Search

Internet Technology Track received around 60 papers and the papers were reviewed by the International program committee and finally 9 papers have been selected for presentation (6 full and 3 short papers). As the track chair, I would like to thank all the authors who submitted their papers in this track and all the PC members who reviewed the papers in timely fashion. The paper presentation in this track is organized into three sessions, (1) Internet Search and Query, (2) E-commerce, (3) Web Browsing. I hope you enjoyed your presence in these sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Distributed Computing track of ICDCIT 2005 received 181 papers. Based on the review by the members of the Program Committee, 16 full and 9 short papers were selected for inclusion in the proceedings of the conference. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics in Distributed Computing. Design of MAC protocol, network architecture and routing protocol for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks seem to attract the attention of many researchers. 5 of the 16 accepted full papers fall in this area. The other popular areas include, Network Security, Sensor Networks, Fault Detection and Recovery and Grid Computing. Each of these areas will have at least 3 papers in the proceedings. The Distributed Computing track will also have papers in the areas of Cellular Networks, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Optical Networks, Information Retrieval, QoS and Mobile IP. We have put together a program that covers many important areas of Distributed Computing. We hope you will find the papers in this track informative, interesting and useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Aspects are aspects found in the early life cycle phases of software development, including requirements elicitation and analysis, domain analysis and architecture design activities. Aspects at these stages crosscut the modular units appropriate for their lifecycle activity; traditional requirements documentation, domain knowledge capture and architectural artifacts do not afford separate description of early aspects. As such, early aspects necessitate new modularizations to be effectively captured and maintained. Without new tools and techniques, early aspects remain tangled and scattered in lifecycle artifacts, and may lead to development, maintenance and evolution difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We welcome our workshop attendees to a very interesting collection of discussions. We received many papers and had to limit the acceptance rate to 40those papers submitted. The papers cover a range of topics from Infrastructure, Service Discovery, Personalization, Environments, Security, Privacy, to Wireless and Sensor Networks showing the scope of interests and activities represented by the PerSys participants. We would like to thank everyone who submitted a paper and believe you will all find the presentations and discussions stimulating and worthwhile. The reviewers of the papers have done a terrific job in helping authors prepare better final papers and deserve special thanks for completing the job promptly. Last, we would like to thank the organizers of the conference a sincere thanks for the hard work they have put in to providing us with the opportunity to gather, present, listen, and discuss our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-adaptive systems are capable of changing their behaviour at runtime to meet target constraints. An important research question is how quality of service models can inform runtime adaptation. This paper presents a solution to the problem by application of control theory to improve performance of queued systems by means of architectural adaptation. In a paper presented at the previous year's QoSA conference, we showed how Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average techniques can be utilized to forecast how Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics are likely to evolve in the near future. This is particularly important in cases where systems can be adapted to counter QoS constraint violations. In this paper, we show how, given a similar type of QoS characteristic forecasts, strategies of architectural adaptation can be implemented that pre-emptively avoid QoS violations. The novelty of our approach is that we use classical control theory to ensure that our adaptation strategies are stable, in the sense that they do not oscillate between choices. We provide a description of how our control theoretic model can be implemented using context-based interception in .NET via model driven engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important role of a workflow system is to schedule and reschedule the workflow process and to allow the user to monitor and guide the overall progress of the workflow and its activities. This paper presents extensions of a rescheduling algorithm based on minimal graph cut. The initial approach allowed to find an optimal rescheduling, which changed the initial schedule by shortening and moving of activities. The new schedule had the lowest overall price, counted as the sum of prices of shortening activities. The extension presented in this paper allows several extensions, while keeping the optimality: handling several delayed activities, handling the price of moving an activity and handling the price of deadline violation. The rescheduling algorithm is used within an ontology-based workflow management system for the process of military exercise preparation in Centre of simulation technologies National Academy of Defence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to extract the frequent patterns that can become motif at high speed from amino acid sequences, we are developing the parallel Modified PrefixSpan with the distributed worker paradigm. This paper presents a new dynamic load balancing technique for the parallel Modified PrefixSpan with the distributed worker paradigm and its performance evaluation. The characteristics of the dynamic load balancing are the small-grain task and the Cache-based Random Steal schema. This paper explains these characteristics and presents performance evaluations with the PC cluster of 100 nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most cache architectures exploit only a second level cache prefetch. