Advances in Information Systems and Technologies

Data from four field studies are analyzed to find the patterns of knowledge acquisition activity in software development projects with respect to other cognitive activities such as documentation, coding and V&V. The data are obtained from self-recorded activity time slips approach. Data are codified based on an information source model, which is related to Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge creation model. It shows that knowledge acquisition activities account for almost 15% of the total effort. We also find out that this effort, in most cases, cannot be restricted to the first phase of the project during requirement and architectural design, which is expected from waterfall or disciplined processes. About half of the learning is done during the code implementation even within a disciplined process. This finding is in line with one value of the Agile philosophy that promotes team interactions and users involvement for the whole project duration.

Nowadays, most people worldwide accept the fact that knowledge is a very valuable asset for their success. Educational institutions such as universities, whose main objective is to educate students to gain more knowledge and skills for their careers as well as how to adapt and live in their community. Over the past decades, teaching and learning paradigms have rapidly changed from traditional styles to computer-based styles. Electronic learning (e-learning) has been recognized as an effective computer-based technology for knowledge management, life long learning, and distant learning. Although most universities have created electronic alumni networks and systems, those systems lack the concern of knowledge management. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an electronic learning system for integrating knowledge management and alumni systems.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study on knowledge management in Portuguese organizations. The study was based on a survey sent to one hundred of the main Portuguese organizations, in order to know their current practices relating knowledge management systems (KMS) usage and intellectual capital (IC) measurement. With this study, we attempted to understand what are the main tools used to support KM processes and activities in the organizations, and what metrics are pointed by organizations to measure their knowledge assets.

Patent information is mainly represented and stored in databases containing large amounts of information about the inventions and metadata of patents such as the technological field to which they belong, which can be retrieved in standard formats such as CSV or XML. These, however, provide few semantics to enable further relationships among patents to be inferred for analysis purposes. Ontologies, mostly represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), are increasingly being developed to represent, manage and reason about data in information systems. Unfortunately, the current patent ontologies do not seem to fully capture the implicit hierarchies present in patent technology codes to exploit the information that can be derived from the formal representation of patent code classification hierarchies through logic reasoning. This paper presents an approach to automatically index hierarchical codes with ontological categories and enrich the information retrieved and knowledge management from different patent repositories with new relationships, properties and inferred information.

The current World Wide Web is featured by a huge mass of knowledge, making it difficult to exploit. One possible way to cope with this issue is to proceed to knowledge mining in a way that we could control its volume and hence make it manageable. This paper explores meta-knowledge discovery and in particular focuses on clustering induction rules for large knowledge sets. Such knowledge representation is considered for its expressive power and hence its wide use. Adapted data mining is proposed to extract meta-knowledge taking into account the knowledge representation which is more complex than simple data. Besides, a new clustering approach based on multilevel paradigm and called multilevel clustering is developed for the purpose of treating large scale knowledge sets. The approach invokes the k-means algorithm to cluster induction rules using new designed similarity measures. The developed algorithms have been implemented on four public benchmarks to test the effectiveness of the multilevel clustering approach. The numerical results have been compared to those of the simple k-means algorithm. As foreseeable, the multilevel clustering outperforms clearly the basic k-means on both the execution time and success rate that remains constant to 100 % while increasing the number of induction rules.

A risks management, carried on in an effective way, leads the software development to success and may influence on the organization. The knowledge takes part of such a process as a way to help taking decisions. This research aimed to analyze the use of Knowledge Management techniques to the Risk Management in software projects development and the possible influence on the enterprise revenue. It had, as its main studying subject, Brazilian incubated and graduated software developing enterprises. The chosen research method was the Survey type. Multivariate statistical methods were used for the treatment and analysis of the obtained results, this way identifying the most significant factors, that is, enterprise´s achievement constraining factors and those outcome achievement ones. Among the latter we highlight the knowledge methodology, the time of existence of the enterprise, the amount of employees and the knowledge externalization. The results encourage contributing actions to the increasing of financial revenue.

The purpose of this paper is to provide research based understanding of leveraging knowledge and managing knowledge within and across several communities using the poverty domain as a case study. We hypothesize that leveraging knowledge with a good taxonomy and a good integration process are good approaches to organize and share knowledge. Problems appear when a group of people in different communities share data and collaborate using different perceptions, different concepts, different terms (terminologies), and different semantics to represent the same reality. In this paper we present an approach to solve this problem. We will generate a common set of terms based on the terms of several different storage devices, used by different communities, in order to make data retrieval independent of the different perceptions and terminologies used by those communities. We use ontologies to represent the particular knowledge of each community and discuss the use of mapping and integration techniques to find correspondences between the concepts used in those ontologies.

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia known to date. Its rich content and semi-structured nature has made it into a very valuable research tool used for classification, information extraction, and semantic annotation, among others. Many applications can benefit from the presence of a topic hierarchy in Wikipedia. However, what Wikipedia currently offers is a category graph built through hierarchical category links the semantics of which are un-defined. Because of this lack of semantics, a sub-category in Wikipedia does not necessarily comply with the concept of a sub-category in a hierarchy. Instead, all it signifies is that there is some sort of relationship between the parent category and its sub-category. As a result, traversing the category links of any given category can often result in surprising results. For example, following the category of “Computing” down its sub-category links, the totally unrelated category of “Theology” appears. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm that through measuring the semantic relatedness between any given Wikipedia category and nodes in its sub-graph is capable of extracting a category hierarchy containing only nodes that are relevant to the parent category. The algorithm has been evaluated by comparing its output with a gold standard data set. The experimental setup and results are presented.

In this article we present an empirical study of privacy policies at local government web sites in Portugal. Web sites of all the 308 Portuguese municipalities where surveyed for privacy policy manifests and a content analysis was performed on those documents. We concluded that privacy of citizens is clearly not a priority in Portuguese local government, since only 26% of the municipalities include privacy policy statements in their web sites and many of those documents exhibit significant gaps considering the information that a user would expect to find in a privacy policy. By raising the awareness to the need of improving privacy in local government web sites, our conclusions are useful for both academics and practitioners in the areas of e-government, privacy and local government

This paper analyses the knowledge integration in problem-solving situations which requires a high level of interaction and trust among workers. The literature review explores the main barriers associated to knowledge integration and use; even if most problem situations are solved in an unconscious way, automatically and in a few seconds, others situations requires more time, effort, teamwork, collaboration and extensive abstract knowledge. This research goal is to analyse the perceptions of the workers from Alpha Organisation. The research findings allow us to conclude that, depending on the complexity of the workstation, the Operator decides if he has the knowledge and the tools to solve the problem or if he needs help from Managers. The use and share of employees’ knowledge is an important factor to solve problems and strengthen performance. However, several organisational and individual barriers condition the process.

