Designing home availability services

We have explored the challenges of designing domestic services to help family and friends determine mutually agreeable times to call one another. In a prior study, we identified activities in the home that predict availability to an external interruption. In our follow-up study, we used a cooperative design activity to see which, if any, of these home activities the family member is willing to share when engaged in mealtime or leisure routine. The data people are willing to reveal is more detailed for mealtime, than leisure activities. Furthermore, the shared availability service needs to be accessible throughout the home, in either compact, portable form or integrated with other services in various room locations. Accuracy and reliability of the shared information, along with device independent caller identification are also essential design requirements. While not unique to the home, the desire to personalize and present a socially acceptable availability status is extremely important.     

Customized delivery of e-government Web services

The Web is revolutionizing the way citizens interact with businesses and government agencies. Almost all key functions of modern society are being reshaped to exploit opportunities the Web opens. As part of an effort to improve government-citizen interactions, government agencies are providing a wide spectrum of online services. Virginia Tech is collaborating with the Virginia Department for the Aging (VDA) on a project called WebSenior. A middleware infrastructure, WebSenior automatically delivers e-government services customized for seniors. It uses ontologies to automatically generate Web services customized to senior citizens' needs and government program laws and regulations.     

Knowledge-driven ultrasonic three-dimensional organ modeling

A representation is described for nonstructured biologic objects which are single-valued distortions of a sphere. The representation is implemented in a model-driven system for extracting three-dimensional (3-D) organ reconstructions from a series of arbitrarily oriented ultrasound slices. A training set of ultrasonic reconstructions of similarly shaped objects is used to give the computer generic knowledge of a given shape class. This knowledge is in the form of local slope constraints defined on an object coordinate system. The combination of constraints, interacting together via a relaxation process on continuous label sets, attempts to capture the essential shape and range of variation for an organ class. An initial tolerance region and ``bestguess' organ surface are established by the interaction of the learned shape knowledge with manually input organ landmarks. A hypothesize-verify paradigm is employed to alternately request new data and to update the tolerance region and bestguess surface. Examples from runs on two balloon classes are presented. These examples show: 1) the local constraints interact to produce a reasonable global depiction of the essential shape and range of variation, 2) the use of shape knowledge permits accurate results from only one third of the available data, and 3) the 3-D shape knowledge provides a two-dimensional (2-D) tolerance region for plan-guided edge detection.     

Smart home services as the next mainstream of the ICT industry: determinants of the adoption of smart home services

Universal Access in the Information Society - This study investigated the core motivations for adopting smart home services and explored the approaches and processes through which the motivations...     

Mobile home automation: merging mobile value added services and home automation technologies

In this paper we study mobile home automation, a field that emerges from an integration of mobile application platforms and home automation technologies. We motivate our research and provide a conceptual introduction, which illustrates the need for such applications by a two-dimensional conceptual model of mobility. As a first steps towards a solution we take the user’s perspective and discuss different options of how he might access a mobile home automation service and the controlled devices. Subsequently, we suggest a general system architecture for mobile home automation services and discuss related design decision. This design has been implemented in a research prototype, which we named Remotile. This helps us to discuss typical components, such as modules that integrate various home automation devices. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Business, 2007. “Andreas Rosendahl, J. Felix Hampe, and Goetz Botterweck, Mobile Home Automation, Merging Mobile Value Added Services and Home Automation Technologies, Proceedings, Sixth International Conference on Mobile Business, 8–11 July 2007, IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 0-7695-2803-1”.     

流媒体业务中的内容分发技术

内容分发网络是流媒体业务的重要支撑系统，对于提供流媒体业务系统的可扩展性和性能具有重要意义。内容分发技术将流媒体或其它内容迅速有效地分发到网络中靠近用户的边缘部分，使网络用户对内容的访问可以就近得到快速响应，从而大大提高了流媒体业务的服务质量，减轻了源服务器和网络的负载，改善了网络性能，目前已经逐步得到广泛使用。本主要介绍了内容分发网络的产生背景、基本功能、体系结构、业务流程、路由请求机制和发展现状等。     

Knowledge-driven description synthesis for floor plan interpretation

International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) - Image captioning is a widely known problem in the area of AI. Caption generation from floor plan images has applications in...     