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical prefetch cache architecture which allows prefetch between all levels of caches. We discovered that this architecture has a virtual effect of expanding memory bus bandwidth. According to an experimental analysis using 10 benchmark programs, the proposed architecture that employs all level cache prefetcher obtained a maximum 11% increased performance when compared to both architecture with expanded bus bandwidth and architecture with employment only a level 2 cache prefetcher. This shows our proposed architecture has an effectiveness of memory-bus bandwidth expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constraint Programming (CP) technology has been extensively used in Random Functional Test Generation during the recent years. However, while the existing CP methodologies are well tuned for traditional combinatorial applications e.g. logistics or scheduling, the problem domain of functional test generation remains largely unexplored by the CP community and many of its domain specific features and challenges are still unaddressed. In this paper we focus on the distinctive features of CP for the random functional test generation domain and show how these features can be addressed using a classical CP engine with custom extensions. We present some modeling and solving problems arising in this context and propose solutions. In particular, we address the way of model building in the problem domain of test generation which we refer to as multi-layer modeling. In this context we introduce constraint patterns of composite variable, implied condition and implied composite variable condition, define their semantics and propose schemes for their CSP modeling. The paper also addresses specific problems arising at the solving stage in the problem domain of random test generation. We propose solutions to these problems by means of custom random search algorithms. This approach is illustrated on the examples of the disjunction constraint and conditional variable instantiation. The latter algorithm addresses the feature of dynamic modeling required in the test generation task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we present experimental results based on the implementation using ILOG Solver as a CP engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses extending the Unified Modelling Language by means of a profile for modelling knowledge-based system in the context of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) framework. The profile is implemented using the eXecutable Modelling Framework (XMF) Mosaic tool. A case study from the health care domain demonstrates the practical use of this profile; with the prototype implemented in Java Expert System Shell (Jess). The paper also discusses the possible mapping of the profile elements to the platform specific model (PSM) of Jess and provides some discussion on the Production Rule Representation (PRR) standardisation work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to formalize Object Role Modeling (ORM) using the $\mathcal{DLR}$ description logic. This would enable automated reasoning on the formal properties of ORM diagrams, such as detecting constraint contradictions and implications. In addition, the expressive, methodological, and graphical capabilities of ORM make it a good candidate for use as a graphical notation for most description logic languages. In this way, industrial experts who are not IT savvy will still be able to build and view axiomatized theories (such as ontologies, business rules, etc.) without needing to know the logic or reasoning foundations underpinning them. Our formalization in this paper is structured as 29 formalization rules, that map all ORM primitives and constraints into $\mathcal{DLR}$, and 2 exceptions of complex cases. To this end, we illustrate the implementation of our formalization as an extension to DogmaModeler, which automatically maps ORM into DIG and uses Racer as a background reasoning engine to reason about ORM diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology to derive views over a relational database by applying a sequence of appropriately defined operations to the global schema. Such tailoring and composition process aims at offering personalized views over the database schema, so as to improve its ability to support the new needs of customers, support evolutionary software development, and fix existing legacy database design problems. The process is driven by the designer's knowledge of the possible operational contexts, in terms of the various dimensions that contribute to determine which portions of the global schema are relevant with respect to the different actors and situations. We formally introduce some operators, defined on sets of relations, which tailor the schema and combine the intermediate views to derive different final views, suitable for the different envisioned situations. The application to a case study is also presented, to better clarify the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For multi-hop wireless sensor networks, this paper presents a simple, loop-free, distributed algorithm to select path for data gathering from each sensor node to the sink node that attempts to balance the load in terms of power dissipation in communication at individual nodes with 100% data aggregation to enhance the lifetime of the network as a whole. It