Application Sharing

Functionality of electronic commerce enabling technologies is dependent upon pervasive networks that a large number of applications share. Given the scarcity of network resources, it is imperative to allocate existing resources based on the actual needs of its users. In this paper, we study a two sided matching algorithm that enables such an allocation using tools from matching literature. Network system deploys intelligent agents that negotiate terms of allocation assignments with other intelligent agents that represent the users. We report the time complexity of the algorithm and give an example on how the mechanism performs.

This chapter has two goals. The first goal is to compare Machine Learning (ML) and Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD, also often called Data Mining, DM) insisting on how much they actually differ. In order to make my ideas somewhat easier to understand, and as an illustration, I will include a description of several research topics that I find relevant to KDD and to KDD only. The second goal is to show that the definition I give of KDD can be almost directly applied to text analysis, and that will lead us to a very restrictive definition of Knowledge Discovery in Texts (KDT). I will provide a compelling example of a real-life set of rules obtained by what I call KDT techniques.

Organizations seeking improvements in their performance are increasingly exploring alternative models and approaches for providing support services; one such approach being Shared Services. Because of the possible consequential impact of Shared Services on organizations, and given that information systems (IS) is both an enabler of Shared Services (for other functional areas) as well as a promising area for Shared Services application, Shared Services is an important area for research in the IS field. Though Shared Services has been extensively adopted on the promise of economies of scale and scope, factors of Shared Services success (or failure) have received little research attention. This paper reports the distillation of success and failure factors of Shared Services from an IS perspective. Employing NVIVO and content analysis of 158 selected articles, 9 key success factors and 5 failure factors are identified, suggesting important implications for practice and further research.

The development of service robots has recently received considerable attention. Their deployment, however, normally involves a substantial programming effort to develop a particular application. With the incorporation of service robots to daily activities, it is expected that they will require to perform different tasks. Fortunately, many of such applications share common modules such as navigation, localization and human interaction, among others. In this chapter, a general framework to easily develop different applications for service robots is presented. In particular, we have developed a set of general purpose modules for common tasks that can be easily integrated into a distributed, layered architecture, and coordinated by a decision-theoretic planner to perform different tasks. The coordinator is based on a Markov decision process (MDP) whose reward is set according to the task's goal, the states are represented by a set of variables affected by the general modules, and the actions correspond to the execution of the different modules. In order to create a new application the user only needs to define a new MDP whose solution provides an optimal policy that coordinates the different behaviors for performing the task. The effectiveness of our approach is experimentally demonstrated in four different service robot tasks with very promising results. Additionally, several aspects include some novel ideas; in particular in navigation, localization and gesture recognition.

We present a series of achievements associated with Geant4-based applications in medical physics and, in particular, in radiotherapy (external beams and brachytherapy), protontherapy, PEM, PET, MRT, metabolic therapy, IORT; projects in microdosimetry and radiobiology are beginning. The Geant4 CTinterface allows to reproduce realistically the patient anatomy, the integration to the GRID allows to run the applications sharing distributed computing resources. The Geant4 Medical Physics Group has born from the collaboration of Geant4 with several research and medical physics institutes in Europe.

In many cooperative work sessions a presenter shares a view of her workstation screen with a group of passive viewers, projecting it on a large screen or using bitmapbased sharing protocols. While these schemes offer advantages of simplicity and sharing transparency over custom collaboration-aware tools, all group members will have the exact same view. Data deemed private by the presenter may be exposed and viewers have to watch the presenter's detailed interactions, making it hard to infer her underlying intentions. We present a general system that allows customization of existing single user application views. Simple policy-guided manipulations are applied to the shared windows and image buffers, providing proactive privacy protection with relaxed verbosity and cues to meet presenter and viewers' needs.