知识驱动的相似缺陷报告推荐方法

软件缺陷在软件开发过程中不可避免,提交的缺陷报告则是分析和修复缺陷的重要信息来源.开发人员常通过借鉴相似的历史缺陷报告和修复信息来辅助对当前新缺陷的分析和修复.文中提出了一种知识驱动的相似缺陷报告推荐方法.该方法首先利用信息检索和Word Embedding技术构建缺陷知识图谱;然后利用TF-IDF和Word Embe...     

Agent-based execution of personalised home care treatments

Home Care services are notoriously difficult to deliver efficiently, due to the heterogeneity of the involved actors and the usual co-morbidity of the patients assisted at home. The K4Care platform proposes an agent-based three-layered architecture aimed at addressing these two issues and facilitate the provision of these services. The development of the platform was supported by a methodology to help the automation of the modelling and implementation of the multi-agent system. The intelligent agents of the platform, which personify the Home Care domain actors, have the capability to guide the execution of administrative and medical processes, driving the flux of knowledge and control among all the involved professionals, simplifying their interactions and capturing new medical knowledge emerging from physicians. The platform also provides tools that allow medical practitioners to develop personalised treatments, adapted to the clinical and social circumstances of each patient and based on the standard international recommendations for the most frequent Home Care pathologies. The paper describes the architecture of the system, how personalised treatments are created, and how they are executed through the co-ordinated work of agents. A comparison with other relevant guideline execution systems and an evaluation of the actual state of the work are also provided.     

Pricing strategies for differentiated services content delivery networks

In order to reduce the user latency, the web sites disseminate some of their information to surrogate caches located closer to the users. We discuss a simple differentiated service type architecture for content delivery networks. A pricing scheme is next proposed to complement this architecture and provide fair service to the subscribed publishers. Then, we show that the suggested pricing scheme is also the optimal (revenue maximizing) pricing scheme for a monopolistic surrogate. We investigate the performance of the pricing scheme in a duopoly and show that under certain conditions the competition results in peering of the surrogates. Finally, we suggest methods to determine the optimal number of service classes offered to the users.     

Using technology for the competitive delivery of education services

This paper considers the use of information technology as a source of competitive advantage for education service providers operating in international markets, with particular reference to Australia. It draws upon the findings of a survey of 315 education institutions in five countries engaged in the export of international education. The importance of effective use of information technology as a source of competitive advantage is highlighted. Current use of information technology within education institutions is examined and technologically mediated learning is proposed as a viable means of promoting, administering and delivering education services to international markets. In particular, the potential of the Internet to provide graduate business education is given close scrutiny. It is argued that a virtual university business faculty is economically viable in this context. Business schools are advised to invest in hardware and software applications to ensure the communications needs of their clients are met.     

Integrated location aware medical care services

The advent of Mobile technologies has defined ways for providing better flexibility in communication, collaboration and information sharing through wireless medium using portable mobile devices. Technologies allow users to have anytime, anywhere access to information and applications. Specifically, location-aware mobile service has become the most essential component in dealing with mobile based applications. Mobile health care is one such promising area where mobile technologies are highly useful to provide services to the affected people. Worldwide the investment towards mobile health care applications is tremendously increasing. The significance of SMS, sensors, agent’s technologies is widely seen in most of the health care projects. This paper focuses on a system called LAMECS (Location Aware MEdical Care Services) which helps the needy people at the right time. The major focus of LAMECS is to provide timely facilities to people in the mobile based networked environment. Especially, the key objectives are to reduce the time taken to inform the service providers about the situation and to initiate the health care services at an early stage.     

Optimal capacity management and planning in services delivery centers

This paper considers human server systems of queues that arise within the information technology services industry. We develop a two-phase stochastic optimization solution approach to effectively and efficiently address the capacity management and planning processes of information technology services delivery centers. A large collection of numerical experiments of real-world human server system environments investigates various issues of both theoretical and practical interest, quantifying the significant benefits of our approach as well as evaluating the financial-performance trade-offs often encountered in practice.     