Knowledge is an important resource for organisations, and being able to manage it is a key factor for success. New information management and knowledge sharing approaches should be able to cope not only with possible variations in business situations and contexts, but also with various and sometimes discordant viewpoints, which are inherent to collaborative environments. Developing, reusing and maintaining common interpretations of available information is crucial to support real-word organisational activities. The particularly challenging problem of knowledge elicitation is tackled here combining terminological and knowledge representation views. A corpus-based conceptual modelling architecture was designed and discussed together with the workflows for real-time context retrieval and lexical pattern discovery. The practical implementation and validation of this work are accomplished on the ConceptME system, a platform developed as part of this research line, providing knowledge and terminological tools and resources to support activities that involve collaborative conceptualisation processes according to the ColBlend method.

When developing and aiming to achieve success in the arena of mobile commerce, user behaviour is one of the main aspects for consideration. This research seeks to analysis whether individuals’ (gender, age, education level) influences their mobile commerce usage within the context of Saudi Arabia. The individuals analysed are own smartphone. We further present three hypotheses that investigate whether demographic factors have a significant statistical impact on the perception of those factors for mobile commerce acceptance in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Survey data were collected from 574 participants in several cities across Saudi Arabia. The results emphasise that age affect statically on the actual usage. However, gender and education level all considerably not affect on the mobile commerce actual usage.

This paper presents an insight of the perspectives and potentialities that may arise from the use of tools based on semantic technology, for an autonomous management of the learning and the knowledge produced within organizations. Thus, the conceptual basis of a model for the development of knowledge systems will be presented, oriented for an intelligent learning management. The scope of application of this model is software houses. Its main function is to support specialized training having as basis the use of contents adjusted to particular needs. The pillars of its functioning are essentially based on the use of semantic technologies and the dynamic self-regulation of its contents. Similarly, and bearing in mind the importance of learning theories for the scope of this study, we will include an approach to the connectivist theory, in order to better understand behavior and trends influencing learning and pedagogical processes in the digital era.

The evolution of internet created new opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SME), among which are social networks. This work aims at analyzing the potential of these networks for the SME in Algarve, creating a questionnaire for the purpose. The empirical study revealed that some firms have already an integrated business strategy with social networks, as well as a group in the firm responsible for it. Most of their managers consider that social networks enhance performance, but few really measure these results. A categorical principal component analysis identified two dimensions of social networks’ use: social networks for product-client interaction and knowledge; and social networks with potential for marketing. A supplementary analysis (hierarchical clustering) identified three patterns of SME’s involvement in social networks: cluster Social Net Level 1, cluster Social Net Level 2 and cluster Social Net Level 3. These groups validated the results described above, indicating a sustainable methodological approach.

The exploration of large networks carries inherent challenges in the visualization of a great amount of data. We built an interactive visualization system for the purpose of exploring a large multidimensional network of news clips over time. These are clips gathered by users from web news sources and references to people or places are extracted from. In this paper, we present the system’s capabilities and user interface and discuss its advantages in terms of the browsing and extraction of knowledge from the data. These capabilities include a textual search and associated event detection, and temporal navigation allowing the user to seek a certain date and timespan.

User documentation is a structurally under-valued aspect of information systems and end user assistance. Popular belief has it that documentation is required only where insufficient attention has been paid to the design of usability, user satisfaction and user experience; and that documentation is not referred to by users anyhow. Both lines of reasoning are shown to be faulty, and a case is made for an interest in user documentation from the pertinent research communities.

Domain knowledge affects search success and behaviors but different aspects of domain knowledge, i.e., topic knowledge and background knowledge, has not normally been distinguished. We were interested in finding out if the two would have different effects on search performance for typical research search tasks, and we report empirical evidence from a user study. Participants’ topic knowledge and background knowledge were measured separately as different aspects of domain knowledge. Our results indicate that topic knowledge and background knowledge impact search performance at different levels. While topic knowledge was significantly correlated with performance measures for individual tasks, background knowledge was significantly correlated with performance at more general levels, over multiple task sessions. This finding furthers our understanding of the role of domain knowledge in search activities.

We present a new algorithm to discover overlapping communities in networks with a scale free structure. This algorithm is based on a node evaluation function that scores the local influence of a node based on its degree and neighbourhood, allowing for the identification of hubs within a network. Using this function we are able to identify communities, and also to attribute meaningful titles to the communities that are discovered. Our novel methodology is assessed using LFR benchmark for networks with overlapping community structure and the generalized normalized mutual information (NMI) measure. We show that the evaluation function described is able to detect influential nodes in a network, and also that it is possible to build a well performing community detection algorithm based on this function.

This paper aims to support doctor’s decision-making on predicting the Sepsis level. Thus, a set of Data Mining (DM) models were developed using prevision techniques and classification models. These models enable a better doctor’s decision having into account the Sepsis level of the patient. The DM models use real data collected from the Intensive Care Unit of the Santo António Hospital, in Oporto, Portugal. Classification DM models were considered to predict sepsis level in a supervised learning approach. The models were induced making use of the following algorithms: Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines and Naïve Bayes classifier. The models were assessed using the Confusion Matrix, associated metrics, and Cross-validation. The analysis of the total error rate, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were the metrics used to identify the most relevant measures to predict sepsis level. This work demonstrates that it is possible to predict with great accuracy the sepsis level.

The security of information systems (IS) depends on many factors, however, numerous technical advances alone cannot always create a safe and secure environment. Security incidents related to patients’ data in healthcare organizations continue to increase due to human behaviors causes serious concerns. This study attempts the exploration of security culture in Health Information Systems (HIS). The scope of this paper is confined to the literature review on existing models on security culture. A conceptual model was constructed in identifying the antecedents that could influence security culture in HIS security effectiveness. We found that education and training, and communication may contribute towards a more effective implementation of security culture for HIS users. This in-progress work will then proceed to the next phase in evaluating the proposed model.

