Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders - An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach

Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy.     

Neural-network method applied to the stereo image correspondence problem in three-component particle image velocimetry

The successful application of a recurrent neural network of the Hopfield type to the solution of the stereo image-pair reconciliation problem in stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (PIV) in the tracking mode is described. The results of applying the network to both virtual-flow and physical-flow PIV data sets are presented, and the usefulness of this novel approach to PIV stereo image analysis is demonstrated. A partner-particle image-pair density (PPID) parameter is defined as the average number of potential particle image-pair candidates in the search window in the second view corresponding to a single image pair in the first view. A quantitative assessment of the performance of the method is then made from groups of 100 synthetic flow images at various values of the PPID. The successful pairing of complementary image points is shown to vary from 100% at a PPID of 1 and to remain greater than 97% successful for PPID's up to 5. The application of the method to a hydraulic flow is also described, with in-line stereo images presented, and the application of the neural-matching method is demonstrated for a typical data set.     

Evolution of carbohydrate metabolic pathways

Current studies of hyperthermophilic archaea and bacteria, the phylogenetically deepest-rooted and slowest-evolving extant organisms known, are allowing new insights into the nature of presumably ancient metabolic pathways. The apparent common occurrence of modified non-phosphorylated Entner-Doudoroff (ED) pathways among saccharolytic archaea and the absence of the conventional Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas (EMP) mode of glycolysis indicate that the ED pathway is the older route of carbohydrate dissimilation. However, gluconeogenesis via the "reversed" EMP route has been found in archaea. Thus, the EMP pathway was probably an anabolic pathway to begin with; its catabolic role came later, with the evolution of fructose phosphate kinases, using ATP, ADP or pyrophosphate as phosphate donors. Similarly, the presence of reductive reactions of the citric acid cycle in anaerobic archaea and the most deeply rooted bacteria, including autotrophs, indicates that the citric acid cycle was originally a reductive biosynthetic pathway.     

Monitoring activities from multiple video streams: establishing acommon coordinate frame

Monitoring of large sites requires coordination between multiple cameras, which in turn requires methods for relating events between distributed cameras. This paper tackles the problem of automatic external calibration of multiple cameras in an extended scene, that is, full recovery of their 3D relative positions and orientations. Because the cameras are placed far apart, brightness or proximity constraints cannot be used to match static features, so we instead apply planar geometric constraints to moving objects tracked throughout the scene. By robustly matching and fitting tracked objects to a planar model, we align the scene's ground plane across multiple views and decompose the planar alignment matrix to recover the 3D relative camera and ground plane positions. We demonstrate this technique in both a controlled lab setting where we test the effects of errors in the intrinsic camera parameters, and in an uncontrolled, outdoor setting. In the latter, we do not assume synchronized cameras and we show that enforcing geometric constraints enables us to align the tracking data in time. In spite of noise in the intrinsic camera parameters and in the image data, the system successfully transforms multiple views of the scene's ground plane to an overhead view and recovers the relative 3D camera and ground plane positions     

Interferometer for cold neutrons

Design and setup of an interferometer for cold and ultracold neutrons are described. As neutron optical components three holographically produced gratings are arranged in triple Laue geometry. The gratings are adjusted during their recording process in photosensitized polymer slabs once for ever. Employing this device we measured the coherence function of a cold neutron beam by means of interferometry.     

Introducing QoS awareness in distributed programming: QTcl

A number of distributed applications require communication services with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Building global‐scale distributed systems with predictable properties is one of the great challenges for computer systems engineering in the new century. Work undertaken within the Internet Engineering Task Force has led to the definition of novel architectural models for the Internet with QoS support. According to these models, the network has to be appropriately configured in order to provide applications with the required performance guarantees. In next‐generation networks, enabling applications to interact with the underlying QoS services is of primary importance. Hence, several special‐purpose application programming interfaces (APIs) have been defined to let applications negotiate QoS parameters across QoS‐capable networks. However, so far, none of these APIs are available in different operating environments. We believe that such features should be embedded in programming environments for distributed applications. In this work we present how we included QoS control features in Tcl, a programming language that has been widely adopted for the development of distributed multimedia applications. Our work has led to the implementation of QTcl, an extended Tcl interpreter that provides programmers with a new set of primitives, in full compliance with the standard SCRAPI programming interface for the RSVP protocol. QTcl in highly portable, in that it enables standard QoS negotiation to be performed in a seamless fashion on the most common operating systems. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electronic Commerce Customer Relationship Management: A Research Agenda

In this paper, we approach electronic commerce Customer Relationship Management (e-CRM) from the perspective of five research areas. Our purpose is to define a conceptual framework to examine the relationships among and between these five research areas within e-CRM and to propose how they might be integrated to further research this area. We begin with a discussion of each of the research areas through brief reviews of relevant literature for each and a discussion of the theoretical and strategic implications associated with some CRM technologies and research areas. Next we present our framework, which focuses on e-CRM from the five research perspectives. We then present a theoretical framework for e-CRM in terms of the five research areas and how they affect one another, as well as e-CRM processes and both performance and non-performance outcomes.     

Managing service level agreements in Premium IP networks: a business-oriented approach

This paper presents a market-enabling framework where users, content providers and network operators can interact in the seamless, transparent sale and delivery of a wide range of services. The framework allows for dynamic creation, configuration and delivery of services with quality assurance, via automated management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose an approach relying on a systemic treatment of business, service and network layer issues, which translates into a layered architecture where components belonging to different levels interact on the basis of a mediation paradigm. We use mediation as a generic term for a combination of negotiation, brokerage and state notification, jointly concurring to the realization of the entire life-cycle of a service.     

An anomaly-based approach to the analysis of the social behavior of VoIP users

In this paper we present the results of a study we recently conducted by analyzing a large data set of VoIP Call Detail Records (CDRs), provided by an Italian telecom operator. The objectives of this study were twofold: (i) first, to provide a representation of users behavior, as well as of their mutual interaction and communication patterns, allowing to identify certain easily separable user categories; and (ii) second, to design and implement a framework calculating such a representation starting from CDR, capable of operating within certain time constraints, and grouping users using unsupervised techniques.The paper shows how we can reliably identify behavioral patterns associated with the most common anomalous behaviors of VoIP users. It also exploits the expressive power of relational graphs in order to both validate the results of the unsupervised analysis and ease their interpretation by human operators.