Context-aware middleware for pervasive elderly homecare

The growing aging population faces a number of challenges, including rising medical cost, inadequate number of medical doctors and healthcare professionals, as well as higher incidence of misdiagnosis. There is an increasing demand for a better healthcare support for the elderly and one promising solution is the development of a context-aware middleware infrastructure for pervasive health/wellness-care. This allows the accurate and timely delivery of health/medical information among the patients, doctors and healthcare workers through a widespread deployment of wireless sensor networks and mobile devices. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of such a Context-Aware Middleware for Pervasive Homecare (CAMPH). The middleware offers several key-enabling system services that consist of P2P-based context query processing, context reasoning for activity recognition and context-aware service management. It can be used to support the development and deployment of various homecare services for the elderly such as patient monitoring, location-based emergency response, anomalous daily activity detection, pervasive access to medical data and social networking. We have developed a prototype of the middleware and demonstrated the concept of providing a continuing-care to an elderly with the collaborative interactions spanning multiple physical spaces: person, home, office and clinic. The results of the prototype show that our middleware approach achieves good efficiency of context query processing and good accuracy of activity recognition.     

LoL@: usability of a location based UMTS application

LoL@, the Local Location Assistant, is a prototype of a location based UMTS service, implementing a tourist guide for the inner city of Vienna. After showing some fundamental issues of usability, this paper presents the user interface of LoL@ and the usability tests performed together with ftw.’s measurements of GPS performance — the default positioning method used in LoL@ — and its implications on user satisfaction.     

An experiment on the security of the Norwegian electronic voting protocol

Even when using a provably secure voting protocol, an election authority cannot argue convincingly that no attack that changed the election outcome has occurred, unless the voters are able to use the voting protocol correctly. We describe one statistical method that, if the assumptions underlying the protocol’s security proof hold, could provide convincing evidence that no attack occurred for the Norwegian Internet voting protocol (or other similar voting protocols). To determine the statistical power of this method, we need to estimate the rate at which voters detect possible attacks against the voting protocol. We designed and carried out an experiment to estimate this rate. We describe the experiment and results in full. Based on the results, we estimate upper and lower bounds for the detection rate. We also discuss some limitations of the practical experiment.     

NeuroGlasses: a neural sensing healthcare system for 3-D vision technology

3-D vision technologies are extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Particularly glasses-based 3-D technology facilities are increasingly becoming affordable to our daily lives. Considering health issues raised by 3-D video technologies, to the best of our knowledge, most of the pilot studies are practiced in a highly-controlled laboratory environment only. In this paper, we present NeuroGlasses, a nonintrusive wearable physiological signal monitoring system to facilitate health analysis and diagnosis of 3-D video watchers. The NeuroGlasses system acquires health-related signals by physiological sensors and provides feedbacks of health-related features. Moreover, the NeuroGlasses system employs signal-specific reconstruction and feature extraction to compensate the distortion of signals caused by variation of the placement of the sensors. We also propose a server-based NeuroGlasses infrastructure where physiological features can be extracted for real-time response or collected on the server side for long term analysis and diagnosis. Through an on-campus pilot study, the experimental results show that NeuroGlasses system can effectively provide physiological information for healthcare purpose. Furthermore, it approves that 3-D vision technology has a significant impact on the physiological signals, such as EEG, which potentially leads to neural diseases.     

Online-Erkennung von Wicklungsfehlern in Asynchronmaschinen

The operation of induction machines with fast switching power electronic devices puts additional stress on the stator windings which leads to an increased probability of machine faults. These faults can cause considerable damage and repair costs and — if not detected in an early stage — may end up in a total destruction of the machine. To reduce maintenance and repair costs many methods have been developed and presented in literature for an early detection of machine faults. This paper gives an overview of today’s detection techniques and describes algorithms and results of some methods with special emphasis to inverter fed operation.     