In this paper we propose a multilingual method to identify health-related queries and classify them into health categories. Our method uses a consumer health vocabulary and the Unified Medical Language System semantic structure to compute the association degree of a query to medical concepts and categories. This method can be applied in different languages with translated versions of the health vocabulary. To evaluate its efficacy and applicability in two languages we used two manually classified sets of queries, each on a different language. Results are better for the English sample where a distance of 0.38 to the ROC optimal point (0,1) was obtained. This shows some influence of the translation in the method’s performance.

The constraint-based processes are those that do not require a procedural model that explicitly specify the execution procedure. Declarative languages are more suitable for modeling and implementing this type of process. This paper aims to present and analyze two approaches that deal with the modeling and execution of constraint-based processes. The first approach makes use of Linear Temporal Logic and software Declare as a tool for modeling constraints. The second approach is based on the Supervisory Control Theory (SCT). Both approaches presented in this paper aims to monitor and restrict execution sequences of tasks such that constraints are not violated. Despite the control logic is built based on constraints, it does not limit the user by imposing rigid control-flow structures. A discussion of the results, advantages and the main drawbacks of the two approaches are presented in this paper.

The investigation that is described in this paper tried to identify and acknowledge the added value created by the adoption of nursing practice standards, using a study case in a large Portuguese hospital. Following a literature review, five assumptions were proposed. Subsequently, a survey was developed and administered to a nursing staff sample of the hospital under study. Our results revealed that, except for the last, all assumptions were confirmed, leading to the conclusion that the adoption of standards is beneficial for the nursing practice.

This research-in-progress article tries to examine Kuwaiti citizens’ perceptions of e-Government quality and its influence on their decision to use (or not to use) the official Kuwaiti portal. Specifically, it tries to examine an attitudinal model linking three groups of e-Government quality attributes and e-Government use as measured by number of visits and transactions. The statistical analyses of responses collected from a sample of Kuwaiti citizens highlight the importance of e-Government quality for inducing citizens’ use.

With the rapid growth of competition in the market, the companies have to guarantee customers a reliable, sustainable and quality proofing production system. In this paper we consider a KM framework that extracts “Six Sigma” knowledge on the basis of the data gathered from production facilities. The KM framework enables to assess the performance of a company’s production and quality system by sigma value. The result will help the company to select a new development strategy in order to increase the profitability and customer satisfaction. KM framework includes well known tools like PDM, ERP system, PDM-ERP middleware and DM. The core of our framework is the DM that combines production route card data, Faults Classification standard DOE-NE-STD-1004-92 and the data from FMEA table. The combination and application of different tools and methods in the general KM framework allows the data flow between different systems, analysis of production operation and the failures occurring in the production process.

The golden time and measure of agility during the emergency is that hour when the incident has occurred. Recovery and response should be served promptly to minimize the risk of losing life and property. Therefore this paper examines(analyze) and determines(clarifies) the concurrent(real time) application of Android, GIS, and web base system that is focusing on those exceptional areas where the emergency system is not very much efficient or is not very much agile (effective). Most emergency situation occurs due to fire, road accidents or natural disasters, this paper analyzes GIS data of transport systems, incident location, hospitals, ambulance and observing teams, police, fire brigades etc, spatial data analysis can also done for past incident scrutiny (analysis) by using ArcGIS server manager at the backend designed by all the basic map interaction WCF services in ASP.NET which can be able to respond on all sort of needs required by the responder by using his/her smart android phone.

Intensive Care Units are considered a critical environment where the decision needs to be carefully taken. The real-time recognition of the condition of the patient is important to drive the decision process efficiently. In order to help the decision process, a Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support System (PIDSS) was developed. To provide a better comprehension of the acceptance of the PIDSS it is very important to assess how the users accept the system at level of usability and their importance in the Decision Making Process. This assessment was made using the four constructs proposed by the Technology Acceptance Methodology and a questionnaire-based approach guided by the Delphi Methodology. The results obtained so far show that although the users are satisfied with the offered information recognizing its importance, they demand for a faster system.

This paper describes the GLORIA system (GLObal Robotic telescope Intelligent Array), the first worldwide network of robotic telescopes, which covers four continents with seventeen telescopes, and can be extended. The network architecture has been designed taking into account the functionalities offered to the community, the number of telescopes, users that will be managed and network compatibility with all kinds of robotic telescopes. Different kinds of experiments have been designed to support the various requirements of astronomers. In order to manage the user access to the network resources, an evaluation system, called karma, has been defined which will operate according to some established policy.

This work aims at pointing out the benefits of a topology-oriented wide scope, but differentiated, profile analysis. The goal was to conciliate advanced common website usage profiling techniques with the analysis of the website’s topology information, outputting valuable knowledge in an intuitive and comprehensible way. Server load balancing, crawler activity evaluation and Web site restructuring are the primary analysis concerns and, in this regard, experiments over six month data of a real-world Web site were considered successful.

The study concerns the situation in the Czech Republic, where the new

Insolvency Act

was accepted in 2006 and took effect from the beginning of 2008. One of the aims of the acceptance of the legislation was the creation of conditions for improved use of information technology in the area of insolvency proceedings. It was intended to bring about a state where a third party would easily acquaint itself with details concerning individual cases so as to compile sufficiently substantiating statistics on insolvency proceedings. While the first goal has been accomplished and it is now possible to access a range of information online and follow a concrete case practically simultaneously to the development of the insolvency proceedings, the second goal has remained unfulfilled. The fault lies in inadequate technological and jurisdictional solutions which have not paid sufficient attention to the possibilities of using information technology in insolvency practice in the Czech Republic.

The Simulation is a key element in efficient management and operation of public transport. This activity includes processing of dynamic data possibly obtained through sensors, as well dealing with static information including map digitalization. A fundamental problem is that, although available, systems that perform these activities are proprietary solutions, have high cost of acquisition, are difficult to be used by non-experts, or offer a limited number of features, without considering important aspects such as changes in travel demand and traffic flow. To address this problem, this paper presents a friendly simulation for public transport systems implemented with support of open technologies. Dynamism to modeling bus and travelers behavior is offered by a MAS (multi-agent system). Our simulation was experimentally evaluated using as scenario a medium-sized city with different travel demand and traffic flow.

