1522 research outputs found
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Breaking a leg : going on stage with the educators
Get PDFThis article is a sketch of developments to date in the area and is, more specifically, an account of the experience of the library staff involved in Learning Support at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). The article examines the background to the educational experience in libraries, and major trends and resources in the area of library education. It also considers emerging strategies, making particular reference to how they are being translated into practical activities at WIT
Managing and Controlling E-Mail Systems: A Cross Case Analysis
Get PDFThis paper presents a multiple case study investigation of email system monitoring and control. The study examines the interaction between key elements of email control identified by previous researchers and considers the role of such controls at various implementation phases
An Aglorithm for Two Phase Rating of Dynamically Composed Services
Get PDFMany computer science researchers are pursuing the vision of service-oriented software architectures through which end-users can seamlessly access customised, potentially disposable services to aid them carry out a myriad of everyday tasks. Full realisation of this vision requires deployment of facilities for the dynamic discovery, composition, interoperation and execution monitoring of preexisting networked software services, possibly administered by different organisations or originated by multiple developers. Significant research efforts are addressing the development of frameworks and process-oriented techniques for service composition, much of it focussing on specification of services in terms of formal process semantics. Although increasingly powerful methodologies, languages and algorithms supporting the construction, execution and adaptation of dynamically composed services have emerged, little attention has been paid to the supporting infrastructure necessary for their widespread deployment. In particular, accounting systems target charging of services on a one-by-one basis; they do not consider the possibility that services can be collectively orchestrated in an arbitrary manner to fulfil changing requirements. Existing accounting systems, including their rating engines, typically are manually configured to account for specific services at the time those services are initially deployed. However, in environments where services can be dynamically composed this approach is no longer possible: service compositions are created and executed within a short time span, so there is no time for manual configuration of appropriate accounting operations. Accounting operations must be automatically configured when service compositions are initially constructed, or subsequently modified. In this paper we present a two-phase rating process incorporating an algorithm that generation of charge for dynamically composed services. The algorithm treats composed services as a tree structure in which groups of services comprise a composed service which can itself be part of a group of services comprising a composed service at the next level upwards of the tree. The tree is traversed in a depth first fashion, in order to attribute charges to all composed services. To do so the algorithm calculates changes in charges for those services based on the presence or lack of presence of named services in the group of service comprising that composed service. Application of this algorithm enables the rating engine to generate charges for services that are dynamically composed and for which the rating engine can have no prior knowledge. This method also provides a means to closely map real-world business relationships between service providers to the charges applied when their services are used together
DYNAMIC ABSTRACTION AND PROVISIONING OF CONTEXT INFORMATION
No full textUbiquitous computing environments are perceived as having a wide array of embedded sensors and other computing artefacts that provide information regarding the current state of the physical environment. Utilisation of such information by contextaware applications has the potential to alter the surroundings of users in order to adapt the environment to suit the user’s needs and assist in their tasks. However, as the primary sources of context information, sensors1 provide raw data that typically stand at a low point in the abstraction scale. Data yielded from these artefacts might not be in the required format or type, or generally might not be useful unless it is processed and combined with data from other sources. As a consequence the end result is a generation of information that has little or no value when consumed in isolation. Here, an approach that will enable flexible transformation, composition and interpretation of the low-level data into high-level context information will aid context-aware applications. Raising the level of abstraction of context information, allows context-aware applications to adapt the environment at a level, closer to meeting human expectations of a truly intelligent system rather than simply altering the environment based on single sensor readings. The proposed research programme, described in this report, addresses these issues focusing on a context aggregation process that will process collected data from multiple and diverse sources enabling reasoning over this data to deduce conclusions that cannot directly be sensed from the environment
