Interactive Paper as a Mobile Client for a Multi-channel Web Information System

We describe how interactive paper can be used together with a multi-channel web information system to build a platform for experimenting with multi-modal context-aware mobile information services. As an application, we present a tourist guide for visitors to an international festival that was developed to investigate alternative modes of information delivery and interaction in mobile environments. The guide is based around a set of interactive paper documents—an event brochure, map and bookmark. The brochure and map are augmented with digital services by using a digital pen to activate links and a text-to-speech engine for information delivery. The digital pen is also used for data capture of event ratings and reviews. The bookmark provides access to advanced searches and ticket reservations. We describe the architecture and operation of the system, highlighting the challenges of extending a web information system to support both the generation of the paper documents and the interaction from these documents, alongside more traditional access channels. Finally, we discuss the range of context-aware interactions that is supported by our platform.     

TV Program Recommendation for Multiple Viewers Based on user Profile Merging

Since today’s television can receive more and more programs, and televisions are often viewed by groups of people, such as a family or a student dormitory, this paper proposes a TV program recommendation strategy for multiple viewers based on user profile merging. This paper first introduces three alternative strategies to achieve program recommendation for multiple television viewers, discusses, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages respectively, and then chooses the strategy based on user profile merging as our solution. The selected strategy first merges all user profiles to construct a common user profile, and then uses a recommendation approach to generate a common program recommendation list for the group according to the merged user profile. This paper then describes in detail the user profile merging scheme, the key technology of the strategy, which is based on total distance minimization. The evaluation results proved that the merging result can appropriately reflect the preferences of the majority of members within the group, and the proposed recommendation strategy is effective for multiple viewers watching TV together.     

Infrastructuring and Ordering Devices in Health Care: Medication Plans and Practices on a Hospital Ward

In this paper, we analyse physicians’ and nurses’ practices of prescribing and administering medication through the use of paper-based, and digitalized medication plans. Our point of departure is an ethnographic study of the implications of upgrading an electronic medication module (EMM) that is part of an electronic health record (EHR), carried out at an endocrinology department. The upgrade led to a temporary breakdown of the EMM, and a return to paper-based medication plans. The breakdown made visible and noticeable the taken-for-granted capabilities of medication plans in their paper-based and digital versions, and the distribution of functionalities between medication plans and clinicians. We see the case as an opportunity to analyse infrastructuring in health care, the process by which medical practices and artefacts become parts of social and technological networks with longer reaches and more channels through which coordination among distributed actors is enabled and formed. In this case, infrastructuring means an extended scope and intensity of the coordinative capabilities of medication plans, and an increased vulnerability to, and dependency on events outside the immediate loci of interaction. We particularly note the capacity of the EMM to facilitate different kinds of ordering of information and practices, and propose the conceptualizing of such digitalized artefacts as ‘ordering devices’. Ordering devices order information, stipulate action, and coordinate interaction across and within social worlds, and achieve this through the flexible support of different kinds of ordering.     

数字机顶盒电子节目指南模块解决方案

机顶盒（STB）是用来增强或扩展电视机功能的一种信息设备。电子节目指南（简称EPG）为用户收看电视节目和享受信息服务提供一个良好的导航机制,使用户能够方便快捷地找到自己关心的节目,查看节目的附加信息。本文主要研究了数字机顶盒电子节目指南（EPG）模块解决方案及模拟系统的实现。建立了一套完整的EPG解决方案模拟系统,其中包括业务信息部分的数据结构和数据检索等。     

Swiping paper: the second hand, mundane artifacts, gesture and collaboration

It is widely recognised that paper remains a pervasive resource for collaboration and yet there has been uncertain progress in developing technologies that aim to enhance paper documents with computational capabilities. In this article, we discuss the design of a technology that interweaves developments in hardware and materials, electronics and software, and seeks to create new affinities between digital content and paper. The design of the technology drew from findings from naturalistic studies of the uses of paper, particularly when considering how ‘users’ might ‘interact’ with the augmented technology. We briefly review these studies and discuss the results of an evaluation of the emerging technology. Analysis of the fine details of the conduct of participants in these assessments suggest how, even when we design simple forms of interaction with a device, these can be shaped and transformed by the participation and collaboration of others.     