Unlike the previous works where detecting communities is performed on large graphs, our approach considers textual documents for discovering potential social networks. More precisely, the aim of this paper is to extract social communities from a collection of documents and a query specifying the domain of interest that may link the group. We propose a methodology which develops an information retrieval system capable to generate the documents that are in relationship with any topic. The authors of these documents are linked together to constitute the social community around the given thematic. The search process in the information retrieval system is designed using a bee swarm optimization method in order to optimize the retrieval time. Our approach was implemented and tested on CACM and DBLP and the time of building a social network is quasi instant.

Making information available is a permanent challenge for cities concerned to their social, urban and local planning and development, focused on life quality of their citizens and on the effectiveness of public management. The objective is to describe the information and information systems project from the planning of a digital city carried out in Vinhedo-SP, Brazil. The research methodology was emphasized by a case study which turned to be a research-action, comprising the municipal administration and its local units. The results achieved describe phases, sub-phases, approval points and resulting products. The contributions have to do with the practical feasibility of the project. The conclusion reiterates the importance of the project, collectively implemented and accepted, as a tool to help the management of cities, in the implementation of strategic digital city projects, in the decisions of public administration managers, and in the quality of life of their citizens.

In this paper the authors propose a link between the Benefits Dependency Network, from a Benefits Management approach, and a Strategy Map, from Balanced Scorecard, to improve the management of business benefits and to ensure that actions taken along the investment life-cycle lead to foreseen benefits realization. The goal of this integration is to build a framework that combines useful features of both methods. We sustain that they can be complementary. As a Strategy Map is committed with strategic alignment, communication and monitoring of strategy execution at all levels of an organization, a Benefits Dependency Network is aimed at explaining how benefits are going to be obtained through organizational change. Using the results of a case-study research, we explain how a Strategy Map can cross with the Benefits Dependency Network. The integrated contribution is meant to increase the investments effectiveness, giving to stakeholdersthe confidence on a clearer delivery path for their expected benefits.

E-government is assumed nowadays as a common and transversal preoccupation to all the modern states. Therefore, in spite of having several methods for planning of the Information Systems, the specificity of Public Administration imposes the need to think in modeling of a method for global planning. This research provides a reflection on how to conduct and implement an e-government initiative in emergent’s countries, with special focus on the case of São Tomé and Principe.

Recently, there seems to be some consensus that universities should play a key role in the issues of social responsibility (SR). The higher education system in Australia has undergone of government reforms, providing funding in order to integrate SR issues in their strategic planning and to implement New Technologies of Information (ICT). This paper analyzes the policies and strategies of communication about SR information and wonders if Australian universities are relying on ICT as a means both to disseminate issues of SR and to facilitate interaction with stakeholders. The results show that the disclosure of SR reporting by Australian universities is very low, only with the main aim of legitimacy purposes.

An Information Architecture is the basis for a comprehensive and integrated information system of any organization, capable of providing answers that meet the challenges posed by the contemporary competitive environment. In this paper we identify representative methodologies used in Information Architecture definitions, and we present an Information Architecture Planning case study for a Local Public Administration organization, where we implement an Adapted BSP Methodology that is sufficiently flexible and suited to the goals we propose.

Software development outsourcing is now a reality in both international and national organizations because it represents a competitive strategy. However, even when organizations recognize in the outsourcing competitiveness and business strategy, the software development projects in outsourcing enviroments fails due to the inadequate project management. Therefore, this paper presents a proposal of how to implement TSPi Methodology to manage software project in outsourcing environment. To achieve this, the main failure factors in software development in outsourcing environments are identified and a traceability to identify the adaptability of TSPi to this environment is showed.

Personalized applications exhibit features adjusted to the preferences or needs of users and can provide benefits related to customer relationship or related to the efficiency of organizational work. This article presents a conceptual model that can be viewed as a contribution to the body of knowledge of Information Systems and Technologies professionals with responsibilities in the adoption, and development of personalized Web applications. These contributions include: a conceptual model that combines and articulates aspects that contribute to the success and to the quality of personalized information system (this model combines design features, facets that contribute to the quality and metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance of organizational work supported by personalized information systems). This set of aspects combines a synthesis of information so far scattered in the literature with proposals and recommendations with empirical knowledge based on an empirical study.

ePharmaCare aims at estimating the health gains from integration of pharmaceutical services; and to assess the potential of ehealth services in the provision of cognitive pharmaceutical services. Collection of data on pharmaceutical services and diagnosis of the use of IT in Pharmacy settings was made with the application of a survey. A set of pharmacies was selected to study the pattern of services’ provision supported by observational studies to evaluate the economic and clinical value of services to patients. The results of this research will allow a better understanding of pharmaceutical services’ delivery and a new perspective for pharmaceutical services integration with the health system. Due to the shortage of physicians, the development of a new internet based pharmaceutical service could be an important contribution to an effective chronic diseases’ management. Furthermore there is the necessity of rethinking the community pharmacy business model to effectively integrate within future health systems.

Organizations worldwide are adopting several international standards and models, in an effort to improve the software processes, however, the difficulty by using multi-model improvement environments in the implementation of successful process improvements is well known. This paper shows the steps in order to establish a multi-model Environment based on the organization’s business goals. It includes the results of a case study on project management process improvement in an organization.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a set of practices that can be applied in companies in order to improve processes. The goal of this work was to understand the barriers in implementing CMMI and improve processes following the model. The study was conducted in a company in the North of Portugal, following three steps: (1) diagnosing the company (2) opinion gathering through questionnaires and (3) reimplementation of CMMI. The analysis of the questionnaires indicated that implementing CMMI is problematical due to bureaucracy and lack of detailed protocols. Based on the difficulties encountered we developed a detailed documentation with standard processes where the employer has a more prominent role in controlling the processes. The adapted CMMI was then re-introduced in the same company. Finally, linking perceptions and results from the reimplementation, we consider fundamental a good use of CMMI to ensure efficient production.

Mobile wallet applications are new and promising mobile payment technologies. While researchers have started to explore adoption models in this domain, they have taken a generic approach to understanding customers’ perceived usefulness of this technology. In this research-in-progress paper, we seek to develop a new, goal-oriented construct to understand the perceived usefulness of the mobile wallet from a consumer’s perspective, which should provide a richer meaning to both academic and practitioner communities.