This paper describes an Augmented Reality Videoconferencing System, which is a novel remote collaboration tool combining a desktop-based AR system and a videoconference module. The novelty of our system is the combination of these tools with AR applications superimposed on live video background displaying the conference parties' real environment, merging the advantages of the natural face-to-face communication of videoconferencing and AR's interaction capabilities with distributed virtual objects using tangible physical artifacts. The simplicity of the system makes it affordable for everyday use. We explain our system design based on concurrent video streaming, optical tracking and 3D application sharing, and provide experimental proof that it yields superior quality compared to pure video streaming with successive optical tracking from the compressed streams. We demonstrate the system's collaborative features with a volume rendering application that allows users to display and examine volumetric data simultaneously and to highlight or explore slices of the volume by manipulating an optical marker as a cutting plane interaction device.

There are many applications and uses for which it is more advantageous to use solar installations than to extend the electrical network and connect to it. This kind of applications are numerous covering from isolated houses to telephone repeaters and the like. These kind of applications share some common characteristics like being located in remote not easy accessible areas, require relatively low power for operation, and being dif®cult to maintain.

Multi-Processor Systems on Chip (MPSoC) run multiple independent applications, often developed by different parties. The applications share the hardware resources, e.g. processors, memories and interconnect. The sharing typically causes interference between the applications, which severely complicates system integration and verification. Even if the applications are verified in isolation, the system designer must verify the combined behaviour, leading to an explosion in design complexity. Composable MPSoCs have no interference between applications, thus allowing independent design and verification. For an MPSoC to be composable, all the hardware resources must offer composability. A particularly challenging resource is the processors, often purchased as off-the-shelf intellectual property.

Middleware components are becoming increasingly important as applications share computational resources in distributed environments, such as high-end clusters with ever larger number of processors, computational grids and increasingly large server farms. One of the main challenges in such environments is to achieve scalability of synchronization. In general, concurrency services arbitrate resource requests in distributed systems. But concurrency protocols currently lack scalability. Adding such guarantees enables resource sharing and computing with distributed objects in systems with a large number of nodes.

A Cluster Based Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network Architecture is proposed to facilitate more than one application sharing the whole or a part of a wireless sensor network, where each application may have its own network, processing requirements and protocols. Such a network is divided into clusters and the clusters are organized hierarchically. For synchronizing the CHWSN there is the requirement for a cluster based hierarchical time synchronization algorithm. None of the already existing time synchronization algorithms satisfy the needs of time synchronization in our CHWSN architecture.

Gestures in collaborative environments can be conveyed by video, at the cost of high bandwidth and one window interface per user. Virtual actors allow low bit rate gesture transmission and display in a single virtual world for several users. We describe a prototype system for 3D-gesture acquisition in real time using a single camera and gesture restitution by avatars in a 3D televirtuality environment to support application sharing.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become an emerging new research area in the distributed computing environment. It plays an important role in the pervasive computing to support a wide range of applications of our daily life in future. More specifically, such wireless network proposes a new monitoring and control model for applications to operate as environmental monitoring, public safety, medical, transportation and military. Most of those applications share similar features such as difficult to access because of geographical locations where the network has been deployed, the large scale of deployment, high mobility, and prone to failure. Accordingly, the traditional network maintenance and management approaches become impractical under such very dynamic conditions. Furthermore, features such as smart, autonomy, and selfawareness have also been considered as the ultimate vision for WSNs to continuously support various applications in a long period of time. Thus, network management becomes extremely important and vital in order to keep the whole network and application work properly. Until now, there still doesn't emerge a considerable network management solution for WSN. Most of existing research addresses one or several application-specific problems in WSNs, instead of considering from network management aspects. This paper overviews several related ongoing research approaches, and provides discussion and provision of some design issues and requirements for building efficient management architecture for WSN. This project is sponsored by ESPRC restrictions on its resources (e.g. energy, communication, and processor capacities), and consequently limits sensor nodes to undertake too much complex tasks. In general, sensor nodes are expected to operate autonomously for a long period of time. Because of limited resource, they always split tasks into individual portions, and coordinate with each other to achieve a big objective. These days, WSNs are likely to operate under very dynamic and critical environment with applications such as environmental monitoring, public safety, medical, transportation and military. Sensor nodes are usually difficult in access because of the geographical locations where they are deployed or the large scale of network. Thus, network maintenance for reconfiguration, recovery from failure or technical problems becomes impractical. In early days, this problem can be ignored as WSNs were supposed to operate cheaply and ready to be disposed. If the system breaks or underperforms, more nodes will be deployed to cover the failure. While, researchers have recently found out that this vision is not always a case within our reach since resource (e.g. the sensor nodes, batteries on which they operate) are not that cheap. In addition, we would also like to get the most out of the system we have at hand, which requires the WSN to cooperate with various application rather than setting up a new network environment. Therefore, WSNs are indeed in need for some sort of management to continuously work without too much human being intervenes.