A cloud-based intelligent TV program recommendation system

In recent years, cloud computing technology has matured significantly, as has the development of digital TV services. This, therefore, has led to an increased demand for improved quality TV services. In this paper, cloud computing technology is used to build a program recommendation system for digital TV programs, and the Hadoop Fair Scheduler is utilized to improve processing performance. Historical data of watched TV programs are collected through an electronic program guide, and then processed using K-means clustering, term frequency/inverse document frequency and k-nearest neighbor algorithms, to obtain clusters of audience groups and to find popular TV programs for each cluster. The proposed system can process massive amounts of user data in real-time, and can easily be scaled up.     

Digital hermeneutics: an outline

The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of digital hermeneutics understood as the encounter between hermeneutics and digital technology, particularly the Internet. In the first part, I want to raise the attention of IT researchers and hermeneuticists to the theoretic and practical relevance of the encounter of their areas of research that are sometimes considered as incompatible to each other. There is still a lot of translation work to be done in order to get these two cultures come closer to and profit from each other. The second part of the paper deals with the foundation of digital hermeneutics on what I call—following Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s paths—digital ontology as opposed to digital metaphysics.     

MHP的机顶盒端基础框架的开放性实现方案

根据数字电视机顶盒的应用技术背景以及交互式应用的需求，阐述了数字电视中间件技术相关的MHP规范，给出了开放的软件解决方案。文章以GNU/Open Source为着眼点，介绍了基于数字电视机顶盒的MHP规范开放性实现方案中与“开放性”密切相关的一些关键技术，就数字电视中间件技术、MHP规范的发展趋势和我国的数字电视现状进行了研究与分析。     

Providing advanced remote medical treatment services through pervasive environments

Advances on sensor technology, wireless environments and data mining introduce new possibilities in the healthcare sector, realizing the anytime-anywhere access to medical information. Towards this direction, integration of packet-switched networks and sensor devices can be effective in deploying assistive environments, such as home monitoring for elderly or patients. In this paper we describe a policy-based architecture that utilizes wireless sensor devices, advanced network topologies and software agents to enable remote monitoring of patients and elderly people; through the aforementioned technologies we achieve continuous monitoring of a patient’s condition and we can proceed when necessary with proper actions. We also present a software framework and network architecture that realizes the provision of remote medical services, in compliance with the imposed security and privacy requirements. A proof of concept prototype is also deployed, along with an evaluation of the overall architecture’s performance.     

Classification system in the software of the Earth remote sensing data processing

Questions concerning the problem of choosing adequate recognition algorithms for Earth, multispectral, remote sensing data are considered. A system of supervised classification based on the strategy of maximum likelihood for normally distributed vectors of attributes is presented. A system of cluster analysis, including an algorithm of K-means and the method of modes analysis for a multidimensional histogram, is described. Aleksei Aleksandrivich Buchnev. Born in 1947. Graduated from Krasnoyarsk State University in 1972. Received his candidate’s degree in 1989. He was awarded the State prize of the Soviet Union in the field of science and technology. Buchnev is currently a senior research fellow at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics SB RAS (Novosibirsk). Scientific interests include remote sensing, digital image processing, and pattern recognition. He is the author of more than 70 publications. Valerii Pavlovich Pyatkin. Born in 1939. Graduated from Moscow Energetic Institute in 1963. Received his candidate’s degree in 1970 and his doctoral degree in 1987. Since 1990, he has been a professor and is currently a head of the Image Processing laboratory at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics SB RAS (Novosibirsk). Pyatkain has been awarded with a K.E. Tsiolkovskii medal (the highest award of the Federation of Russian Cosmonautics) in 2002 and has received the honorary title “Honored Creator of Space Technique.” Scientific interests include digital image processing, remote sensing, geoinformatics, and GIS- and Web-technologies. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including five monographs. Vasilii Valentinovich Asmus. Born in 1952. Graduated from Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering in 1976. Postgraduate studies at the Computational Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Received his candidate’s degree in 1984 and his doctoral degree in 2002. Since 2007, he has been a professor and is currently a director at the Planeta Space Hydrometeorology Research and Development Center of the Federal Service of Russia on Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Moscow). Asmus is also a full member of the Tsiolkovskii Russian Academy of Cosmonautics and has been awarded the prize of the Moscow City Administration. Scientific interests include remote sensing, digital image processing, and pattern recognition. He is the author of more than 140 publications, including four monographs.     

