Effects of video placement and spatial context presentation on path reconstruction tasks with contextualized videos

Many interesting and promising prototypes for visualizing video data have been proposed, including those that combine videos with their spatial context (contextualized videos). However, relatively little work has investigated the fundamental design factors behind these prototypes in order to provide general design guidance. Focusing on real-time video data visualization, we evaluated two important design factors--video placement method and spatial context presentation method--through a user study. In addition, we evaluated the effect of spatial knowledge of the environment. Participants' performance was measured through path reconstruction tasks, where the participants followed a target through simulated surveillance videos and marked the target paths on the environment model. We found that embedding videos inside the model enabled realtime strategies and led to faster performance. With the help of contextualized videos, participants not familiar with the real environment achieved similar task performance to participants that worked in that environment. We discuss design implications and provide general design recommendations for traffic and security surveillance system interfaces.     

A knowledge-based framework for extracting components in agile systems development

Considerable strides have been made in the use of components in software development. Many proprietary enterprise resource planning (ERP) software environments use modular components to develop and customize “best practices” to meet a specific organizational need. In agile application development, many developers and users are asked to design systems in a short period of time. These applications may use components that are embedded in software repositories. The challenge then is how to select the right software components (data and procedures) to meet an application requirement. Although experienced developers may select and customize components to meet the needs of an application, such expertise may not be available to other applications. This paper presents a knowledge-based framework to select and customize software components and demonstrates its value in deriving quality specifications, even when the developers are relatively inexperienced.     

Supporting K nearest neighbors query on high-dimensional data in P2P systems

Peer-to-peer systems have been widely used for sharing and exchanging data and resources among numerous computer nodes. Various data objects identifiable with high dimensional feature vectors, such as text, images, genome sequences, are starting to leverage P2P technology. Most of the existing works have been focusing on queries on data objects with one or few attributes and thus are not applicable on high dimensional data objects. In this study, we investigate K nearest neighbors query (KNN) on high dimensional data objects in P2P systems. Efficient query algorithm and solutions that address various technical challenges raised by high dimensionality, such as search space resolution and incremental search space refinement, are proposed. An extensive simulation using both synthetic and real data sets demonstrates that our proposal efficiently supports KNN query on high dimensional data in P2P systems.     

Structure-based color learning on a mobile robot under changing illumination

A central goal of robotics and AI is to be able to deploy an agent to act autonomously in the real world over an extended period of time. To operate in the real world, autonomous robots rely on sensory information. Despite the potential richness of visual information from on-board cameras, many mobile robots continue to rely on non-visual sensors such as tactile sensors, sonar, and laser. This preference for relatively low-fidelity sensors can be attributed to, among other things, the characteristic requirement of real-time operation under limited computational resources. Illumination changes pose another big challenge. For true extended autonomy, an agent must be able to recognize for itself when to abandon its current model in favor of learning a new one; and how to learn in its current situation. We describe a self-contained vision system that works on-board a vision-based autonomous robot under varying illumination conditions. First, we present a baseline system capable of color segmentation and object recognition within the computational and memory constraints of the robot. This relies on manually labeled data and operates under constant and reasonably uniform illumination conditions. We then relax these limitations by introducing algorithms for (i) Autonomous planned color learning, where the robot uses the knowledge of its environment (position, size and shape of objects) to automatically generate a suitable motion sequence and learn the desired colors, and (ii) Illumination change detection and adaptation, where the robot recognizes for itself when the illumination conditions have changed sufficiently to warrant revising its knowledge of colors. Our algorithms are fully implemented and tested on the Sony ERS-7 Aibo robots.

Services computing as the foundation of enterprise agility: Overview of recent advances and introduction to the special issue

The advancement of web services in the last few years has spurred a number of revolutionary concepts in information technology and management including service-oriented architectures, service-oriented computing, and services science, management and engineering, which can be collectively called as “services computing.” Services computing is a new research field that goes beyond traditional computing disciplines as it includes not only architectural, programming, deployment, and other engineering issues, but also management issues such as business component modeling, business process design, and service delivery. In this paper, we provide an overview of emerging research concepts in services computing without attempting to unify them as it will take sometime for the field to become mature. In addition, we take a position that the ultimate goal of services computing is to create the necessary technological and managerial foundation to support enterprise agility. In this short paper, we give an overview of services computing, describe its relationship to enterprise agility, and discuss basic technical and managerial issues. Finally, we introduce the papers that are published in this special issue.