requires just a one-time computation during the initialization of the network, and the paths remain static unless the routing tree gets partitioned due to faults etc. The performance of the proposed scheme has been compared with some conventional centralized routing techniques, namely the minimum hop routing, the shortest power path routing and the minimum spanning tree routing by simulation. In all the cases, the proposed algorithm results improved lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a set of n different deterministic finite state machines (DFSMs), we examine the problem of tolerating k faults among them. The traditional approach to this problem involves replication, requiring n.k backup DFSMs. For example, given two state machines, say A and B, to tolerate two faults, this approach maintains two copies each of A and B, thus resulting in a total of six DFSMs in the system. In this paper, we question the optimality of such an approach and present another approach based on the ‘fusion' of state machines allowing for more efficient backups. We introduce the theory of fusion machines and provide an algorithm which can generate fusion machines corresponding to a given set of machines. Further, we have implemented this algorithm and tested it for various examples. It is important to note that our approach requires only k backup DFSMs, as opposed to the n.k backup DFSMs required by the replication approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current state of the art of workflow composition over web services employ a centralized composite process to coordinate the constituent web services. Therefore, the coordinator process is complex, less scalable, and bulky. This paper introduces an architecture and associated techniques for distributed coordination of these workflows, and a prototype system, namely BondFlow system, with capability to control workflow execution using a handheld device. We distribute the centralized coordination logic of traditional workflows by (i) extending the stateless web services into self-coordinating entities using coordinator proxy objects, and (ii) creating the workflow over these entities by interconnecting them into a distributed network of objects using web bond primitives. Previously, we have developed web bond primitives to enforce interdependencies among autonomous entities. The prototypedr BondFlow systeh provides a platform to configure such distributed workflows, producing coordination components with a footprint small enough to be executed on a handheld (footprint no larger than 150 KB). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2006 MACE workshop [1, 28] has presented the drivers and challenges of Autonomic Networking [2] and fostered an understanding of emerging principles for this new type of networks [3]. In this paper, we present concepts and principles that define a technological neutral, architectural perspective of Autonomic Networks. The work presented in largely based on work within the Architecture team of the TeleManagement Forum (Technological Neutral Architecture, [4]) and joined research work of industrial and academic research teams (for example Ericsson [5], HP & QinetiQ [6] and Motorola [7]). The goal of this paper is to provide the reader with manageability guidelines and architectural patterns leading to the development of manageable autonomic software and communication systems. We present a component-based, distributed system architecture and an associated set of critical system services that Autonomic Networks require. Since we tackle the problem from a technologically neutral angle, this paper will not prescribe a single new technology, but rather provide a means that allows for federating different technologies, each of which offers particular advantages at business and system levels. In particular, it enables business concepts and principles to drive system design and architectures. This may be further implemented using currently available distributed systems information technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a context-aware text summarizer based on ontologies intended to be used for adapting information to mobile devices. The system generates summaries from texts according to the profile of the user and the context where he/she is at the moment. Context is determined by spatial and temporal localization. Ontologies are used to allow identifying which parts of the texts are related to the user's profile and to the context. Ontologies are structured as hierarchies of concepts and concepts are represented by keywords with a weight associated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Run-time application environments are affected by the changes in mini-world or technology changes. Large number of applications are process driven. For robust applications that can evolve over time, there is a need for a methodology that implicitly handles changes at various levels from mini-world to run-time environment through a layers of models and systems. In this paper, we present ER* methodology for evolving applications. In the context of this paper, the role of two-way active behaviour and template driven development of applications is presented. This methodology facilitates capturing active behaviour from run-time transactions and provides a means of using this knowledge to guide subsequent application design and its evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), it has been recently shown that Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) is indeed feasible on resource-constrained nodes. This feasibility, however, does not necessarily mean attractiveness, as the obtained results are still not satisfactory enough. In this paper, we present results on implementing ECC, as well as the related emerging field of Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC), on two of the most popular