Search

This paper describes the Electronic Schoolbag, a digital workspace developed at the University of Savoie (France) and analyses its usages. This online environment is dedicated to the educational world: it offers pupils, students, teachers, school staff, or parents, personal and group workspaces in which individual or collaborative activities can take place. The flexibility of this software, allowing synchronous or asynchronous activities, lies in the “participation model”. This model allows groups themselves to describe and organise their activities. The architecture that permits its implementation in the Electronic Schoolbag workspace is described. The study of the practices of the workspace is then presented. This requires different observation methods, according to the different procedures chosen: real practices provided by quantitative methods (analysis of the logs of the actions and questionnaires) and imagined practices provided by qualitative methods (semi-directive interviews). The results obtained from the university users allow us to assess the evolution of the usages for different periods and on different university sites. The observatory also lets us list the main uses of the Electronic Schoolbag for educative communication (collaborative vs. individual, informative vs. communicative). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Event Filter (EF) selection stage is a fundamental component of the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition architecture. Its primary function is the reduction of data flow and rate to values acceptable by the mass storage operations and by the subsequent offline data reconstruction and analysis steps. The computing instrument of the EF is organized as a set of independent subfarms, each connected to one output of the Event Builder (EB) switch fabric. Each subfarm comprises a number of processors analyzing several complete events in parallel. This paper describes the design of the ATLAS EF system, its deployment in the 2004 ATLAS combined test beam together with some examples of integrating selection and monitoring algorithms. Since the processing algorithms are not explicitly designed for EF but are adapted from the offline ones, special emphasis is reserved to system reliability and data security, in particular for the case of failures in the processing algorithms. Other key design elements have been system modularity and scalability. The EF shall be able to follow technology evolution and should allow for using additional processing resources possibly remotely located [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives: To propose a novel approach of incorporating ambient intelligence in the health grid security architecture.Methods: Security concerns are severely impeding the grid community effort in spreading its wings in health applications. In this paper, we have proposed a high level approach to incorporate ambient intelligence for health grid security architecture and have argued that this will significantly improve the current state of the grid security paradigm with an enhanced user-friendly environment. We believe that the time is right to shift the onus of traditional security mechanisms onto the new technologies. The incorporation of ambient intelligence in the security architecture of a grid will not only render a security paradigm robust but also provide an attractive vision for the future of computing by bringing the two worlds together.Results: In this article we propose an evolutionary approach of utilizing smart devices for grid security architecture. We argue that such an infrastructure will impart unique features to the existing grid security paradigms by offering fortified and relentless monitoring. This new security architecture will be comprehensive in nature but will not be cumbersome for the users due to its typical characteristics of not prying into their lives and adapting to their needs.Conclusions: We have identified a new paradigm of the security architecture for a health grid that will not only render a security mechanism robust but will also provide the high levels of user-friendliness. As our approach is a first contribution to this problem, a number of other issues for future research remain open. However, the prospects are fascinating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]