User-author centered multimedia building blocks

The advances of multimedia models and tools popularized the access and production of multimedia contents: in this new scenario, there is no longer a clear distinction between authors and end-users of a production. These user-authors often work in a collaborative way. As end-users, they collectively participate in interactive environments, consuming multimedia artifacts. In their authors’ role, instead of starting from scratch, they often reuse others’ productions, which can be decomposed, fusioned and transformed to meet their goals. Since the need for sharing and adapting productions is felt by many communities, there has been a proliferation of standards and mechanisms to exchange complex digital objects, for distinct application domains. However, these initiatives have created another level of complexity, since people have to define which share/ reuse solution they want to adopt, and may even have to resort to programming tasks. They also lack effective strategies to combine these reused artifacts. This paper presents a solution to this demand, based on a user-author centered multimedia building block model—the digital content component (DCC). DCCs upgrade the notion of digital objects to digital components, as they homogenously wrap any kind of digital content (e.g., multimedia artifacts, software) inside a single component abstraction. The model is fully supported by a software infrastructure, which exploits the model’s semantic power to automate low level technical activities, thereby freeing user-authors to concentrate on creative tasks. Model and infrastructure improve recent research initiatives to standardize the means of sharing and reuse domain specific digital contents. The paper’s contributions are illustrated using examples implemented in a DCC-based authoring tool, in real life situations.     

Treasure codes: augmenting learning from physical museum exhibits through treasure hunting

Previous studies have highlighted the difficulty that designers face in creating mobile museum guides to enhance small group experiences. In this paper, we report a study exploring the potential of mobile visual recognition technology (Artcodes) to improve users’ experiences in a visitor centre. A prototype mobile guide in the form of a treasure hunt was developed and evaluated by means of a field study comparing this technology with the existing personal guided tour. The results reveal a preference for the mobile guide amongst participants and show significant learning gains from pre-test to post-test compared with the pre-existing personal tour. Our observational analyses indicate how the mobile guide can be used to improve visitors’ learning experiences by supporting active discovery and by balancing physical and digital interactions. We further expand the concept of design trajectories to consider micro-scaffolding as a way of understanding and designing future public technologies.     

IP TV中的EPG管理系统的设计与实现

IPTV是计算机网络技术同数字电视技术结合的新型数字电视解决方案。EPG是IPTV中关键的一环。EPG管理系统采用基于XML格式的EPG文件，提供EPG文件的制作、发布和维护等服务。EPG管理系统采用微软.NET体系架构并使用C#语言开发实现。     

The iterative development of a tangible pin-board to symmetrically link physical and digital documents

There is an asymmetry in many tangible interfaces: while physical objects can be used to manipulate digital information, the reverse is often not possible—the digital world cannot push back. We introduce a new push-back tangible technology, a pin-board that physically ejects paper documents. This is realized by extending the Pin&Play technology to support ‘pouts’, addressable pin-like devices that can remove themselves from a board using muscle wire actuators. We describe how this technology has been developed through two iterations of prototyping, application and formative study. An initial study revealed how potential mismatches between the physical and digital characteristics of pouts caused difficulties with users predicting pop-out events and reasoning about the state of pouts. This led us to extend pouts to reveal more of their internal state, an approach verified through a second study. It also raises more general issues for the design of pushback tangible technologies and ubiquitous interfaces.     

Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease using evolutionary algorithms

This paper describes the novel application of an evolutionary algorithm to discriminate Parkinson’s patients from age-matched controls in their response to simple figure-copying tasks. The reliable diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease is notoriously difficult to achieve with misdiagnosis reported to be as high as 25% of cases. The approach described in this paper aims to distinguish between the velocity profiles of pen movements of patients and controls to identify distinguishing artifacts that may be indicative of the Parkinson’s symptom bradykinesia. Results are presented for 12 patients with Parkinson’s disease and 10 age-match controls. An algorithm was evolved using half the patient and age-matched control responses, which was then successfully used to correctly classify the remaining responses. A more rigorous “leave one out” strategy was also applied to the test data with encouraging results.     