sensor nodes. By doing that, we show that PKC is not only viable, but in fact attractive for WSNs. As far as we know pairing computations presented in this paper are the most efficient results on the MICA2 (8-bit/7.3828-MHz ATmega128L) and Tmote Sky (16-bit/8.192-MHz MSP-430) nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probabilistic correctness is an important aspect of reliable systems. A soft real-time system, for instance, may be designed to tolerate some degree of deadline misses under a threshold. Since probabilistic systems may behave differently from their probabilistic models depending on their current environments, checking the systems at runtime can provide another level of assurance for their probabilistic correctness. This paper presents a statistical runtime verification for probabilistic properties using statistical analysis. However, while this statistical analysis collects a number of execution paths as samples to check probabilistic properties within some certain error bounds, runtime verification can only produce one single sample. This paper provides a technique to produce such a number of samples and applies this methodology to check probabilistic properties in wireless sensor network applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an approach to generate AspectJ aspects from formal specifications written for the Monitoring and Checking (MaC) runtime verification tool. The aspects can serve as the foundation for instrumentation of programs that can be verified at runtime. To demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach, the authors used a benchmark from the MaC research. The benchmark is based on a safety-critical railroad crossing system comprised of a train, a gate, and a controller. Finally, the paper describes the results from generating Java-MaCs specification scripts to AspectJ aspects, and it compares the proposed approach to related approaches and ones that use aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HALO is a novel aspect language introducing a logic-based pointcut language which combines history-based pointcuts and "escape" conditions for interacting with the base language. This combination is difficult to support when escape conditions access context exposed by "future" join points. This paper introduces a weaving mechanism based on copying objects for resolving such pointcuts. Though this seems a memory consuming solution, it can be easily combined with HALO's analysis for reducing the join point history. Furthermore, pointcuts with escape conditions accessing future join point context, sometimes require less memory than pointcuts that don't, but otherwise implement the same functionality. In this paper, we illustrate this by measuring memory usage for simulations of an e-commerce application, switching between an implementation where the pointcut definitions contain escape conditions referring to future join point context, and an equivalent implementation that doesn't. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of service-oriented device architectures (SODA) suffers from restrictions that are imposed by the use of existing syntactic technologies. Related problems include data and message-level heterogeneities among interoperating services, insufficient search and discovery of exposed services and inadequate web process composition. In this paper we propose an approach for introducing semantics in a SODA environment. Specifically we examine the introduction of data, functional and behavioural semantics and the role they play in a semantically-enabled SODA (SeSODA) pervasive environment. We put special emphasis in data semantics. We present the architecture of an OSGi-based SeSODA implementation, analyse the most critical components of this architecture and discuss implementation issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a mobile system that supports young students learning history at an archaeological site. It adopts gameplay as a novel and effective technique particularly suited for learning through mobile systems (m-learning). From a technological point of view, the main novelty of our system is its slim architecture. Minimal investments are required because the system runs on the students' own cellular phones. Experimental studies indicate that gameplay is able to trigger a desire to learn more about ancient history and to make archaeological visits more exciting and learning about the past more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been developed to enhance the integration of various systems to allow organizations to be more flexible in case of business changes. This paper will explain a top-down method in which Business Process Models can lead to a basic service orientation of business functions. This will be shown based on the principles of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). Without model support, the translation of business needs into executable code to support IT developments is rather hard and mostly impossible. In this paper, we motivate the need for this approach as a means of focusing importance on modeling, a key enabler of communication between business analysts and IT developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context is typically viewed at as meta-data that supplements the ‘real' data of an application. In this paper, we contrast and compare the concepts of context in four different applications. We show that our notion of context needs to be extended and that wider and more flexible notions need to be supported. In particular, a key issue is how to provide systems that support computation in regard to any context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, WSBL (Web Service Business Library) is proposed as a solution for problems above mentioned, of any company which offers financial services, by combining agents' theory, web services and grid