This paper describes an Augmented Reality Videoconferencing System, which is a novel remote collaboration tool combining a desktop-based AR system and a videoconference module. The novelty of our system is the combination of these tools with AR applications superimposed on live video background displaying the conference parties' real environment, merging the advantages of the natural face-to-face communication of videoconferencing and AR's interaction capabilities with distributed virtual objects using tangible physical artifacts. The simplicity of the system makes it affordable for everyday use. We explain our system design based on concurrent video streaming, optical tracking and 3D application sharing, and provide experimental proof that it yields superior quality compared to pure video streaming with successive optical tracking from the compressed streams. We demonstrate the system's collaborative features with a volume rendering application that allows users to display and examine volumetric data simultaneously and to highlight or explore slices of the volume by manipulating an optical marker as a cutting plane interaction device.

WheelFS is a wide-area distributed storage system intended to help multi-site applications share data and gain fault tolerance. WheelFS takes the form of a distributed file system with a familiar POSIX interface. Its design allows applications to adjust the tradeoff between prompt visibility of updates from other sites and the ability for sites to operate independently despite failures and long delays. WheelFS allows these adjustments via semantic cues, which provide application control over consistency, failure handling, and file and replica placement.

This paper describes an Augmented Reality Videoconferencing System, which is a novel remote collaboration tool combining a desktop-based AR system and a videoconference module. The novelty of our system is the combination of these tools with AR applications superimposed on live video background displaying the conference parties' real environment, merging the advantages of the natural face-to-face communication of videoconferencing and AR's interaction capabilities with distributed virtual objects using tangible physical artifacts. The simplicity of the system makes it affordable for everyday use. We explain our system design based on concurrent video streaming, optical tracking and 3D application sharing, and provide experimental proof that it yields superior quality compared to pure video streaming with successive optical tracking from the compressed streams. We demonstrate the system's collaborative features with a volume rendering application that allows users to display and examine volumetric data simultaneously and to highlight or explore slices of the volume by manipulating an optical marker as a cutting plane interaction device.

Existing multicore systems already provide deep levels of thread parallelism. Hybrid programming models and composability of parallel libraries are very active areas of research within the scientific programming community. As more applications and libraries become parallel, scenarios where multiple threads compete for a core are unavoidable. In this paper we evaluate the impact of task oversubscription on the performance of MPI, OpenMP and UPC implementations of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks on UMA and NUMA multisocket architectures. We evaluate explicit thread affinity management against the default Linux load balancing and discuss sharing and partitioning system management techniques. Our results indicate that oversubscription provides beneficial effects for applications running in competitive environments. Sharing all the available cores between applications provides better throughput than explicit partitioning. Modest levels of oversubscription improve system throughput by 27% and provide better performance isolation of applications from their co-runners: best overall throughput is always observed when applications share cores and each is executed with multiple threads per core. Rather than "resource" symbiosis, our results indicate that the determining behavioral factor when applications share a system is the granularity of the synchronization operations.