Multimedia information using mobile computers: accessing the digital campus and the digital library

Abstract

It is clear that the role of the information resource is changing. Major publishers have been slow to adapt to the emergence of a global digital medium, but there are now signs that a great deal of information will be delivered on-line, (although at present only about 25 databases account for 80% of usage in UK and optical publishing is still in its early stages). However, digital publishing on the Internet — with services for libraries such as just-in-time purchasing and delivery, for example — will be a driving force in creating the ‘global digital medium’. One issue that will become increasingly relevant is how the individual user accesses rich multimedia data in the most appropriate way. The ‘digital university campus’ and the ‘digital library’ are coming to be important concepts, with the aim that users of information services will receive information on-line supported by a ‘ubiquistructure’ of information technology. For the ‘digital campus’ this means that not only scholarly but also teaching activities are based on interactive access to information, and where not only the digital library but also the digital bookshop and the digital classroom are becoming possible with the development of 140Mb/s SuperJANET links. However, it is recognised that libraries will not be truly digital for the foreseeable future, and that libraries will maintain traditional and digital media side by side. In this paper, reporting on work at the University of Bristol's Educational Technology Service multimedia resources unit MRU, and the University of the West of England's Centre for Personal Information Management (in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories and the University of Bristol's Centre for Communications Research), we look the ‘digital library’ and ‘digital campus’ from the perspective of the individual user and her information needs. We are particularly interested in the use of small, mobile computers as access points to the global digital medium. We suggest that, in an environment of change — where the traditional campus and the traditional library exist alongside the digital campus and digital library — the most appropriate form of access technology is based on ‘personal technology’ which allows a linking between digital information and traditional paper-based information.     

Technology scruples: why intimidation will not save the recording industry and how enchantment might

While the recording industry continues to lobby for increasingly draconian laws to protect their interests, users of digital technology continue to share files and copy protected music. This paper considers the ethics of copying and argues that legal measures are unlikely to solve the music industry’s problems in the age of digital reproduction. It begins with a review of the legal arguments around copyright legislation and notes that the law is currently unclear and contested. Adapting the game “scruples” to questions of what is and is not considered theft, a qualitative study reflects on the ways that ethical positions around new media are reached and articulated. The findings relate ethical positions constructed around notions of resistance, intangibility and identity. It is argued that the global online population cannot be policed without consent and that mechanics of artist reimbursement must be developed that account for consumers’ technology scruples. File sharing is then considered not as a legal problem but as a design challenge and a strategy of enchantment is suggested. The design concept of a digital music box is outlined to illustrate strategies of enchantment rather than litigation and intimidation.     

A new territory of multi-user variable remote control for interactive TV

Unlike passive analog TV, interactive TV (iTV) is the next step toward interactivity that offers users a friendly interactive experience. As there are fewer studies focused on multi-user interaction in a local environment, we concentrate on multi-user interaction with families, especially within a home information system. Therefore, we propose a control service framework “MVC-iTV,” based on distributed computing and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, in which external displays (TVs or projectors) and handheld devices can be used for controlling iTV services by several members of the family at the same time, without any relocation. Further, the new remote control framework can free users from the restrictions of using one remote controller. The experiment results indicate that the MVC-iTV framework is applicable to the iTV service and that users can operate the service in any visible environment via wireless networking technologies. Besides, requirements of the hardware compatibility of the TV appliance and remote controller will be reduced in the MVC-iTV framework.     

Tangibles for learning: a representational analysis of physical manipulation

Manipulatives—physical learning materials such as cubes or tiles—are prevalent in educational settings across cultures and have generated substantial research into how actions with physical objects may support children’s learning. The ability to integrate digital technology into physical objects—so-called ‘digital manipulatives’—has generated excitement over the potential to create new educational materials. However, without a clear understanding of how actions with physical materials lead to learning, it is difficult to evaluate or inform designs in this area. This paper is intended to contribute to the development of effective tangible technologies for children’s learning by summarising key debates about the representational advantages of manipulatives under two key headings: offloading cognition—where manipulatives may help children by freeing up valuable cognitive resources during problem solving, and conceptual metaphors—where perceptual information or actions with objects have a structural correspondence with more symbolic concepts. The review also indicates possible limitations of physical objects—most importantly that their symbolic significance is only granted by the context in which they are used. These arguments are then discussed in light of tangible designs drawing upon the authors’ current research into tangibles and young children’s understanding of number.