computing. After explaining the solution, this paper presents an example of a web service that prices a weather derivative using the computing power of a grid, but could be easily extended to any financial product. This approach would enable the bank to have only one library for pricing all products running in one grid giving service to all of the trading rooms that a bank could have around the world. These services could be sold to third-party users with the appropriate security services. Some experiments in a real grid environments will be presented to validate and verificate the utility as well as the performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of virtual humans capable of behaving and interacting realistically with each other requires the integration of interdisciplinary theories, methods and approaches. Although Intelligent Virtual Simulation has focused on realistic interactions of their inhabitants, it still reflects the necessity of a common framework capable of integrating all the technological advances developed separately. This paper combines some of the successful approaches carried out with the purpose of defining an openness framework that help making the development of Intelligent Virtual Agent based systems as easy as possible by the integration of these independent and different domains. The paper also presents a case study based on a virtual assistant helping a human and learning from him to use UML (Unified Modelling Language) for modelling different systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an extension of the AMBLE model, an awareness model which manage load balancing by means of a multi-agent based architecture, with the aim to establish a cooperative load balancing model for collaborative grid environments. This model, named C-AMBLE (Cooperative Awareness Model for Balancing the Load in grid Environments) applies some theoretical principles of multi-agents systems, awareness models, and third party models, to promote an efficient autonomous cooperative task delivery in grid environments. This cooperative task management, implemented using web services, has been tested in a real and heterogeneous grid infrastructure with very successful results. This paper presents some of these outcomes while emphasizing on the performance speedup of the system using this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The justification for using mutihop clusters may be found in [1]. In the well known heuristic proposed in [2], the d-dominating set of clusterheads is first selected by using nodes identifiers and then clusters are formed. In this paper we generalise this algorithm in order to select nodes depending of a given criterion (as the the degree, density or energy of nodes). The first section of this paper simplifies and proves the correctness of our generalised algorithm to select clusterheads. The cluster formation process proposed in [2] is extensively studied in the second section and is proved to be false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Doubletree, a cooperative algorithm for large-scale topology discovery at the IP level, was introduced. Compared to classic probing systems, Doubletree discovers almost as many nodes and links while strongly reducing the quantity of probes sent. This paper examines the problem of the nodes and links missed by Doubletree. In particular, this paper's first contribution is to carefully describe properties of the nodes and links that Doubletree fails to discover. We explain incomplete coverage as a consequence of the way Doubletree models the network: a tree-like structure of routes. But routes do not strictly form trees, due to load balancing and routing changes. This paper's second contribution is the Windowed Doubletree algorithm, which increases Doubletree's coverage up to 16% without increasing its load. Compared to classic Doubletree, Windowed Doubletree does not start probing at a fixed hop distance from each monitor, but randomly picks a value from a range of possible values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares several approaches for dynamic allocation in geo-stationary networks based on DVB-RCS system. Each Satellite Terminal (ST) regularly sends requests to the Network Control Center (NCC) which in turn allocates resource to the users. Unfortunately, this delayed request-assignment makes the dynamic bandwidth allocation very difficult. Simple mechanisms such as a fixed allocation or requests based on the current size of the terminals' queue are compared to predictive methods based on control theory techniques which have been previously proposed. A lower bound is also derived by considering that the actual size of the buffer can be instantaneously known. It is shown that if the traffic is not really bursty, a fixed allocation which implies lighter signalling mechanisms leads to good results. In bursty traffic conditions, simple mechanisms for which the requests correspond to the actual size of the buffer may lead to the best performance results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of cooperative communications in the context of IEEE 802.11b to combat radio signal degradation. The performance gain of both an existing cooperative protocol and the one proposed in the paper is discussed. It is quantitatively shown how much the two cooperative protocols increase throughput, lower delivery latency, and extend transmission span, when compared to the conventional IEEE 802.11b protocol. These features may help improve connectivity and network performance in ad hoc applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main steps on the way to more realistic simulations of mobile ad-hoc networks are the introduction of realistic mobility and sophisticated radio wave propagation models. Both have strong impact on the performance of mobile ad-hoc networks, e.g. the performance of routing