Seventh

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the logical further development of today's Internet. Technological advancements lead to smart objects being capable of identifying, locating, sensing and connecting and thus leading to new forms of communication between people and things and things themselves. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) encompasses technical systems to support elderly people in their daily routine to allow an independent and safe lifestyle as long as possible. Keep In Touch (KIT) uses smart objects and technologies (Near Field Communication and Radio Frequency Identification) to facilitate telemonitoring processes. Closed Loop Healthcare Services take use of KIT technology and are capable of processing relevant data and establishing communication channels between elderly people and their environment and different groups of care-givers (physicians, relatives, mobile care providers). The combination of KIT technology (smart objects) and Closed Loop Healthcare Services results in an applied IoT infrastructure for AAL scenarios. Already applied IoT and AAL applications in telemonitoring and medication intake compliance projects show that these applications are useful and accepted by the elderly and that the developed infrastructure enables a new form of communication between people and people, people-topeople (P2P) communication. The personal communication between elderly people, their environment and relevant groups of care givers is an important aspect in AAL. Through the combination of KIT and Closed Loop Healthcare, a central AAL paradigm can be realized through the IoT, where the elderly live in their homes with smart objects, thus smart homes, communicating to the outside world in an intelligent and goal-orientated manner. (Abstract) eHealth; Pervasive Healthcare; Telemedicine; Near Field Communication (NFC); RFID (key words) I.

In this study, we propose an alternative solution for Bezier curve fitting with Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. DE algorithm is conducted by randomly generating the control points of the Bezier curve. These generated control points are used to calculate the Bezier curve point. The fitness function of DE algorithm is computed to search for the minimum error. From the experiments, we found that the results of our proposed method achieve the minimum error value significantly.

An approach to the optimal design of pipe networks is presented and applied to a case study. The sequential unconstrained minimization technique to solve the optimal design of network is applied for pipe network optimization and the Newton-Raphson method for the ...

The National Science Foundation, beginning in the late 1990s, laid the foundation for the development of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), which is under development as of this writing. In 2004, the initial NSF-Funded components of NEES will be in place. The participation of experimental or simulation sites other than the NSF-funded NEES Equipment Sites, and the involvement of researchers, educators, practitioners, and others, will become part of NEES activities as well. The combination of these human, laboratory, and computer resources will inaugurate in 2004 the beginning of a new mode for conducting earthquake engineering research: NEES Collaboratory research.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not only an architecture, rather it is a relationship between the service provider, broker and user. Designing middleware platforms for this architecture really helps in achieving interoperability, loose coupling and high efficiency especially for applications running in heterogeneous environments. The job of an SOA middleware is to cater for the functional properties in addition to supporting the non-functional properties which include scalability, service reliability, service flexibility and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. This paper reviews the current work in the area and the trends and challenges to be addressed when designing and developing SOA middleware solutions for different application domains. The paper also discusses the main objectives and approaches of the current projects.

Nowadays, product line, as an important topic in software development domain, has been paid attention by software engineering practitioners. Finding suitable components to construct an efficient and comprehensive product line with low costs is one of the critical problems in ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the logical further development of today's Internet. Technological advancements lead to smart objects being capable of identifying, locating, sensing and connecting and thus leading to new forms of communication between people and things and things themselves. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) encompasses technical systems to support elderly people in their daily routine to allow an independent and safe lifestyle as long as possible. Keep In Touch (KIT) uses smart objects and technologies (Near Field Communication and Radio Frequency Identification) to facilitate telemonitoring processes. Closed Loop Healthcare Services take use of KIT technology and are capable of processing relevant data and establishing communication channels between elderly people and their environment and different groups of care-givers (physicians, relatives, mobile care providers). The combination of KIT technology (smart objects) and Closed Loop Healthcare Services results in an applied IoT infrastructure for AAL scenarios. Already applied IoT and AAL applications in telemonitoring and medication intake compliance projects show that these applications are useful and accepted by the elderly and that the developed infrastructure enables a new form of communication between people and people, people-topeople (P2P) communication. The personal communication between elderly people, their environment and relevant groups of care givers is an important aspect in AAL. Through the combination of KIT and Closed Loop Healthcare, a central AAL paradigm can be realized through the IoT, where the elderly live in their homes with smart objects, thus smart homes, communicating to the outside world in an intelligent and goal-orientated manner. (Abstract) eHealth; Pervasive Healthcare; Telemedicine; Near Field Communication (NFC); RFID (key words) I.

An approach to the optimal design of pipe networks is presented and applied to a case study. The sequential unconstrained minimization technique to solve the optimal design of network is applied for pipe network optimization and the Newton-Raphson method for the hydraulic analysis of the network. Water distribution system design satisfying all constraints including pipe diameter and nodal pressure is performed. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on an existing network. The case study is for El-Mostakbal City network, an extension to an existing distribution network of Ismailia City, Egypt. The application of the method on the network shows its capability to solve such actual optimization problems.