Term clustering based on proximity measure is a strategy leading to efficiently yield documents relevance. Unlike the recent studies that investigated term proximity for improving matching function between the document and the query, in this work the whole process of information retrieval is thoroughly revised on both indexing and interrogation steps. Consequently, an Extended Inverted file is built by exploiting the term proximity concept and using data mining techniques. Then three interrogation approaches are proposed, the first one uses query expansion, the second one is based on the Extended Inverted file and the last one hybridizes retrieval methods. Experiments carried out on OHSUMED demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches compared to the traditional one.

In order to automate and manage the processes of business of the organizations, it is advisable to the use of systems of management of processes of business (BPMS - Business Process Management Suite) with a high level of quality and efficiency. We believe that the definition and proposal for a catalog (set) of specific requirements to these systems is one of the important steps in this sense. This work presents a set of requirements for BPMS, serving the guide to your development and improvement. The catalog has been drawn up on the basis of work in the literature and in the experience of experts (including experiences of assessment and elicitation requirements for systems of BPM).

This paper presents a new high level software architecture used to develop automated trading agents in betting exchange markets.

Betfair

betting exchange entity is used as case study. The implementation of the

Scalping, Swing

, and

Trailing-Stop

trading mechanisms is explored in detail. A

rule-based

trading agent, used as test example, is also described together with results of simulations and real interaction with

pre-live

horse race markets.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) supports the automating of code generation by performing a set of transfomations between models. This approach is currently been applied to specific domains and in particular in the web domain, and this is because web aplications have evolved with the appearance of AJAX and Web 2.0 technology, and a new breed of applications for the Internet has emerged. However, as web applications become more and more complex, the performance degree is negatively affected, since the initial stages of software life cycle are not incorporated into the development process of this type of applications. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a model-driven architecture to support web application development from the design to the implementation model. With this objective, the following tasks have been performed: first a new profile extends UML with new concepts from the web domain, next a new framework supports web application development by composing web components, and finally, a transformation model generates web applications from the UML extension proposed. The main contributions of this work is a cost and complexity reduction of web applications, and a high reusability degree achieved, since web components can be reused in different web applications.

This paper highlights the need of many organizations nowadays for early warning information systems (EWIS) that can predict the future and help prevent crises or reduce their negative effects. These EWIS should be based on a reliable and consistent framework. The frameworks currently available are mostly deterministic, simplified or inconsistent in application and assumption; thus making them unreliable and impractical. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it provides guidelines for system analysts, designers, engineers and experts seeking to deal with crisis or disaster information systems. Secondly, it aims to present a novel framework for EWIS that can be adapted to the dynamic needs of the field of crisis management, and that can also be used efficiently in crisis preparedness. Finally, the paper will describe a case study in the law enforcement sector as a proof-of-concept for the conceptual framework; to demonstrate both the theoretical and practical approaches.

Aggregation operators play a fundamental role in decision making, especially when there are numerous (conflicting) criteria present. In case of uncertain data, an important task is to develop appropriate solutions for the aggregation process. In many applications the knowledge and data provided by the experts tend to be vague, as experts express their knowledge in non-structured and ambiguous ways, for instance by using linguistic terms. We combine interval-valued fuzzy sets and OWA operators to create new aggregation methods and we prove that the new operators satisfy some important properties. In this article we present novel approaches for aggregating vague and imprecise information.

Several Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods involve pairwise comparisons to obtain the preferences of decision makers (DMs). This paper proposes a fuzzy group prioritization method for deriving group priorities/weights from fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices. The proposed method considers the different importance weights of multiple DMs by extending the Fuzzy Preferences Programming Method (FPP). The elements of the group pairwise comparison matrices are presented as fuzzy numbers rather than exact numerical values in order to model the uncertainty and imprecision in the DMs’ judgments. Unlike the known fuzzy prioritization techniques, the proposed method is able to derive crisp weights from incomplete and fuzzy set of comparison judgments and doesn’t require additional aggregation procedures. A prototype of a decision tool is developed to assist DMs to use the proposed method for solving fuzzy group prioritization problems. A detailed numerical example is used to illustrate the proposed approach.

Optimization models based on fuzzy set theory are relevant to the process industry, where there are many uncertainties that are inherently fuzzy. In this paper, we incorporate backorders (i.e the inventory to go below zero) and cycle time in a fuzzy Economic Production Quantity (EPQ) model. The uncertainties in the backorders and in the demand for different products are modeled using triangular possibility distributions. We illustrate the model with an example that describes a typical decision making problem in the paper industry.

A well-known problem in research and technology (R&T) planning is the selection of suited R&T collaboration partners. We investigate the use of textual information from the website content of possible collaboration candidates to identify their suitability. This improves the selection of collaboration partners and it enables a successful processing of R&T-projects. In a case study ‘defense R&T’, organizations and companies that have proven their suitability as collaboration partner in former R&T projects are selected (positive examples) as well as organizations and companies that have not. Latent semantic indexing with singular value decomposition and logistic regression modeling is used to identify semantic textual patterns from their websites’ content. As a result of prediction modeling, some of these textual patterns are successful in predicting new organizations or companies as (un-) suited R&T collaboration partners. These results support the acquisition of new collaboration partners and thus, they are valuable for the planning of R&T.

This paper lays out a theoretical framework for engineering accountability for decision-making into cognitive systems, based on a combination of theories from the fields of archival and cognitive science, and demonstrates the application of this framework in a prototype cognitive system - an interactive visual dashboard for fixed income analytics.

A reduction of interest in management decision support systems and technologies did not reduce the importance of well-supported business decision making. Being attributed to the group of intelligent systems and technologies, decision support technologies have been largely supplemented by business intelligence technologies. Both types of technologies are supported by respective information technologies, which often appear to be quite closely related. The objective of this paper is to define relations between decision support and business intelligence technologies, based on common goals of sense-making and use of advanced analytical tools. A model of two interconnected cycles has been developed to relate the activities of decision support and business intelligence.

In University Management, one of the recurring problems that each department has to solve, each year, is the Teaching Service Distribution (TSD) or Teaching Assignment Problem (TAP). The problem of TSD consist to assign teachers to courses classes - lectures, tutorials, practical or laboratory - taking into account these preferences and qualifications for teaching. This is a crucial stage, since it is almost imperative that the TSD is fully defined before the process of schedules generating. However, most institutions of higher education, don’t have a specific software tool to support the process of TSD. In this paper we propose a new approach for solving the TSD consisting on the formulation of the problem as a distributed scheduling problem with the formation with coalitions formation. The problem is solved in the context of a multi-agent system where the real agents are modeled by computational agents, with their interests, but may cooperate in alliance groups.