protocols changes with these models. In this paper we introduce a framework which combines realistic mobility and radio wave propagation models. Our approach consists of a zone-based mobility generator and a high accuracy radio wave propagation model. For the mobility generation a wide variety of well understood random mobility models is combined with a graph based zone model, where each zone has its own mobility model. To achieve a realistic radio wave propagation model a ray tracing approach is used. The integration of these two techniques allows to create simulation setups that closely model reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With iterative development increasingly becoming the de facto-practice in mainstream software processes, distinct early lifecycle artifacts need to be synchronized in order to leverage their correspondences. Requirements engineering and software architecture models have been recently enriched with aspect-oriented (AO) abstractions and composition mechanisms. In this context, this paper proposes a symbiotic relation between early AO development phases by specifying mapping rules between a requirements model, AOV-graph, and an architecture description language, AspectualACME. AOV-graph and AspectualACME are, respectively, symmetric AO extensions to the V-graph goals model and the ACME language, with features to modularize crosscutting concerns. The meta-models of these modeling languages offer abstractions that are recurrently supported in other requirements models and architectural approaches. Hence, this paper also discusses how the proposed suite of mapping rules can be exploited in other similar approaches. The evaluation of the mappings is carried out in the context of a case study called Health Watcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freyd showed that in certain CPO-categories, locally continuous functors have minimal invariants, which possess a structure that he termed dialgebra. This gives rise to a category of dialgebras and homomorphisms, where the minimal invariants are initial, inducing a powerful recursion scheme (direcursion) on a cpo. In this paper, we identify a problem appearing when translating (co)iterative functions (on a fixed parameterised datatype) to direcursion (on the same datatype), and present a solution to this problem as a recursion scheme (primitive direcursion), generalising and symmetrising primitive (co)recursion for endofunctors. To this end, we give a uniform technique for translating (co)iterative maps into direcursive maps. This immediately gives a plethora of examples of direcursive functions, improving on the situation in the literature where only a few examples have appeared. Moreover, a technical trick proposed in a POPL paper is avoided for the translated maps. We conclude the paper by applying the results to a denotational semantics of Abadi and Cardelli's typed object calculus, and linking them to previous work on higher-order coalgebra and to bisimulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In formal language theory, James Rogers published a series of innovative papers generalising strings and trees to higher dimensions. Motivated by applications in linguistics, his goal was to smoothly extend the core theory of the formal languages of strings and trees to higher dimensions. Rogers' definitions rely on a specific representation of higher dimensional trees. This paper presents an alternative approach which focusses more on their universal properties and is based upon category theory, algebras, coalgebras and containers. Our approach reveals that Rogers' trees are canonical constructions which are also particularly beautiful. We also provide new theoretical results concerning higher dimensional trees. Finally, we provide evidence for our devout conviction that clean mathematical theories provide the basis for clean implementations by indicating how our abstract presentation will make computing with higher dimensional trees easier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new control system interface which utilises the user's eye gaze to enable severely disabled individuals control electronic devices easily. The system is based upon a novel human computer interface, which facilitates simple control of electronic devices by predicting and responding to the user's possible intentions, based intuitively upon their point of gaze. The interface responds by automatically pre-selecting and offering only those controls appropriate to the specific device that the user looks at, in a simple and accessible manner. It therefore affords the user conscious choice of the appropriate range of control actions required, which may be executed by simple means and without the need to navigate manually through potentially complex control menus to reach them. Two systems using the head-mounted and the remote eye tracker respectively are introduced, compared and evaluated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a device that indicates the direction of an obstacle that is encroaching into the path of a visually impaired person who is walking. Our proposed system, which would resemble a pair of eyeglasses, first detects an obstacle and then indicates its direction and distance to the wearer through puff of air to the forehead. This paper describes the preliminary testing for presenting distance information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new method for robustly extracting moving objects in an environment with varying illuminations. The proposed method applies background subtraction scheme based on hue and hue gradient to minimize the effect of the illumination change. First, we train the background images in the HSI color space and build the Gaussian background model with respect to the hue and hue gradient. Next, image subtraction is performed between the trained background image and the current