Recent developments in synthetic biology are described and characterized as moving the era of biotechnology into platform technologies. Platform technologies enable rapid and diffuse innovations and simultaneous product development in diffuse markets, often targeting sectors of the economy that have traditionally been thought to have little relationship to one another. In the case of synthetic biology, pharmaceutical and biofuel product

This paper proposes using virtual reality to enhance the perception of actions by distant users on a shared application. Here, distance may refer either to space (e.g. in a remote synchronous collaboration) or time (e.g. during playback of recorded actions). Our approach consists in immersing the application in a virtual inhabited 3D space and mimicking user actions by animating avatars. We illustrate this approach with two applications, the one for remote collaboration on a shared application and the other to playback recorded sequences of user actions. We suggest this could be a low cost enhancement for telepresence.

The development of service robots has recently received considerable attention. Their deployment, however, normally involves a substantial programming effort to develop a particular application. With the incorporation of service robots to daily activities, it is expected that they will require to perform different tasks. Fortunately, many of such applications share common modules such as navigation, localization and human interaction, among others. In this chapter, a general framework to easily develop different applications for service robots is presented. In particular, we have developed a set of general purpose modules for common tasks that can be easily integrated into a distributed, layered architecture, and coordinated by a decision-theoretic planner to perform different tasks. The coordinator is based on a Markov decision process (MDP) whose reward is set according to the task's goal, the states are represented by a set of variables affected by the general modules, and the actions correspond to the execution of the different modules. In order to create a new application the user only needs to define a new MDP whose solution provides an optimal policy that coordinates the different behaviors for performing the task. The effectiveness of our approach is experimentally demonstrated in four different service robot tasks with very promising results. Additionally, several aspects include some novel ideas; in particular in navigation, localization and gesture recognition.

Advanced location based services have the ability to track users with Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled cell phones in real-time. These applications share a common problem; the continuous calculation and transmission of GPS fixes from the mobile phone to a server consumes a considerable amount of energy and increases data transmission costs. Therefore, an application-level algorithm is necessary to reduce the number of GPS fixes calculated and transmitted, while continuing to track the user in real-time and record an accurate representation of his or her travel path. In this paper, two complementary algorithms are presented: the Critical Point (CP) algorithm, which filters data points to be transmitted to the server, and the location-aware state machine, which dynamically manages the frequency of the location re-calculation update rate. Both algorithms were implemented in TRAC-IT, a Java Micro Edition (Java ME) application designed to automatically collect user travel behavior; the proposed algorithms allow TRAC-IT to build an accurate representation of the user's path with a considerably reduced number of fixes while significantly extending mobile device battery life.

General-purpose commercial database systems, though widely used, fail to meet the performance requirements of applications requiring short, predictable response times, and extremely high throughput rates. As a result, most high performance applications are custom designed and lack the flexibility needed to adapt to unforeseen, evolving requirements. In the military domain, command centers often contain numerous "stovepipe" systems unable to share data easily. The need for improved data management is apparent with the rapid growth of communication networks and the increasing demand by end users for network-centric solutions that require flexibility and high performance. These applications share the need for real-time response to a dynamically changing external environment; the need to store a substantial amount of data; and the need to process transactions that have the usual ACID guarantees of traditional database systems.

Augmented reality (AR) takes natural user input (NUI), such as gestures, voice, and eye gaze, and produces digital visual overlays on top of reality seen by a user. Today, multiple shipping AR applications exist, most notably titles for the Microsoft Kinect and smartphone applications such as Layar, Wik- itude, and Junaio. Despite this activity, little at- tention has been paid

The application sharing mechanism in multi-application smart cards facilitates corroborative schemes between applications in a secure and reliable manner. Traditional application sharing can only be realised if both applications are installed on the same device. In this paper, we extend the smart card firewall to include the application sharing mechanism between applications installed on different smart cards. We propose Platform and Application Binding Protocols that enables two smart-cards / applications to authenticate and ascertain the trustworthiness before sharing resources. Furthermore, we provide an informal analysis of the protocols along with comparison with existing protocols. Subsequently, mechanical formal analysis based on the CasperFDR, and the implementation experience is presented.