A Catalan transform and related transformations on integer sequences
Get PDFWe introduce and study an invertible transformation on integer sequences related to the Catalan numbers. Transformation pairs are identified among classical sequences. A closely related transformation
which we call the generalized Ballot transform is also studied, along with associated transformations. Results concerning the Fibonacci, Jacobsthal and Pell numbers are derived. Finally, we derive results
about combined transformations
SEINIT Security for Heterogeneous Mobile Network Services
Get PDFThis paper presents a model for securing mobile services using heterogeneous access networks, and implementing sample solutions using this framework. This is a project that is defining new security models and policies to address the new issues of the pervasive computing world. The security models and policies are implemented over IPv6 infrastructures to cover various business cases and assessed against real life scenarios. SEINIT is developing a trusted and dependable security framework with the end-user as the focus
FUSION METHODOLOGIES FOR HETEROGENEOUS DATA SOURCES WITHIN A REDUNDANT POSITIONING ARCHITECTURE
No full textUbiquitous computing is growing and emerging as an increasingly significant part of our everyday lives. It offers us the chance to work and interact with others in a safer and more efficient manner. Context awareness – knowledgeable of a user’s surrounding environment, used to characterise the situation of the user - will play a substantial role in achieving this. Location is a major part of context but many factors have contrived to prevent the widespread deployment of location-aware technologies outside of a few niche areas. Included here would be coverage, obtrusiveness, cost, low granularity and a lack of reliability. A Redundant Positioning Architecture will go a long way to combating these drawbacks and this research endeavour aims to implement a prototype positioning system based on the principles of this architecture. This articular document introduces data representation & data fusion in regard to a redundant positioning architecture. The many methodologies available to accomplish this representation and fusion are discussed and a canonical example of how one particular approach evaluates information is presented
PRIVACY AND HEALTHCARE INFORMATICS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
No full textThis paper revisits a previously published critical analysis of privacy and healthcare informatics in order to provide additional insight and commentary on the main findings. It also considers a small number of potential solutions offered by the literature for addressing ICT privacy concerns in general. While no one approach will resolve the privacy risks inherent in healthcare informatics, or indeed any systems that process personal information, there is some hope that a multi-pronged approach may prove effective. The role of systems developers in improving ICT privacy is advocated, given that they are in a privileged position to influence the direction of systems development by promoting privacy as an indispensable, human-centred value. As very little is known concerning the actual role privacy plays in the development of information systems, the ongoing research seeks to help redress this gap
Properties and Crystallization of Rare-Earth Si-Al-O-N Glasses Containing Mixed Trivalent Modifiers
Get PDFThirteen glasses of the general formula (M1, M2)9.33Si14 Al5.33O41.5N5.67 where M15La or Nd and M25Y or Er have been prepared with M1/(M11M2) fractions of 1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.25, and 0. Data for molar volume (MV), glass compactness (C), Young’s modulus (E), microhardness (H), glass transition temperatures (Tg), and dilatometric softening temperatures (Td) have been recorded. In addition, temperatures at which crystallization exotherms arise have also been determined as well as crystalline phases present after the glasses had been heat treated to 13001C in nitrogen. The results clearly demonstrate that glass properties vary linearly with effective cation field strength (CFS) of the combined modifiers (M1, M2), which is calculated from the atomic fractions of M1 and M2 and their associated CFSs. Glass stability in both the La–Y and La–Er systems reaches a maximum at M1 and M2 fractions of 0.5 because of the relative stability of different oxynitride and disilicate phases with changes in ionic radius. Furthermore, La appears to stabilize the a polymorph of yttrium disilicate because of combined La–Y ionic radius effects
Dynamics of Traveling Waves in the Transverse Section of a Laser
No full textWe analyze the general features of the formation and interaction of transverse traveling waves and the appearance of filamentation in broad area semiconductor lasers with current profiling. For small apertures, the emitted profile is symmetric consisting of two counterpropagating transverse traveling waves, both emanating from the center of the device. For larger apertures, the emission becomes asymmetric as one of the traveling waves expands to occupy an increased area while the other occupies the remaining, smaller spatial region. In both devices, the pattern becomes unstable at higher injection currents due to optical filamentation, although an intermediate state is present in the wider device whereby the dominant wave undergoes a Hopf bifurcation before filamentation occurs