人脸欺诈检测最新进展及典型方法

以人脸为生物特征的身份认证由于其简单、快捷和无接触，深受用户喜爱。然而，不法分子针对人脸的易于伪造和认证场景的多样性，恶意攻击人脸识别系统，给国家安全和人民生活带来极大危害，有必要深入研究人脸的反欺诈技术。该文收集了经典和代表性论文68篇，其中包括近2年来国际主流期刊和会议的相关论文50余篇，从7大类来梳理近期人脸欺诈检测的技术脉络，把握领域的最新动向。为了使读者洞悉各类的技术精髓，对典型方法进行了重点介绍，并对各类进行了技术小结。在方法介绍结束之后，对2019年以来新推出的6个人脸欺诈检测数据库进行了简要介绍，便于读者对本领域的最新算法开发和验证平台有所了解。结语部分对人脸欺诈检测7类方法之间的关联、在理论和应用上的总体现状、存在的主要问题以及发展的方向作了简单的总结和展望。      

Pilot Designs for Consistent Frequency-Offset Estimation in OFDM Systems

This paper presents pilot designs for consistent frequency-offset estimation of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems in frequency-selective fading channels. We describe two design approaches, namely, consistency in the probabilistic sense and absolute consistency. Existing preambles and pilot designs in the literature do not guarantee the absolute consistency. We derive general criteria for both approaches, present sufficient conditions on the pilot structures over the maximum carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation range (half of the sampling rate), and derive simple pilot designs satisfying these conditions. We also extend the sufficient conditions to any arbitrary but fixed CFO estimation range, and present some generalized design patterns. Furthermore, the CFO estimation performances of distinct consistent pilot designs can be quite different at moderate or low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to different statistics of outliers which also yields a link failure. We develop efficient pilot-design criteria that provide both consistency and robustness against outliers at moderate-to-low SNR. Our consistent pilot designs facilitate flexible and economical implementation, while our robust pilot designs enable wireless links with less outage and better resilience     

Cross-Compiling Android Applications to iOS and Windows Phone 7

Android is currently leading the smartphone segment in terms of market share since its introduction in 2007. Android applications are written in Java using an API designed for mobile apps. Other smartphone platforms, such as Apple’s iOS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, differ greatly in their native application programming model. App developers who want to publish their applications for different platforms are required to re-implement the application using the respective native SDK. In this paper we describe a cross-compilation approach, whereby Android applications are cross-compiled to C for iOS and to C# for Windows Phone 7. We describe different aspects of our cross-compiler, from byte code level cross-compilation to API mapping. A prototype of our cross-compiler called XMLVM is available under an Open Source license.     

Multimodal monitoring of Web servers

We present a multimodal real-time monitoring system called MMM that describes server activity by multimodal representation and supplements traditional ways of conveying sonification and peripheral information to Webmasters. We also describe a prototype and plug-in that MMM's three-level distributed architecture implements.     

Smart Identification Frameworks for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

We present our results of the conceptual design and the implementation of ubiquitous computing applications using smart identification technologies. First, we describe such technologies and their potential application areas, then give an overview of some of the applications we have developed. Based on the experience we have gained from developing these systems, we point out design concepts that we have found useful for structuring and implementing such applications. Building upon these concepts, we have created two frameworks based on Jini (i.e., distributed Java objects) and Web Services to support the development of ubiquitous computing applications that make use of smart identification technology. We describe our prototype frameworks, discuss the underlying concepts and present some lessons learned.     

Defending the weakest link: phishing websites detection by analysing user behaviours

Phishing detection systems are principally based on the analysis of data moving from phishers to victims. In this paper we describe a novel approach for detecting phishing websites based on analysis of users’ online behaviours—i.e., the websites users have visited, and the data users have submitted to those websites. Such user behaviours can not be manipulated freely by attackers; detection based on those data can achieve high accuracy whilst being fundamentally resilient against changing deception methods.     

Maximuma posteriori fast fading channel estimation for alamouti’s space-time transmit diversity

This paper considers the Alamouti’s two-branch transmit diversity scheme. This scheme supports a maximum likelihood detection based on linear processing at the receiver. When no knowledge of the channel is available — at the transmitter and the receiver- the above scheme requires in general the estimation of the two discrete propagation channels seen from the two transmit antennas. Our objective is to evaluate the Alamouti’s technique of diversity with a realistic estimation algorithm considering a very fast time-varying channel. For a robust channel estimation, we propose an EM-based maximuma posteriori semi-blind algorithm. This algorithm requires a convenient representation of the time-varying fading channel using a discrete version of the Karhunen-Loève expansion theorem. The iterative receiver optimally uses pilot as well as unknown data symbols for improving channel estimation quality. The validity of the proposed algorithm is highlighted by simulation results. Moreover, a complexity evaluation of this algorithm and a comparison is provided for different scenarii.     

