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Several empirical studies confirm the importance of time-awareness in learning disabilities. Designed tools and environments to interact with time are essential for the training and diagnosis of an impaired notion of time. Training which improves sense of time may improve learning, daily functioning and quality of life. This paper reviews perceptual and computational time models in literature and present briefly our first attempts in applying the knowledge in the design of playful tools for children to orient their time.

This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying risks in executable business processes and detecting them at run-time. The approach considers risks in all phases of the business process management lifecycle, and is realized via a distributed, sensor-based architecture. At design-time, sensors are defined to specify risk conditions which when fulfilled, are a likely indicator of faults to occur. Both historical and current process execution data can be used to compose such conditions. At run-time, each sensor independently notifies a sensor manager when a risk is detected. In turn, the sensor manager interacts with the monitoring component of a process automation suite to prompt the results to the user who may take remedial actions. The proposed architecture has been implemented in the YAWL system and its performance has been evaluated in practice.

In a mixed reality installation, a variety of technologies is integrated such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and animated virtual agents and robotic agents. One of the main challenges is how to design and implement a mixed reality installation that integrates a heterogeneous array of sensors and actuators, immersive interactive environments into aware system that will engage the user, providing a meaningful experience. In this paper we address the problems of building a CAVE environment in mixed reality installations, and share our experience in using a game engine as the driver for the CAVE, and in interfacing the game engine with sensors, actuators and input devices.

The numerical modeling of combustion systems is a very challenging task. The interaction of turbulence, chemical reactions and thermodynamics in reacting flows is of exceptional complexity. Computing power is too limited to solve practical problems in detail. This problem asks for special treatments in the modeling of flames.

We present two designs in the area of Internet of Things, utilizing an ontology-driven platform, namely Smart-M3, to connect domestic objects in the physical world to the information world, for coaching the behavior or raising the awareness in domestic energy consumption. The concept and architecture of Smart-M3 are introduced, in which the domestic objects are knowledge processors connected to the semantic information broker that contains the ontologies, using a blackboard design pattern and semantic web technologies, enabling the interoperability among both digital and physical entities. Two designs based on Smart-M3 are presented, as examples for coaching with and learning from the Internet of Things. Although both designs are in the area of domestic energy consumption, they can be seen as good starting points towards broader areas of ubiquitous learning with the Internet of Things.

As organizations reach higher levels of Business Process Management maturity, they tend to accumulate large collections of processmodels. These repositories may contain thousands of activities and be managed by different stakeholders with varying skills and responsibilities. However, while being of great value, these repositories induce high management costs. Thus, it becomes essential to keep track of the various model versions as they may mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. We propose an innovative versioning model, and associated storage structure, specifically designed to maximize sharing across process models and process model versions, reduce conflicts in concurrent edits and automatically handle controlled change propagation. The focal point of this technique is to version single process model fragments, rather than entire process models. Indeed empirical evidence shows that real-life process model repositories have numerous duplicate fragments. Experiments on two industrial datasets confirm the usefulness of our technique.

Using simulators for training is an accepted practice in medical education and in advanced medical training. Creating simulators that perform the functionality required and respond to interventions in a realistic way is key. The first iteration in the design cycle of creating a hard- and software platform that will support the development of these kind of simulators is the topic of this paper. The design approach, the hard- and software choices, the hard- and software architectures and the first results of creating a baby simulator prototype will be discussed.

This paper presents a method for monitoring mental state of small isolated crews during long-term missions (such as space mission, polar expeditions, submarine crews, meteorological stations, and etc). It combines the records of negotiation game with monitoring of the nonverbal behavior of the players. We analyze the records of negotiation game that has taken place between the crew members who were placed in isolated environment for 105 days during the Mars-500 experiment. The outcomes of the analysis, differently from the previously made conclusions, show that there was not a significant deviation of the rational choice of the players. We propose an extension of the method that includes monitoring of the nonverbal behavior of the players next to recording the game records. The method is focused on those aspects of psychological and sociological states that are crucial for the performance of the crew. In particular, we focus on measuring of emotional stress, initial signs of conflicts, trust, and ability to collaborate.