The increasing potential to combine devices with different capabilities and purposes leads to new security issues. Traditional security prescribes what has to be prohibited and is thus too inflexible to cope with a constantly changing context. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to formulating security policies in UbiComp based on the notion of commandments. In essence, commandments formulate situations that should occur within an indefinite time span, thus being conceptually similar to, albeit qualitative ...

RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology is widely used for supply chain management and inventory control. Furthermore, RFID has been recognized as a tool to realize a ubiquitous environment. The typical architecture of RFID applications comprises RFID tags, which are embedded in or attached to an object, an RFID reader, and IS (information services) server. The RFID reader reads the code in the RFID tag and interprets it by communicating with the IS server via a proper communication network. This is the typical architecture defined by EPCglobal. The RFID reader can be stationary or mobile. A mobile RFID reader affords more applications than the stationary one. In this paper, we describe the core components for realizing a mobile RFID application, such as a mobile RFID reader, platform architecture, and the corresponding network architecture. Although there are several types of mobile RFID readers in the market, we propose a specially designed mobile RFID technology that has several positive features including security, network architecture, operation scenario, and code resolution mechanism. Furthermore, we analyze the characteristics of the proposed technologies.

This paper describes a framework for a software internal quality measurement program with automatic metrics extraction. This framework was successfully implemented in an Industrial Software Factory. That was possible through the implementation of a proposed Continuous Integration (CI) environment to periodically analyze source codes and extract metrics. These metrics were consolidated in a Data Warehouse by allowing On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) analysis with high-performance and userfriendly interface. The measurement program followed GQ(I)M paradigm for metrics selection to ensure that collected metrics are relevant from the Software Factory goals perspective. Finally, the Measurement and Analysis Process Area of the Capability Maturity Model integration -CMMi was used for measurement and analysis planning and implementation.

In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient feature set based on modified contour chain code to achieve higher recognition accuracy of Persian/Arabic numerals. In classification part, we employ support vector machine (SVM) as classifier. Feature set consists of 196 dimensions, which are the chain-code direction frequencies in the contour pixels of input image. We evaluated our scheme on 80,000 handwritten samples of Persian numerals. Using 60,000 samples for training, we tested our scheme on other 20,000 samples and obtained 98.71% correct recognition rate. Further, we obtained 99.37% accuracy using five-fold cross validation technique on 80,000 dataset.

This paper describes a framework for a software internal quality measurement program with automatic metrics extraction. This framework was successfully implemented in an Industrial Software Factory. That was possible through the implementation of a proposed Continuous Integration (CI) environment to periodically analyze source codes and extract metrics. These metrics were consolidated in a Data Warehouse by allowing On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) analysis with high-performance and userfriendly interface. The measurement program followed GQ(I)M paradigm for metrics selection to ensure that collected metrics are relevant from the Software Factory goals perspective. Finally, the Measurement and Analysis Process Area of the Capability Maturity Model integration -CMMi was used for measurement and analysis planning and implementation.

Objective: To examine the effect of Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) membership on 'immunity' to the secular effects of changes in BMI. Design: Three independent, cross-sectional, screening surveys conducted by Sydney Adventist Hospital in 1976, 1986 and 1988 and a survey conducted among residents of Melbourne in 2006. Subjects: Two hundred and fifty-two SDA and 464 non-SDA in 1976; 166 SDA and 291 non-SDA in 1986; 120 SDA and 300-non SDA in 1988; and 251 SDA and 294 non-SDA in 2006. Measurements: Height and weight measured by hospital staff in 1976, 1986 and 1988; self-reported by respondents in 2006.

This paper presents a new method to detect initial seed points for automatic tracing of the vessel center lines in coronary angiograms. Vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and efficient among several feature extraction methods. However, most of them suffer from incomplete results due to inappropriate trade-off between the completeness of seed point detection and computational efficiency. Imposing strict validation rules decreases the number of background traces, but results in more false negatives and more computation time. We show that using the geometrical properties of gradient vectors calculated at vessel boundary points as a validation criterion, improves the performance of the seed point detection algorithm. The results illustrate that the proposed method improves upon the prior method in both performance and computation time.