In recent times, technology is being used more and more in a variety of educational endeavours. This thesis considers the use of technology in the improvement of teaching and learning mathematics in higher education. In particular, it addresses, through three case studies, specific technological solutions to two well documented educational problems: the knowledge gap between secondary school and university level

Communication theories and technology have tended to focus on extended, formal meetings and have neglected a prevalent and vital form of workplace communication-namely, lightweight communication. Unlike formal, extended meetings, lightweight interaction is brief, informal, unplanned, and intermittent. We analyze naturalistic data from a study of workplace communication and derive five design criteria for lightweight interaction systems. These criteria require that systems for lightweight interaction support conversational tracking, rapid connection, the ability to leave a message, context management, and shared real-time objects. Using these criteria, we evaluate existing interpersonal communications technologies. We then describe an implementation of a system (TeleNotes) that is designed to support lightweight interaction by meeting these criteria. The interface metaphor allows communications to be based around desktop objects, resembling "sticky notes." These objects are also organized into "desktop piles" to support conversational threads and provide mechanisms for initiating real-time audio, video, and application sharing. We conducted informal user testing of several system prototypes. Based on our findings, outstanding issues concerning theory and systems design for communication systems are outlined-in particular, with regard to the issue of managing conversations over time.

Wireless sensor networks are evolving from dedicated application-specific platforms to integrated infrastructure shared by multiple applications. Shared sensor networks offer inherent advantages in terms of flexibility and cost since they allow dynamic resource sharing and allocation among multiple applications. Such shared systems face the critical need for allocation of nodes to contending applications to enhance the overall Quality of Monitoring (QoM) under resource constraints.

In this paper a model for collaboration between engi- neers in a distributed virtual environment, based upon a suite of specialised computer tools is presented. The system uses the distributed virtual reality system DIVE, which has been customised to allow interoperability with existing CAD systems. Other tools implemented to support information exchange in a product develop- ment project include audio-/videoconferencing

The invention provides expression vectors containing the promoter, enhancer and substantially complete 5'-untranslated region including the first intron of the major immediate early gene of human cytomegalovirus. Further vectors including the hCMV-MIE DNA linked directly to the coding sequence of a heterologous gene are described, Host cells transfected with the vectors and a process for producing heterologous polypeptides using the vectors and the use of the hCMV-MIE DNA for expression of a heterologous gene are also included within the invention.

In this paper a model for collaboration between engineers in a distributed virtual environment, based upon a suite of specialised computer tools is presented. The system uses the distributed virtual reality system DIVE, which has been customised to allow interoperability with existing CAD systems. Other tools implemented to support information exchange in a product development project include audio-/videoconferencing software, shared workspace systems for document sharing, application sharing tools, shared whiteboard applications and more. The paper discusses the components of a prototype collaboration environment and how these components together form a coherent whole from both a technical standpoint as well as in respect to usability issues.

Multi-application smart card technology facilitates applications to securely share their data and functionality. The security enforcement and assurance in application sharing is provided by the smart card firewall. The firewall mechanism is well defined and studied in the Issuer Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (ICOM), in which a smart card is under total control of its issuer. However, it is not analysed in the User Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (UCOM) that delegates the smart card control to their users. In this paper, we present UCOM's security requirements for the firewall mechanism and propose a generic framework that satisfies them.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become an emerging new research area in the distributed computing environment. It plays an important role in the pervasive computing to support a wide range of applications of our daily life in future. More specifically, such wireless network proposes a new monitoring and control model for applications to operate as environmental monitoring, public safety, medical, transportation and military. Most of those applications share similar features such as difficult to access because of geographical locations where the network has been deployed, the large scale of deployment, high mobility, and prone to failure. Accordingly, the traditional network maintenance and management approaches become impractical under such very dynamic conditions. Furthermore, features such as smart, autonomy, and selfawareness have also been considered as the ultimate vision for WSNs to continuously support various applications in a long period of time. Thus, network management becomes extremely important and vital in order to keep the whole network and application work properly. Until now, there still doesn't emerge a considerable network management solution for WSN. Most of existing research addresses one or several application-specific problems in WSNs, instead of considering from network management aspects. This paper overviews several related ongoing research approaches, and provides discussion and provision of some design issues and requirements for building efficient management architecture for WSN.