基于Android和云服务的智能家居系统设计

随着智能手机、物联网和云服务的快速发展,家庭的智能化已成为了一种发展趋势。基于Android平台、云平台、S5PV210微处理器、ZigBee和多种传感器实现对家庭状况的采集和显示以及对家庭设备的控制。该系统进一步可结合数据挖掘和大数据分析,实现宏观统筹节能环保。还可以将云技术和智能家具结合实现智慧小区,乃至智慧城市。     

Hybrid storage-based caching strategy for content delivery network services

This study proposes a novel caching scheme for content delivery network services. In general, video content users often watch the first part of video clips and then switch to other content. Therefore, a caching scheme is proposed, in which the first part of the frequently referenced content is stored on a solid state drive (SSD) while the remaining video content is stored on a hard disk drive (HDD),. The proposed hybrid (SSD/HDD) caching scheme offers several benefits, such as an improved average data output capacity due to the high average data rate and average hit capacity of the SSD. That is, performance can be significantly improved at a low extra cost with the cache server of a content delivery network (CDN).     

Knowledge-driven intelligent quality problem-solving system in the automotive industry

In the current automotive industry, quality management, especially quality problem-solving (QPS), plays an important role in fulfilling the expectations of demanding customers who seek high-quality products at low-cost. During the problem-solving process, various real-time and historical quality data are often not fully used, yet these data are of high value. This paper provides a comprehensive quality data mining process and method, as well as an intelligent quality problem-solving system (IQPSS). First, based on original quality problem data, an ontology library is constructed using the ontology generating module (OGM). Second, based on the generated ontology and the textual data of the original quality problem, this study builds a quality problem-solving knowledge base (QPSKB) by employing relevant algorithms in the knowledge transformation module (KTM). The component and fault relational matrix mining (CFRMM) algorithm is designed to extract the relationship matrix between the components and faults. The semi-supervised classification algorithm based on the K-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) is used to classify the immediate measures, causes and long-term measures into the corresponding ontology and express the ontology as their knowledge. Furthermore, the binary tree-based support vector machine (SVM) approach is applied to classify the cause texts into the factors of Man, Machine, Material, Method, and Environment (4M1E), which are the five factors in a fishbone diagram. In particular, the digital fishbone diagram is a brand-new type of fishbone diagram that subverts the traditional method of fishbone diagram analysis through brainstorming. A pilot run of the IQPSS has been undertaken in an automotive manufacturing company to demonstrate how quality management employees obtain this knowledge by searching in the IQPSS. The results show that the IQPSS contributes appreciably to the quality problem-solving in the manufacturing industry.     

Personal health care services through digital television

Personal health care has obtained increasing importance in the field of health care as the populations' age in the industrialised countries and resources available for health care remain limited. Personal health care through digital television is an exiting possibility in the realisation of new types of services answering to this demand for increased personal action and responsibility in health care. The possibilities of digital television in health care are studied in the Health Care Television (HCTV) research project of the Digital Media Institute at Tampere University of Technology. In this paper personal health care services are studied mainly from the perspective of the interactive service infrastructure of digital television. Firstly we present the general infrastructure of digital television and the different interactive service types of digital television. The usage of these service types in personal health care applications is also discussed. Finally, a web-based application based on chronic atrial fibrillation and its test use is presented. The application is used as a research platform for personal health care applications in digital television.     

Context-aware multiagent system: Planning home care tasks

Context-aware systems are able to capture information from the context in which they are executed, assign a meaning to the gathered information, and change their behavior accordingly. As a result, the systems can offer services to users according to their individual situation within the context. This article analyzes the important aspects of context-aware computing such as capturing information for context attributes and determining the manner of interacting with users in the environment. Used in conjunction with mobile devices, context-aware systems are specifically used to improve the usability of applications and services. This article proposes the home care context-aware computing (HoCCAC) multiagent system that identifies and maintains a permanent fix on the location of patients in their home, and manages the infrastructure of services within their environment securely and reliably by processing and reasoning the data received. Based on the multiagent system, a prototype was developed to monitor patients in their home. The HoCCAC multiagent system uses a critical path method-based planning model that, in the present study, prepares the most optimal task-planning schedule for the patients in their home, is capable of reacting automatically when faced with dangerous or emergency situations, replanning any plans in progress and sending alert messages to the system. The results obtained with this prototype are presented in this article.