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The increasing request for converged multimedia services have motivated relevant standardization efforts, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to support session control, mobility, and interoperability in all-IP next generation wireless networks. Notwithstanding the central role of SIP in novel converged multimedia, the potential of SIP-based service composition for the development of new classes of Web 2.0 services able to interoperate with existing HTTP-based services is still widely unexplored. The paper proposes an original solution to improve online user experience by integrating a SIP stack into the Web browser, thus enabling the execution of novel SIP-based applications directly at the client endpoint. In particular, our browser extension coordinates with our novel SIP-based Converged Application Server to enable session mobility and prevent abuses of the services available in the client. Experimental results show that our SIP-based solution is feasible in most common Internet deployment scenarios and enables session mobility with limited management cost.

This paper surveys the work carried out within two large consortia, AMI and IM2, on improving access to records of human meetings using multimodal interfaces called meeting browsers. Their design has emerged as an important goal, with both theoretical interest and practical applications. Meeting browsers are assistance tools that help humans navigate through multimedia records (audio, video, documents, and metadata) in order to obtain a general idea about what happened in a meeting or to find specific pieces of information, for discovery or verification. To explain the importance that meeting browsers have gained in time, the paper summarizes findings of user studies, discusses features of meeting browser prototypes developed in AMI/IM2, and outlines the main evaluation protocol proposed (BET). Reference scores are provided for future benchmarking. These achievements in meeting browsing are the result of an iterative software process, from user studies to prototypes and then to products.

Juvenile trees are expected to be more heavily defended against browsing mammals than mature plants. Juvenile and mature trees of Acacia tortilis and A. nilotica occurring at Nylsvley, Northern Transvaal, were quantitatively compared in terms of some potential chemical and physical defences. Neither species showed any significant difference between juvenile and mature trees in terms o f total polyphenol content, condensed tannin content, protein precipitating ability or protein content in leaves. Both species showed age-class differences in spinescence. In A. nilotica, thorns on branch tips were longer and more closely spaced and leaves were smaller in juveniles than in adults. Hence juveniles of this species appear to be physically more heavily defended than mature plants. In A. tortilis, curved thorns were longer, but straight thorns were shorter than in mature trees. There was no difference between age classes in overall thorn density, but juveniles had a higher curved to straight thorn ratio. It is not obvious what the effects of these differences might be on mammalian browsers.

Maybe I'm missing something. In all the breathless, "the pageview is dead" stories that came out last week surrounding Nielsen/NetRatings' press release that they will include "Total Minutes" as part of their ranking methodology, I couldn't find any information on how the measurement would work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]