In Pair Programming -a software development technique that is part of Extreme Programming (XP) -two developers work side by side, on a single computer, to jointly produce an artifact. It has been reported that Pair Programming can be accounted for the development of higher quality software in half the time it required a single programmer. Pair programmers are meant to be collocated since they require continuous and fluid communication. However, the globalization of the software industry and the growth of open source software development are trends that motivate the need to support Distributed Pair Programming. For distributed pair programming to be effective, its support should facilitate not only actually collaborating in pairs, but also the pairing of distributed colleagues in an opportunistic and flexible manner. In this paper we present the COPPER collaborative editor, developed using the Collaborative Spaces Model, to support pair programming during actual collaboration, and for potential collaboration; awareness on the opportunities for collaboration when a distributed colleague is available or working on a file of common interest. We also present the results of an empirical evaluation of the actual collaboration features of the tool. The evaluation considered three different working conditions: pairs collocated sharing a single computer; distributed pairs using application sharing mode; and distributed pairs using collaboration aware facilities. In all three cases the subjects used the COPPER collaborative editor. The results support our hypothesis that distributed pairs could find the same amount of errors as their collocated counterparts. However, no evidence was found that the pairs that used actual collaboration awareness services had better code comprehension, as we had also hypothesized. Overall, according to comments from evaluation participants', COPPER improves Distributed Pair Programming, in subtle but significant ways, by allowing concurrent work and better maintaining awareness on the concurrent actions of the pair, in contrast to collaboration-transparent applications which do not support these features.

This paper proposes using virtual reality to enhance the perception of actions by distant users on a shared application. Here, distance may refer either to space (e.g. in a remote synchronous collaboration) or time (e.g. during playback of recorded actions). Our approach consists in immersing the application in a virtual inhabited 3D space and mimicking user actions by animating avatars whose motion can be either generated from user actions on the shared application or from motion capture by a computer vision system we briefly describe. We illustrate this approach with two applications, one for remote collaboration on a shared application and the other to playback recorded sequences of user actions. We suggest this could be a low cost enhancement for telepresence.

Due to software which plays an increasingly role in everyday life, interaction between humans and computers will increase in importance; therefore, the ability to support interactions for efficient re-use of experience is a major challenge for systems in the future. Trace Based Reasoning will have a significant impact on applications sharing experience, when they are based on the web in particular, since traces allow us to imagine several ways of interaction in systems and to combine multiple modes of interaction in a single system. In the conducted study we aimed at developing an Assist System of Human Diagnostician (SADU), meaning that this system will have the human knowledge and then information retrieved by interaction with humans at the SADU request.

In Pair Programming -a software development technique that is part of Extreme Programming (XP) -two developers work side by side, on a single computer, to jointly produce an artifact. It has been reported that Pair Programming can be accounted for the development of higher quality software in half the time it required a single programmer. Pair programmers are meant to be collocated since they require continuous and fluid communication. However, the globalization of the software industry and the growth of open source software development are trends that motivate the need to support Distributed Pair Programming. For distributed pair programming to be effective, its support should facilitate not only actually collaborating in pairs, but also the pairing of distributed colleagues in an opportunistic and flexible manner. In this paper we present the COPPER collaborative editor, developed using the Collaborative Spaces Model, to support pair programming during actual collaboration, and for potential collaboration; awareness on the opportunities for collaboration when a distributed colleague is available or working on a file of common interest. We also present the results of an empirical evaluation of the actual collaboration features of the tool. The evaluation considered three different working conditions: pairs collocated sharing a single computer; distributed pairs using application sharing mode; and distributed pairs using collaboration aware facilities. In all three cases the subjects used the COPPER collaborative editor. The results support our hypothesis that distributed pairs could find the same amount of errors as their collocated counterparts. However, no evidence was found that the pairs that used actual collaboration awareness services had better code comprehension, as we had also hypothesized. Overall, according to comments from evaluation participants', COPPER improves Distributed Pair Programming, in subtle but significant ways, by allowing concurrent work and better maintaining awareness on the concurrent actions of the pair, in contrast to collaboration-transparent applications which do not support these features.

