is able to tailor the delivery of the information in real time according to the actual driving context and the drivers workload. COMUNICAR adopted a user-centred design process involving an iterative development based on extensive user tests since the early phases of the project. This approach was particularly useful to define and improve the layout of the user interface and specify the rules that decide the scheduling and the modalities of the delivery of the information messages to the driver. This paper introduces the COMUNICAR concept and the user-centred flow of design. Then, a concrete case of user-test driven, iterative improvement of a systems functionality is presented. We also briefly describe two software tools that we have designed to enhance the development process in a user-centred perspective. Finally, the future evolution of the concept of smart and safe information scheduling is sketched and discussed.

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The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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Understanding and capturing people’s privacy policies in a mobile social networking application

A number of mobile applications have emerged that allow users to locate one another. However, people have expressed concerns about the privacy implications associated with this class of software, suggesting that broad adoption may only happen to the extent that these concerns are adequately addressed. In this article, we report on our work on PeopleFinder, an application that enables cell phone and laptop users to selectively share their locations with others (e.g. friends, family, and colleagues). The objective of our work has been to better understand people’s attitudes and behaviors towards privacy as they interact with such an application, and to explore technologies that empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify their privacy preferences (or “policies”). These technologies include user interfaces for specifying rules and auditing disclosures, as well as machine learning techniques to refine user policies based on their feedback. We present evaluations of these technologies in the context of one laboratory study and three field studies.

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