Crime rate in Malaysia is almost in awareness stage. The centre for Public Policy Studies Malaysia reports that the ratio of police to population is 3.6 officers to 1,000 citizens in Malaysia. This lack of manpower sources ratios alone are not a comprehensive afford of crime fighting capabilities. Thus, dealing with these circumstances, we present a comprehensive study to determine bandit behavior with PCA and different neural network algorithm such as Elman Neural Network (ELMNN), Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Cascade-Forward Neural Network (CFNN). This system provided a good justification as a monitoring supplementary tool for the Malaysian police arm forced.

Autonomy and autonomous agents are currently the most researched topics in autonomous systems. Issues like autonomy adjustment, autonomy level, and the required degree of autonomy to be performed are investigated. Abstracting an autonomy model poses the problem of identifying specific aspects that merit an autonomous system. In this paper, we propose another model of autonomy that conceptualizes autonomy as a spectrum, which is constructed in a layered structure of a multi-agent environment called Layered Adjustable Autonomy (LAA). The autonomy spectrum of the LAA is divided into adjustable-leveled layers. Each of which has distinct attributes and properties that assist an agent in managing the influences of the environment during its decision-making process. The LAA structure is designed to endorse an agent’s qualification to make a decision by setting the degree of autonomy to the agent’s choice of decision-making. An Autonomy Analysis Module (AAM) is also proposed to control and delegate the agent’s actions at specific autonomy levels. Hence, the AAM determines the threshold of the agent autonomy level to act in its qualified layer. Ultimately, the proposed LAA model will be implemented on an air drone for the purpose of testing and refinement.

The design and development of autonomous software agents is still a challenging task and needs further investigation. Giving an agent the maximum autonomous capabilities may not necessarily produce satisfactory agent behavior. Consequently, adjustable autonomy has become the hallmark of autonomous systems development that influences an agent to exhibit satisfactory behavior. To perform such influences, however, a dynamic adjustment mechanism is needed to be configured. The influences are costly in time and implementation especially for systems with time-critical domain. They might negatively influence agent decisions and cause system disturbance. In this paper, we propose a framework to govern an agent autonomy adjustment and minimize system disturbance. The main components of the proposed framework are the Planner, Scheduler and Controller (PSC) that conform to the current trends in automated systems. Two modules are also suggested which are Autonomy Analysis Module (AAM) and Situation Awareness Module (SAM). They are accordingly used to distribute the autonomy and provide balance to the system so that it’s local and global desires do not conflict.

On the last decade Poker has been one of the most interesting subjects for artificial intelligence, because it is a game that requires game playing agents to deal with an incomplete information and stochastic scenario. The development of Poker agents has seen significant advances but it is still hard to evaluate agents’ performance against human players. This is either because it is illicit to use agents in online games, or because human players cannot create agents that play like themselves due to lack of knowledge on computer science and/or AI. The purpose of this work is to fill the gap between poker players and AI in Poker by allowing players without programming skills to build their own agents. To meet this goal, a high-level language of poker concepts – PokerLang – was created, whose structure is easy to read and interpret for domain experts. This language allows for the quick definition of an agent strategy. A graphical application was also created to support the writing of PokerLang strategies. To validate this approach, some Poker players created their agents using the graphical application. Results validated the usability of the application and the language that supports it. Moreover, the created agents showed very good results against agents developed by other experts.

A current review of media sources indicates crimes of opportunity such as burglaries, purse-snatchings and vehicle theft, are consistently the most topical crime problems. The Malaysian government has taken several steps to increase police effectiveness and reduce crime since 2004. But their effectiveness is limited by low salaries and lack of manpower. Verily to compile a comprehensive afford of crime fighting capabilities. We present an explicit system to detect a crime scene with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and a fusion of Genetic Algorithm with Neural Network (GANN). This system provided a good justification as a monitoring supplementary tool for the Malaysian police arm forced.

This paper presents a Swarm based Cooperation Mechanism for scheduling optimization. We intend to conceptualize real manufacturing systems as interacting autonomous entities in order to support decision making in agile manufacturing environments. Agents coordinate their actions automatically without human supervision considering a common objective – global scheduling solution taking advantages from collective behavior of species through implicit and explicit cooperation. The performance of the cooperation mechanism will be evaluated consider implicit cooperation at first stage through ACS, PSO and ABC algorithms and explicit through cooperation mechanism application.

This paper presents a performance analysis tool (BAL) for concurrent systems that involves resources and synchronization. It is based on timed process algebra (BTC) for specifying process systems and their resource requirements. The output of the tool is the minimum time and resources needed to reach a given state. BAL makes the syntactic analysis of the system specification, draws up its relevant transition graph by applying the rules of the operational semantics and solves a performance optimization problem relevant to the minimization of the maximum completion time. A case study is used to assess how BAL works, the degree of usefulness of the results and the time required to obtain them.

Information technology has great potential for transforming the health care system, improving quality of care. With the increasing expansion of health information systems, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has become one of the finest sources for clinical information aggregators in the context of digital health. The EHR is a core part of a hospital information system, as well as a service on duty of the patient to improve the treatment of patients. It can be considered as a longitudinal electronic record of patient heath information, for example vital signs, medical history or laboratory data, generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting. As the EHR offers many potential opportunities for healthcare systems, it is important to take steps to improve the system. With this in mind, a study of the features present on a Portuguese EHR was made. The basis of this study was an adoption model that evaluates the EHR system accordingly to its current features. After this study, the EHR will be ranked into one of the existing eight stages.

Scientific computing over the Internet can suit many activities that have not, in the authors’ opinion, been explored enough in general. Resources such as executables, languages, packages, can be used from a remote computing system. In this study, largely based on academic practice, a simple illustrative example in Geometry is implemented on a distributed system that outsources the computing-intensive tasks to remote servers that may be located in other universities or companies, linked to grids and clusters and so on. The software stack and software developed to support the communication is explained in detail. The architecture developed stresses the interoperability of the software, and a high degree of decoupling between components hosted in various locations. The results of this study motivate further work and serve a practical purpose that may be useful to everyone doing scientific computing.