Interactive tridimensional visualization of terrain models can be found in geographical information systems and computer games. Both applications share the need for high performance algorithms that are tailored to produce textured images in interactive time, say at least 5 frames per second. We propose and analyze the extension of a well known ray casting algorithm to the case where the view plane is not vertical. Three efficient algorithms are presented and compared. Experimental results are shown and conclusions are made

for pervasive information gathering. We develop simple and efficient data delivery schemes tailored for DFT-MSN, which has several unique characteristics such as sensor mobility, loose connectivity, fault tolerability, delay tolerability, and buffer limit. We first study two basic approaches, namely, direct transmission and flooding. We analyze their performance by using queuing theory and statistics. Based on the analytic results that show the tradeoff between data delivery delay/ratio and transmission overhead, we introduce an optimized flooding scheme that minimizes transmission overhead in flooding. Then, we propose a simple and effective DFT-MSN data delivery scheme, which consists of two key components for data transmission and queue management, respectively. The former makes decision on when and where to transmit data messages based on the delivery probability, which reflects the likelihood that a sensor can deliver data messages to the sink. The latter decides which messages to transmit or drop based on the fault tolerance, which indicates the importance of the messages. The system parameters are carefully tuned on the basis of thorough analyses to optimize network performance. Extensive simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. Our results show that the proposed DFT-MSN data delivery scheme achieves the highest message delivery ratio with acceptable delay and transmission overhead.

Augmented reality (AR) takes natural user input (NUI), such as gestures, voice, and eye gaze, and produces digital visual overlays on top of reality seen by a user. Today, multiple shipping AR applications exist, most notably titles for the Microsoft Kinect and smartphone applications such as Layar, Wikitude, and Junaio. Despite this activity, little attention has been paid to operating system support for AR applications. Instead, each AR application today does its own sensing and rendering, with the help of user-level libraries like OpenCV or the Microsoft Kinect SDK.

Semantic Web applications share a large portion of development effort with database-driven Web applications. Existing approaches for development of these database-driven applications cannot be directly applied to Semantic Web data due to differences in the underlying data model. We develop a mapping approach that embeds Semantic Web data into object-oriented languages and thereby enables reuse of existing Web application frameworks.

Most distributed meeting support systems focus on meeting management and audio/video communication mechanisms. They provide little support for a flexible meeting process and a shared information space with structure-rich visual artifacts. In this work, a cooperative visual hypermedia system is developed to provide visual hypermedia artifacts for team members to manipulate in a distributed meeting. The visual hypermedia system is a hypermedia-based drawing system that integrates visual hypermedia artifacts and structures found in multiple hypertext domains. In addition, the visual hypermedia is integrated with process support for flexible meeting control and for easy setup of audio/video and application sharing communication channels. A use cases is presented, which shows that using the cooperative visual hypermedia, distributed teams can perform many kinds of meetings, in the meantime, enjoying dedicated support for the planning, control, information management, and follow-up activi...

Managing a Network-on-Chip (NoC) in an efficient way is a challenging task. To succeed, the operating system (OS) needs to be tuned to the capabilities and the needs of the NoC. Only by creating a tight interaction can we combine the necessary flexibility with the required efficiency. This paper illustrates such an interaction by detailing the management of communication resources in a system containing a packet-switched NoC and a closely integrated OS. Our NoC system is emulated by linking an FPGA to a PDA. We show that, with the right NoC support, the OS is able to optimize communication resource usage. Additionally, the OS is able to diminish or remove the interference between independent applications sharing a common NoC communication resource.