In this paper we present the design of an application that helps people with expressive aphasia to express their feelings and share information through digital photographs. Our design is based on feedback from the therapist and persons with aphasia and their partners. The preliminary prototypes are evaluated with persons with aphasia and their partners. The concept is well accepted by the aphasics and it could be easily used during therapy and post-therapy period.

Design becomes more and more the art of bringing together expertise and experts from different domains in creating future products. Synthetical knowledge and hands-on skills in design, especially in industrial design, is often implicit, hardly captured and modeled for remote education. The need of transferring implicit design knowledge using computer mediated learning tools, provides not only technical challenges, but also many research opportunities. In this article the literature about training transfer and implicit design knowledge transfer is reviewed. A scenario of using such learning tools for learning and teaching physical modeling in industrial design is presented, followed by a discussion about the challenges and opportunities in developing such a system.

Real world models of large-scale crowd movement lead to computationally intractable problems implied by various classes of non-linear stochastic differential equations. Recently, cellular automata (CA) have been successfully applied to model the dynamics of vehicular traffic, ants and pedestrians’ crowd movement and evacuation without taking into account mental properties. In this paper we study a large-scale crowd movement based on a CA approach and evaluated by the following three criteria: the minimization of evacuation time, maximization of instantaneous flow of pedestrians, and maximization of mentality-based synchronization of a crowd. Our computational experiments show that there exist interdependencies between the three criteria.

Designing architectures requires the balancing of multiple system quality objectives. In this paper, we present techniques that support the exploration of the quality properties of component-based architectures deployed on multiprocessor platforms. Special attention is paid to real-time properties and efficiency of resource use. The main steps of the process are (1) a simple way of modelling properties of software and hardware components, (2) from the component properties, a model of an execution architecture is composed and analyzed for system-level quality attributes, (3) for the composed system, selected execution scenarios are evaluated, (4) Pareto curves are used for making design trade-offs explicit. The process has been applied to several industrial systems. A Car Radio Navigation system is used to illustrate the method. For this system, we consider architectural alternatives, show their specification, and present their trade-off with respect to cost, performance and robustness.

To support the efficient appraisal and selection of available best practices, this paper proposes a strategy for the implementation of Business Process Redesign (BPR). Its backbone is formed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) multi-criteria method and our earlier research on the popularity and impact of redesign best practices. Using (AHP) we derive a classification of most suitable best practices for the process being redesigned. Criteria such as the popularity, the impact, the goals and the risks of BPR implementation are taken into account. A case study of a municipality in the Netherlands is included. It discusses which best practices should be applied to redesign the invoicing process at the municipality.

We give a light-weight but formal introduction to XQuery by defining a sublanguage of XQuery. We ignore typing, and don’t consider namespaces, comments, programming instructions, and entities. To avoid confusion we call our version LiXQuery (Light XQuery). LiXQuery is fully downwards compatible with XQuery. Its syntax and its semantics are far less complex than that of XQuery, but the typical expressions of XQuery are included in LiXQuery. We claim that LiXQuery is an elegant and simple sublanguage of XQuery that can be used for educational and research purposes. We give the complete syntax and the formal semantics of LiXQuery.

As a consequence of the success of the Web, methodologies for information system development need to consider systems that use the Web paradigm. These Web Information Systems (WIS) use Web technologies to retrieve information from the Web and to deliver information in a Web presentation to the users. Hera is a model-driven methodology supporting WIS design, focusing on the processes of integration, data retrieval, and presentation generation. Integration and data retrieval gather from Web sources the data that composes the result of a user query. Presentation generation produces the Web or hypermedia presentation format for the query result, such that the presentation and specifically its navigation suits the user’s browser. We show how in Hera all these processes lead to data transformations based on RDF(S) models. Proving the value of RDF(S) for WIS design, we pave the way for the development of Semantic Web Information Systems.