Multiple dispatch is a feature provided by some programming languages, in which the actual method to be executed is dynamically determined by the runtime types of its arguments. Although some programming languages such as CLOS, Xtend and Dylan provide this feature, many widespread languages such as Java, C# and C++ only support

single

dispatch by means of dynamic binding. Therefore, different implementation techniques are commonly used to obtain multiple dispatch from within these single-dispatch languages. We propose a new approach to obtain multiple dispatch in single-dispatch hybrid static and dynamic typing languages. Using C# as an example, the proposed approach is compared with the existing ones, considering factors such as software maintainability and readability, code size, parameter generalization, compile-time type checking, and runtime performance. The example implementation of the hybrid statically and dynamically typed approach in

.Net

has shown a runtime performance 1.26 times lower than the statically typed approach, and 6.27 times higher than the dynamically type one.

The current information systems and match analysis software associated to professional football output a huge amount of statistics. Many football professionals are particularly interested in real time information about the tactical plan occurring during the match, and the relations between that information and what was prepared in the training sessions. It is fundamental to have on the bench, and on-the-fly, the most relevant information each time they have to take a decision. In this paper, we present a set of open source technologies involved in building a multi-platform web based integrated football information system, supported in three main modules: user interfaces, databases, and the tactical plan detection and classification. We show that the selected technologies are suitable for those modules, allowing field occurrences to trigger meaningful information.

Smartphones are trending and most tourists already own one. Many applications exist for smartphones, in order to help tourists in their journeys. Applications available share the same problem, though: content may not be complete or updated and, they lack user feedback. The best information about a city is usually held by locals, or by recent visitors. An application fed and maintained by its users, seems a good solution to improve the information contained in mobile applications for tourists. Motivating travelers to share their knowledge, in a long-term basis, poses a problem. We propose to tackle that problem through the use of Serious Games, to achieve user’s collaboration in the building and maintenance of a tourism database. A prototype for Android platform was developed and deployed. A group of 20 individuals tested the application in the terrain. Data was collected from their experience. A survey to the users showed their feelings towards this new experience. Results showed that Serious Games are a viable approach to achieve several objectives. Users from the test group showed to be interested in the gaming environment, enabling them to share their knowledge, possibly in a long term basis.

The increased frequency and damage caused by virtual attacks, reveals a need for stronger, easily deployable authentication solutions. This paper describes the architecture of a biometric authentication system based on dynamic handwritten signatures. Our design uses the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and consists of non-intrusive, easy-to-integrate services and software components. Its features are enhanced security, reduced development time for the applications that use it, and modularity with respect to the underlying biometric system. Our experiments demonstrate that the system is a cost-efficient solution capable of handling thousands of authentication requests per minute.

Groovy is a dynamic language based on Java. Groovy enables the development of new operators in order to overcome the language’s own limitations. The extensions to Groovy can be made through Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) Transformations. In this paper, we present two AST Transformations to monitor variables and methods in an AspectJ inspired manner. These transformations make it possible to execute custom closures (lambda expressions) at specific points of the application, enabling the improvement of software development.

We present an approach of intertextuality in terms of graph theories, statistics, and bakhtinian polyphony, the latter perspective considering the way in which discourse threads are influencing each other. This paper presents theoretical models, processing techniques with their applications and results that acknowledge as important the approach based on networks of intertextuality. In the end are introduced two original applications of supervised and unsupervised analysis of antique texts of philosophical and religious nature.

This article presents the development of a specific software system through the integration of several open source applications. This integration makes use of several synchronous Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) techniques that were grouped as a way to keep the applications the most independent possible. The integration process was conducted directly on the source code of the applications, making usage of open source applications as an asset. This article presents and approach that allows the development of new software solutions through the integration of several open source applications.

Today, performance prediction of component-based systems is important to help software engineers to analyze their applications in early stages of the development life-cycle, so that performance problems are avoided. To achieve performance prediction, modelling is a crucial step. It would be interesting if component performance models can be derived automatically. To this aim, we describe in this paper a software toolset which allows component designers of specific systems, that are

Fractal

systems, to generate performance models, starting from the

Fractal

architectural description of their system and component behaviours. These models consist of Stochastic Well formed Nets (SWN) and Stochastic Petri nets (SPN), and can be analyzed using SPN/SWN analysis tools. A case study illustrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Besides source code, the fundamental source of information about Open Source Software lies in documentation, and other non source code files, like

README

,

INSTALL

, or

HowTo

files, commonly available in the software ecosystem. These documents, written in natural language, provide valuable information during the software development stage, but also in future maintenance and evolution tasks.

DMOSS is a toolkit designed to systematically assess the quality of non source code text found in software packages. The toolkit handles a package as an attribute tree, and performs several tree traverse algorithms through a set of plugins, specialized in retrieving specific metrics from text, gathering information about the software. These metrics are later used to infer knowledge about the software, and composed together to build reports that assess the quality of specific features of the software.

This paper discusses the motivations for this work, continues with a description of the toolkit implementation and design goals. Follows an example of its usage to process a software package, and the produced report. Finally some final remarks and trends for future work are presented.

Transition from traditional teacher-centered models, focusing on curricula description and content plans, to student-centered models, in which learning activities are supported in e-learning platforms, is not an easy task to resolve. This issue is especially important when the knowledge is emergent, i.e. when the activities that this knowledge enables are intensively supported by information and communications technologies, subjected to rapid obsolescence. A method for mapping a course content plan into technological mediating tools that form a portfolio is proposed. A mediating tool is a set of learning activities organized according to a specific structure. The portfolio enables synergetic relations between mediating tools, promoting a good content organization and high-order learning activities. The characteristics of the resulting application are described for a course of electronic marketing, in which a content plan is mapped into a set of mediating tools organized in a portfolio. The application was evaluated with surveys and benchmarked with traditional teaching and other e-learning solutions. Benchmarking positioned our e-learning solution as having the best features in team building, achieving scores similar to traditional teaching.

Cloud Computing has emerged as a new paradigm for services delivering over the Internet. In this growing market, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) service model has been the subject of great interest from several organizations allowing a straightforward deployment of applications without the need for a dedicated infrastructure, dependencies installation or server configuration. However, each PaaS provider generates a lock-in to their proprietary features, technologies or APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). This paper focuses on the specification, development and test of an abstraction layer that aims to unify the management and information processes of applications and databases created in PaaS environments, in order to struggle the existing lock-in in the market. As result, PaaS users will have now the opportunity for selecting the most appropriate platform for an application, interacting seamlessly with any supported vendor, also having the opportunity to attain the portability of applications among distinct PaaS providers. As far as we know, this is the first work in this research area presenting a real implemented and tested system aggregating several PaaS offerings.