Action recognition is a crucial task to provide high-level semantic description of the video content, particularly in the case of sports videos. The bag-of-words (BoW) approach has proven to be successful for the categorization of objects and scenes in images, but it's unable to model temporal information between consecutive frames for video event recognition. In this paper, we present an approach to model actions as a sequence of histograms (one for each frame) represented using a traditional bag-of-words model. Actions are so described by a string (phrase) of variable size, depending on the clip's length, where each frame's representation is considered as a character. To compare these strings we use Needlemann-Wunsch distance, a metrics defined in the information theory, that deal with strings of different length. Finally, SVMs with a string kernel that includes this distance are used to perform classification. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach and they show that it outperforms baseline kNN classifiers.

With the prevalence of mobile devices that are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, the creation and access of user-generated content are extended to users on the go. Such content are tied to real world objects, in the form of geospatial annotations, and it is only natural that these annotations are visualized using a map-based approach. However, viewing maps that are filled with annotations could hinder the serendipitous discovery of data, especially on the small ...

In this paper we present a prototype two-axis scanning laser rangefinder, or LIDAR, intended for use on small mobile robots. By combining a high speed, highly accurate single point laser range sensor with a custom high speed, compact scanning mechanism, we have developed a sensor which can provide remarkably high resolution images at a rate sufficient to support autonomous navigation and map buildings. The design is simple and elegant using only two actuators and a single mirror arranged in a gyroscopestyle layout. The resulting system is lighter, smaller, and consumes less power than comparable commercially available systems. The prototype has a perceptual range of 360 continuous degrees HFOV,-IO to +I5 degrees VFOV, and 0 to IOm with a variance of less than Imm. Power consumption is less than I0 W in full-scan mode, and the scanner occupies a volume of less than 3,100 cm3. These jeatures make it attractive for use in mobile robot systems where both power and space are at a premium. Figure 4 Indoor Mapping. (a)-(c) Single line scans. (d) Map built from line scan.

An approach to the optimal design of pipe networks is presented and applied to a case study. The sequential unconstrained minimization technique to solve the optimal design of network is applied for pipe network optimization and the Newton-Raphson ...

This paper presents a new method to detect initial seed points for automatic tracing of the vessel center lines in coronary angiograms. Vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and efficient among several feature extraction methods. However, most of them suffer from incomplete results due to inappropriate trade-off between the completeness of seed point detection and computational efficiency. Imposing strict validation rules decreases the number of background traces, but results in more false negatives and more computation time. We show that using the geometrical properties of gradient vectors calculated at vessel boundary points as a validation criterion, improves the performance of the seed point detection algorithm. The results illustrate that the proposed method improves upon the prior method in both performance and computation time.

A natural language spoken dialog system includes a large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, whose output is used as the input of a spoken language understanding component. Two challenges in such a framework are that the ASR component is far from being perfect and the users can say the same thing in very different ways. So, it is very important to be tolerant to recognition errors and some amount of orthographic variability. In this paper, we present our work on developing new methods and investigating various ways of robust recognition and understanding of an utterance. To this end, we exploit word-level confusion networks (sausages), obtained from ASR word graphs (lattices) instead of the ASR 1-best hypothesis. Using sausages with an improved confidence model, we decreased the calltype classification error rate for AT&T's How May I Help You SM (HMIHY SM ) natural dialog system by 38%.

The National Science Foundation, beginning in the late 1990s, laid the foundation for the development of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), which is under development as of this writing. In 2004, the initial NSF-Funded components of NEES will be in place. The participation of experimental or simulation sites other than the NSF-funded NEES Equipment Sites, and the involvement of researchers, educators, practitioners, and others, will become part of NEES activities as well. The combination of these human, laboratory, and computer resources will inaugurate in 2004 the beginning of a new mode for conducting earthquake engineering research: NEES Collaboratory research.

The concept of a "Networked Physical World" originated from the Auto-ID Center, now called the Auto-ID Labs. Such a system can be realized with a combination of automatic identification technology and a ubiquitous computer network that will glue the physical world together. The ability to form a ubiquitous item identification network has a wide range of applications including manufacturing automation and supply chain management. We describe the building block system components of a distributed ubiquitous item identification network aimed at creating a "Networked Physical World" system and explore the data flows within the system.

This paper proposes an efficient skin-color and template based technique for automatic ear detection in a side face image. The technique first separates skin regions from nonskin regions and then searches for the ear within skin regions. Ear detection process involves three major steps. First, Skin Segmentation to eliminate all non-skin pixels from the image, second Ear Localization to perform ear detection using template matching approach, and third Ear Verification to validate the ear detection using the Zernike moments based shape descriptor. To handle the detection of ears of various shapes and sizes, an ear template is created considering the ears of various shapes (triangular, round, oval and rectangular) and resized automatically to a size suitable for the detection. Proposed technique is tested on the IIT Kanpur ear database consisting of 150 side face images and gives 94% accuracy.

