Some spatial equilibria in facility investment under uncertain demand

This paper describes the spatial distribution of customer demand, supply of customer services and facility investment, as the outcome of a three-level game-like interaction between customers (e.g., shoppers), suppliers (e.g., retailers) and developers (e.g., landlords). Treating both the suppliers and developers at each centre as competitors, oligopolistic equilibria of the Nash-Stackelberg type are developed, and conditions for their existence and uniqueness established. Uncertain customer demand is specified in probabilistic terms, representing the suppliers' perception of expected customer behaviour.     

Kanga(ROO): Handling the micro-DST of the BaBar experiment with ROOT

A system based on ROOT for handling the micro-DST of the BaBar experiment is described. The purpose of the Kanga system is to have micro-DST data available in a format well suited for data distribution within a world-wide collaboration with many small sites. The design requirements, implementation and experience in practice after three years of data taking by the BaBar experiment are presented.     

New formulations for unsaturated polyester resins and their interactions with low-profile agents and glass fibres

Special anhydrides, such as hexahydrophthalic, methyl-hexahydrophthalic, nadic, methylnadic and methyl-tetrahydroxyphthalic, have been polycondensed with glycols such as propylene and di-propylene, to obtain new formulations for unsaturated polyesters. The properties of these resins, such as tensile behaviour and ultraviolet resistance, neat or mixed with anti-shrinkage additives have been examined and compared to standard polyester resins. Particular attention was paid to the study of the influence of low-profile agents on the resulting phase structures of cured systems. Moreover, the role played by the different phases on the fibre/matrix addition in composite materials reinforced with coated glass fibres was also investigated.     

RUSHES—an annotation and retrieval engine for multimedia semantic units

Multimedia analysis and reuse of raw un-edited audio visual content known as rushes is gaining acceptance by a large number of research labs and companies. A set of research projects are considering multimedia indexing, annotation, search and retrieval in the context of European funded research, but only the FP6 project RUSHES is focusing on automatic semantic annotation, indexing and retrieval of raw and un-edited audio-visual content. Even professional content creators and providers as well as home-users are dealing with this type of content and therefore novel technologies for semantic search and retrieval are required. In this paper, we present a summary of the most relevant achievements of the RUSHES project, focusing on specific approaches for automatic annotation as well as the main features of the final RUSHES search engine.     

Network Awareness of P2P Live Streaming Applications: A Measurement Study

Early P2P-TV systems have already attracted millions of users, and many new commercial solutions are entering this market. Little information is however available about how these systems work, due to their closed and proprietary design. In this paper, we present large scale experiments to compare three of the most successful P2P-TV systems, namely PPLive, SopCast and TVAnts. Our goal is to assess what level of "network awareness" has been embedded in the applications. We first define a general framework to quantify which network layer parameters leverage application choices, i.e., what parameters mainly drive the peer selection and data exchange. We then apply the methodology to a large dataset, collected during a number of experiments where we deployed about 40 peers in several European countries. From analysis of the dataset, we observe that TVAnts and PPLive exhibit a mild preference to exchange data among peers in the same autonomous system the peer belongs to, while this clustering effect is less intense in SopCast. However, no preference versus country, subnet or hop count is shown. Therefore, we believe that next-generation P2P live streaming applications definitively need to improve the level of network-awareness, so to better localize the traffic in the network and thus increase their network-friendliness as well.     

Mobile Agent Coordination for Distributed Network Management

Mobile agents are a promising technology to face the problems raised by the increasing complexity and size of today's networks. In particular, in the area of network management, mobile agents can lead to a fully distributed paradigm to overcome the limits of traditional centralized approaches. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is the definition of high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources—data and services—provided by the network nodes. On this basis, this paper describes the MARS coordination architecture for mobile agents. MARS is based on the definition of programmable tuple spaces associated with the network nodes: mobile agents can access the local resources and services via the tuple space, thus adopting a standard and high-level interface. The network administrator—via mobile agents—can dynamically program the behavior of the tuple space in reaction to the agents' access to the tuple space, thus leading to a flexible network model. Several examples show the effectiveness of the MARS approach in supporting network management activities.     

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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A low-power wireless video sensor node for distributed object detection

In this paper we propose MicrelEye, a wireless video node for cooperative distributed video processing applications that involve image classification. The node is equipped with a low-cost VGA CMOS image sensor, a reconfigurable processing engine (FPGA, Microcontroller, SRAM) and a Bluetooth 100-m transceiver. It has a size of few cubic centimeters and its typical power consumption is approximately ten times less than that of typical commercial DSP-based solutions. As regards classification, a highly optimized hardware-oriented support vector machine-like (SVM-like) algorithm called ERSVM is proposed and implemented. We describe our hardware and software architecture, its performance and power characteristics. The case study considered in this paper is people detection. The obtained results suggest that the present technology allows for the design of simple intelligent video nodes capable of performing classification tasks locally.