FAST TCP: Motivation, Architecture, Algorithms, Performance

We describe FAST TCP, a new TCP congestion control algorithm for high-speed long-latency networks, from design to implementation. We highlight the approach taken by FAST TCP to address the four difficulties which the current TCP implementation has at large windows. We describe the architecture and summarize some of the algorithms implemented in our prototype. We characterize its equilibrium and stability properties. We evaluate it experimentally in terms of throughput, fairness, stability, and responsiveness     

Direction-of-Arrival Estimation System for Multipath Propagation in Code-Division Multiple-Access Systems With Synthesized Virtual Planar Array Using Pilot Signals

Here, we propose a method for estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) using pilot signals in code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. We also report the evaluation of the performance of the proposed method by conducting simulations and experiments in an anechoic chamber and an outdoor environment. This method estimates the DOA of the arrival waves by synthesizing the data received by a virtual planar array using pilot signals. First, we describe a method for synthesizing the data received by the virtual planar array using pilot signals. Next, we present simulation results that confirmed that the accuracy of the estimation based on the virtual planar array was the same as that based on a real planar array. Last, we describe the effectiveness of the proposed system that is demonstrated through experiments in both the anechoic chamber and in an outdoor environment.     

An energy-efficient spike encoding circuit for speech edge detection

In speech processing applications, the instantaneous bandwidth of speech can be used to adaptively control the performance of an audio sensor’s analog front end. Extracting the instantaneous bandwidth of speech depends on the detection of speech edges in the time–frequency plane. In this paper, we propose a spike encoding circuit for real-time and low-power speech edge detection. The circuit can directly encode the signal’s envelope information—an important feature to identify the speech edge—by temporal spike density without additional envelope extraction. Furthermore, the spike encoding circuit automatically adapts its resolution to the amplitude of the input signal, which improves the encoding resolution for small signal without increasing the power consumption. We use the nonlinear dynamical approach to design this circuit and analyze its stability. We also develop a linearized model for this circuit to provide the design intuition and to explain its adaptive resolution. Fabricated in 0.5-μm CMOS process, the spike encoding circuit consumes 0.3-μW power and the experimental results are presented.     

Realizing a foundation for programmability of ATM networks with thebinding architecture

A conceptual framework, called the binding model, for the creation, deployment and management of multimedia services on ATM-based broadband networks with end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees is presented. The key function of the associated binding architecture is to provide an open programmable environment that facilitates the easy creation of flexible services. We describe the implementation of a prototype binding architecture called xbind as a middleware toolkit for building open programmable ATM networks. Finally, we present our initial experiences with experimenting and deploying xbind over an ATM testbed and highlight some of the lessons learned     

基于X3D的富客户端WEBGIS应用研究

应用独立框架的富客户端技术的特点,对WEBGIS在表现交互,地图渲染,图属相融合,数据协同等方面进行了扩展,并实现了相关模型及原型系统.提出了一个基于X3D的富客户端WEBGIS原型系统设计及其应用,并进行了试验研究,克服了传统WEBGIS存在的不足.     

Optimal pilot placement for frequency offset estimation and data detection in burst transmission systems

In this letter, we address the problem of pilot design for carrier frequency offset (CFO) and data detection in digital burst transmission systems. We consider a quasistatic flat-fading channel. We find that placing half of the pilot symbols at the beginning of the burst and the other half at the end of the burst is optimal for both CFO estimation and data detection. Our findings are based on the Cramer-Rao bound and on empirical evaluations of the bit error rate for different pilot designs. The equal-preamble-postamble pilot design is shown to provide a significant gain in performance over the conventional preamble-only pilot design.     

Laboratory Measurements and a Theoretical Analysis of the TCT Fading Channel Radio System

This paper documents the laboratory and theoretical performance of a pilot-aided digital radio system. The technique considered transmits a midband pilot tone to improve the receiver data detection performance in a multipath fading channel and is referred to as the tone calibrated technique (TCT). We report on the performance of a 860 MHz prototype system carrying 2.4 kbit/s data under Rician fading conditions. Both experimental and analytical results show that the error floor experienced with nonpilot-aided transmission methods is effectively removed by the TCT scheme, resulting in significant performance gains at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. The paper also examines the TCT system performance under typical operating conditions and presents a new analysis of the TCT theoretical error probability.