This paper presents a new method to detect initial seed points for automatic tracing of the vessel center lines in coronary angiograms. Vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and efficient among several feature extraction methods. However, most of them suffer from incomplete results due to inappropriate trade-off between the completeness of seed point detection and computational efficiency. Imposing strict validation rules decreases the number of background traces, but results in more false negatives and more computation time. We show that using the geometrical properties of gradient vectors calculated at vessel boundary points as a validation criterion, improves the performance of the seed point detection algorithm. The results illustrate that the proposed method improves upon the prior method in both performance and computation time.

With the prevalence of mobile devices that are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, the creation and access of user-generated content are extended to users on the go. Such content are tied to real world objects, in the form of geospatial annotations, and it is only natural that these annotations are visualized using a map-based approach. However, viewing maps that are filled with annotations could hinder the serendipitous discovery of data, especially on the small screens of mobile devices. This calls for a need to manage the annotations. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application, MobiTOP, which enable users to create multimedia geospatial annotations and employs a map-based visualization for users to explore the annotations. We propose the adoption of clustering approaches to manage the volume annotations on the map. Two approaches of clustering techniques, namely incremental clustering and DBScan (Density based spatial clustering applications with noise), are proposed and compared with a baseline approach in our evaluation. Implications of our findings are discussed.

With the prevalence of mobile devices that are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, the creation and access of user-generated content are extended to users on the go. Such content are tied to real world objects, in the form of geospatial annotations, and it is only natural that these annotations are visualized using a map-based approach. However, viewing maps that are filled with annotations could hinder the serendipitous discovery of data, especially on the small screens of mobile devices. This calls for a need to manage the annotations. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application, MobiTOP, which enable users to create multimedia geospatial annotations and employs a map-based visualization for users to explore the annotations. We propose the adoption of clustering approaches to manage the volume annotations on the map. Two approaches of clustering techniques, namely incremental clustering and DBScan (Density based spatial clustering applications with noise), are proposed and compared with a baseline approach in our evaluation. Implications of our findings are discussed.

An approach to the optimal design of pipe networks is presented and applied to a case study. The sequential unconstrained minimization technique to solve the optimal design of network is applied for pipe network optimization and the Newton-Raphson method for the hydraulic analysis of the network. Water distribution system design satisfying all constraints including pipe diameter and nodal pressure is performed. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on an existing network. The case study is for El-Mostakbal City network, an extension to an existing distribution network of Ismailia City, Egypt. The application of the method on the network shows its capability to solve such actual optimization problems.

With the prevalence of mobile devices that are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, the creation and access of user-generated content are extended to users on the go. Such content are tied to real world objects, in the form of geospatial annotations, and it is only natural that these annotations are visualized using a map-based approach. However, viewing maps that are filled with annotations could hinder the serendipitous discovery of data, especially on the small screens of mobile devices. This calls for a need to manage the annotations. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application, MobiTOP, which enable users to create multimedia geospatial annotations and employs a map-based visualization for users to explore the annotations. We propose the adoption of clustering approaches to manage the volume annotations on the map. Two approaches of clustering techniques, namely incremental clustering and DBScan (Density based spatial clustering applications with noise), are proposed and compared with a baseline approach in our evaluation. Implications of our findings are discussed.

A natural language spoken dialog system includes a large vo-cabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, whose output is used as the input of a spoken language understand-ing component. Two challenges in such a framework are that the ASR component is far from ...

This paper presents a new method to detect initial seed points for automatic tracing of the vessel center lines in coronary angiograms. Vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and efficient among several feature extraction methods. However, most of them suffer from incomplete results due to inappropriate trade-off between the completeness of seed point detection and computational efficiency. Imposing strict validation rules decreases the number of background traces, but results in more false negatives and more computation time. We show that using the geometrical properties of gradient vectors calculated at vessel boundary points as a validation criterion, improves the performance of the seed point detection algorithm. The results illustrate that the proposed method improves upon the prior method in both performance and computation time.

This paper addresses a process for identifying system use cases from business models. The proposed process is comprised of four phases supported by the DoD Std 2167 A. It suggests the use of UML notation during the model elaboration. In order to verify the process, it was applied on an actual project named Amazon Integration and Cooperation for Modernization of Hydrological Monitoring, under the development of the Brazilian Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica -ITA). The main contributions of this paper are the proposed system use cases identification process and the validation procedure performed, comparing the obtained results with those results from a traditional approach.

The concept of a "Networked Physical World" originated from the Auto-ID Center, now called the Auto-ID Labs. Such a system can be realized with a combination of automatic identification technology and a ubiquitous computer network that will glue the physical world together. The ability to form a ubiquitous item identification network has a wide range of applications including manufacturing automation and supply chain management. We describe the building block system components of a distributed ubiquitous item identification network aimed at creating a "Networked Physical World" system and explore the data flows within the system.