input image based on the Gaussian background model. Finally, the morphological operations are applied to remove the background noise. In this paper, we compare the previous subtraction schemes to our method applied to both the hand and body tracking in order to prove the robustness of the proposed method in sudden illumination changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of personal electronic equipment has significantly increased during recent years. Augmented Reality (AR) technology enables mobile devices to provide a very rich user experience by combining mobile computing with connectivity and location-awareness. In this paper we discuss the approach and development of an Augmented Reality-based personal assistant, combining the familiar interface of a human person with the functionality of a location-aware digital information system. The paper discusses the main components of the system, including the anthropomorphic user interface as well as the results of an initial prototype evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real life, most of the tasks we perform throughout the day are first person tasks. Shouldn't these same tasks be realized from a first person point of view in virtual reality? This paper presents a first person Projection-based Visuo-Haptic Environment, and virtual prototyping and data exploration applications taking advantage of the first person visuo-haptic features of this configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of the art in vehicle configuration is still very much characterized by a face-to-face sales situation. In addition, web browsers are becoming market places. But direct sales over the internet, without contact with a sales person constitute still a small segment of the market, of only a few percent for European manufacturers. The internet is more used as a medium to gather information. A standardised DIYD vehicle configuration is thus a must for European manufacturers today. This paper presents an Intelligent DIY e-commerce system for vehicle design, based on Ontologies and 3D Visualization, that aims at enabling a suitable representation of products with the most realistic possible visualisation outcome. The platform, designed for the automotive sector, includes all the practicable electronic commerce variants and its on-line product configuration process is controlled by an ontology, that was created using the OWL Web Ontology Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a Prover-Verifier model for analyzing the computational complexity of a class of Constraint Satisfaction problems termed Binary Boolean Constraint Satisfaction problems (BBCSPs). BBCSPs represent an extremely general class of constraint satisfaction problems and find applications in a wide variety of domains including constraint programming, puzzle solving and program testing. We establish that each instance of a BBCSP admits a coin-flipping Turing Machine that halts in time polynomial in the size of the input. The prover P in the Prover-Verifier model is endowed with very limited powers; in particular, it has no memory and it can only pose restricted queries to the verifier. The verifier on the other hand is both omniscient in that it is cognizant of all the problem details and insincere in that it does not have to decide a priori on the intended proof. However, the verifier must stay consistent in its responses. Inasmuch as our provers will be memoryless and our verifiers will be asked for extremely simple certificates, our work establishes the existence of a simple, randomized algorithm for BBCSPs. Our model itself serves as a basis for the design of zero-knowledge machine learning algorithms in that the prover ends up learning the proof desired by the verifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Test effectiveness is a central quality aspect of a test specification which reflects its ability to demonstrate system quality levels and to discover system faults. A well-known approach for its estimatation is to determine coverage metrics for the system code or system model. However, often these are not available as such but the system interface only, which basically define structural aspects of the stimuli and responses to the system. Therefore, this paper focuses on the idea of using test data variance analysis as another analytical approach to determine test quality. It presents a method for the quantitative evaluation of structural and semantical variance of test data. Test variance is defined as the test data distribution over the system interface data domain. It is expected that the more the test data varies, the better the system is tested by a given test suite. The paper instantiates this method for black-box test specifications written in TTCN-3 and the structural analysis of send templates. Distance metrics and similarity relations are used to determine the data variance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the volumes of software development increase and the cost reduction is required, most Japanese IT companies are interested in offshore software outsourcing. Although a lot of engineers have experienced the success and failure on their projects, their know-how still remains as tacit knowledge. This paper proposes a risk assessment scheme for new projects by externalizing such tacit knowledge. Such a scheme requires collaboration between industry and academia because the tacit knowledge is scattered over many companies and cannot be formalized by a single company or academic institute. Defining fourteen attributes related to software development and designing questionnaire about project evaluation, this paper clarifies how to quantify the risk of offshore software outsourcing. Risk assessment tool based on the proposed scheme will promote a knowledge spiral for project management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]