Interweaving place and story in a location-based audio drama

This paper presents a qualitative study of an interactive audio drama facilitated by a location-based application. The investigation focuses on an accessible experience, a play in which the audience members simply trigger new scenes of the audio drama as they walk to predefined city areas. The findings draw attention to the role of the mobile technology in facilitating this particular artistic experience. Furthermore, they illustrate the various levels at which creative imagination and open interpretation emerge as audience members seek to make sense of the interrelations between the locative media experienced and elements of the places inhabited during the audio narrative. In concluding the article, designing for loose coupling between mobile media and physical places is suggested as a strategy to enable people’s engagement in meaningful experience through the use of various location-based services.     

The Stratosphere platform for big data analytics

We present Stratosphere, an open-source software stack for parallel data analysis. Stratosphere brings together a unique set of features that allow the expressive, easy, and efficient programming of analytical applications at very large scale. Stratosphere’s features include “in situ” data processing, a declarative query language, treatment of user-defined functions as first-class citizens, automatic program parallelization and optimization, support for iterative programs, and a scalable and efficient execution engine. Stratosphere covers a variety of “Big Data” use cases, such as data warehousing, information extraction and integration, data cleansing, graph analysis, and statistical analysis applications. In this paper, we present the overall system architecture design decisions, introduce Stratosphere through example queries, and then dive into the internal workings of the system’s components that relate to extensibility, programming model, optimization, and query execution. We experimentally compare Stratosphere against popular open-source alternatives, and we conclude with a research outlook for the next years.     

Control of nanopositioning and nanomeasuring machines with a modular FPGA based data processing system

For precise length measuring techniques, highly dynamic positioning stages are used to measure and manipulate objects with a resolution in subnanometer range. The position and the orientation of these systems have to be controlled permanently to compensate external disturbances such as sound waves, thermal expansion of the mechanical components, and ground motion. Because of new applications in the area of microsensing devices the dynamic or path accuracy is in addition to the stationary accuracy a critical feature. To improve the dynamic behavior of these machines, an efficient friction compensation as well as a high perfomance signal- and data processing system is necessary. This work presents a realization of a control system with friction compensation for a nanopositioning and nanomeasuring machine based on FPGA technology. Particular attention was paid to the obtainable sampling rate and its impact on the attainable path accuracy.