Optimization Techniques for Reactive Network Monitoring

We develop a framework for minimizing the communication overhead of monitoring global system parameters in IP networks and sensor networks. A global system predicate is defined as a conjunction of the local properties of different network elements. A typical example is to identify the time windows when the outbound traffic from each network element exceeds a predefined threshold. Our main idea is to optimize the scheduling of local event reporting across network elements for a given network traffic load and local event frequencies. The system architecture consists of N distributed network elements coordinated by a central monitoring station. Each network element monitors a set of local properties and the central station is responsible for identifying the status of global parameters registered in the system. We design an optimal algorithm, the Partition and Rank (PAR) scheme, when the local events are independent; whereas, when they are dependent, we show that the problem is NP-complete and develop two efficient heuristics: the PAR for dependent events (PAR-D) and Adaptive (Ada) algorithms, which adapt well to changing network conditions, and outperform the current state of the art techniques in terms of communication cost.     

Differentiated survivability with improved fairness in IP/MPLS-over-WDM optical networks

This paper addresses the priority-fairness problem inherent in provisioning differentiated survivability services for sub-lambda connections associated with different protection-classes in IP/MPLS-over-WDM networks. The priority-fairness problem arises because, high-priority connections requiring high quality of protection such as lambda level pre-configured lightpath protection are more likely to be rejected when compared to low-priority connections which may not need such a high quality of protection. A challenging task in addressing this problem is that, while improving the acceptance rate of high-priority connections, low-priority connections should not be over-penalized. We propose two solution-approaches to address this problem. In the first approach, a new inter-class backup resource sharing (ICBS) technique and a differentiated routing scheme (DiffRoute) are adopted. The ICBS is investigated in two methods: partial- and full-ICBS (p-ICBS and f-ICBS) methods. The DiffRoute scheme uses different routing criteria for the traffic classes. In the second approach, two rerouting schemes are developed. The rerouting schemes are applied with the DiffRoute and ICBS. The rerouting schemes employ inter-layer backup resource sharing and inter-layer primary-backup multiplexing for the benefit of high-priority connections, thus improving fairness. Our findings are as follows. (1) The application of p-ICBS and DiffRoute yields improved performance for high-priority connections. However, it shows penalized performance for low-priority connections. On the other hand, the collective application of f-ICBS and DiffRoute yields significantly improved performance for high-priority connections with no penalized performance as the performance of low-priority connections is also improved. (2) The rerouting schemes, when applied with the DiffRoute and ICBS methods, further improve the performance of high-priority traffic without significantly affecting the performance of other traffic.     

轻薄笔记本电脑的未来世界

能够与《微型计算机》的读者共同分享英特尔对2009年笔记本电脑市场的小结以及对笔记本电脑未来的展望,我感到高兴并且有趣。     

Norm-based agency for designing collaborative information systems

Abstract. Information systems are organizations in which signs are created, processed and consumed. In order to fulfil the organizational goals and objectives, its members must understand their responsibilities and authorities, and must act co-operatively. The key to this organization and co-ordination lies in norms, which define responsibilities and authorities for each human agent, and establish regularities of behaviour. In the context of co-operative work, where 'intelligent' software agents are involved, to understand the norms of behaviour of various human agents becomes critical. Software agents can perform some tasks autonomously on the user's behalf. Such delegation involves a set of complicated philosophical and legal issues. After discussion on delineation of various boundaries of responsibility and authorities, this paper addresses norms and normative behaviour of human agents within an organization. It discusses the taxonomies of norms and a method of norm specification, with examples. Finally it presents an approach of norm-based agency for designing collaborative information systems and a case study of an insurance claim for illustration.