The current developments in life sciences face a big challenge, with the need of dealing with huge amounts of data and the increasing demand of computational resources, both in hardware and in software, pushing the limits of the available state-of-the-art at an affordable price. This paper introduces a computer cluster whose building blocks are the first commercially available many-core CPU systems: the Tile64 by Tilera Corporation, packed in PCIe cards (TILExpress-20G). We have developed the main software components of the cluster (resource manager and scheduler) and a communication library, in order to offer a high-performance general-purpose platform to speedup bioinformatics applications.

Self-portrait using mobile phones has been a popular trend among backpackers, teenagers and travellers. The usage of mobile devices had been escalating over the years, as it is more convenient and portable. However, there were constraints in terms of camera view and angle the mobile devices can capture. Based on my preliminary research, the major problems faced by most backpackers concerns (i) hand distance, (ii) angle and view captured, and (iii) no alternative mechanism or functions in mobile devices that can capture a larger panoramic view in self-portrait. This proposal intends to study the current strategies used by travelers in taking self-portrait by using mobile devices and investigate future mobile image application. The subjects in this study include travellers (backpackers, people travelling alone) and social network users as viewers. The evaluation is to find out if a model of “destination image measurement” could be an attribute towards enhancing mobile application in the future. The concept of destination image measurement has four-distinct components; functional characteristics, psychological characteristics, holistic and attributes. The framework is to establish a strategy to improve self-portrait capturing using mobile devices and the evaluation outcome will be a measurement technique in capturing a more effective self-portrait.

Experience sampling methods (ESM) are a commonly used technique for capturing information from real or potential technology usage. The ubiquity of mobile phones has created a particularly appealing opportunity for all sorts of ESM studies, but there are complex technical challenges involved. In this work, we have sought to understand those challenges and the overall viability of a general purpose ESM application. The contribution of this work is the identification of the key challenges and approaches that may be more relevant in creating this type of general purpose study support. We have found that the main challenges are associated with data synchronisation, proper notification management, flexible questionnaire design, generalisation of study workflow processes, and efficient positioning. This contribution may inform the design of other generic tools for ESM-based studies.

Nuclear plant operators must act in accordance with a number of requirements which are specified in the technical documentation that describes handling, functionality and architecture of the systems. Due to these many specifications to be considered, it is crucial to create technical documentation in order to improve the operation efficiency of such facilities and prevent human errors whenever possible. In this work, we propose a procedure (ManPro) for the computer-based creation of instruction manuals for the operation of technical systems. The “ManPro” approach is semiautomatic, which underlines its reproducibility and efficiency. Feasibility of the approach and its effects on usability are assessed and outlined.

This is a case study of text cues of affect and interaction in students’ postings in a virtual learning environment designed to support and expand face-to-face classes of English for Specific Purposes at university level. These categories of text analysis are indicators of the learner’s social presence in online activities. Methodology in this study included (i) mining text indicators of affect and interaction; (ii) applying a questionnaire to investigate students’ perception of the environment; (iii) verifying how these results reflect the students’ level of satisfaction with the blended-learning approach.

In recent years videogame companies have recognized the role of player engagement as a major factor in user experience and enjoyment. This encouraged a greater investment in new types of game controllers such as the WiiMote

TM

, Rock Band

TM

instruments and the Kinect

TM

. However, the native software of these controllers was not originally designed to be used in other game applications. This work addresses this issue by building a middleware framework, which maps body poses or voice commands to actions in any game. This not only warrants a more natural and customized user-experience but it also defines an interoperable virtual controller. In this version of the framework, body poses and voice commands are respectively recognized through the Kinect’s built-in cameras and microphones. The acquired data is then translated into the native interaction scheme in real time using a lightweight method based on spatial restrictions. The system is also prepared to use Nintendo’s Wiimote

TM

as an auxiliary and unobtrusive gamepad for physically or verbally impractical commands. System validation was performed by analyzing the performance of certain tasks and examining user reports. Both confirmed this approach as a practical and alluring alternative to the game’s native interaction scheme. In sum, this framework provides a game-controlling tool that is totally customizable and very flexible, thus expanding the market of game consumers.

This work proposes the definition of a system to negotiate products in an e-commerce scenario. This negotiation system is defined as PLANE – Platform to Assist Negotiation – and it is carried in a semi-automatic way, using multi-attributes functions, based on attributes of the negotiated content. Also it presents an architecture to interconnect the participant through an inter-network in the television broadcasters context. Each participant of the inter-network applies policies for its own contents, and all of them must respect these policies. If a participant needs a content not covered by the policies, it is possible to start a negotiation process for this specific content.

Land is a natural resource for the livelihood of human and basic element of wealth generation. The land plays an important role in agricultural, residential and environmental advancement of the country. Due to rapid growth rate in population, mortgage ability, cultivation and industrial areas enhanced the importance of land record management. The system is design to provide maximum accuracy, accessibility and portability. In our system GPS and GIS technologies used to manage land records. GIS and GPS technologies are used to preserve the land record that helps in reducing the boundary disputes and automatically localize land boundaries irrespective of the changing conditions of the physical location of land. This application eliminates illegal land shrinkages and expansions based on the moving physical boundaries (more often the case in rural areas and agricultural/orchards). These Land records are helpful for taxation and provide protection of the rights and ownership information of land owners.

An important feature for the design of algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks is the estimation of its lifetime. To design communication protocols and data collection algorithms with low power consumption, a key factor is the ability to measure the actual consumption in the sensor node. This ability enables the verification of theoretical/simulated models, allowing an accurate estimation of the network longevity. This paper proposes a system for measuring the energy consumption levels of sensor nodes in normal operation, allowing the estimation of the real lifetime for each node, enabling the optimization of energy aware protocols. Presented data is related to the energy consumption of a MicaZ node and to the behavior of the full discharge of a battery pack. A set of polynomial functions describing this energy discharge are also presented that can be easily inserted into the battery models of network simulators to obtain a more realistic behavior.

The integration of Mobile and Fixed Network is one of the most important topics in the Future Internet development and an open issue for network providers. In this case, mobility management and Quality of Service (QoS) are two of the main goals in this integration. These tasks are an important challenge if the mobility rate is very high. In this paper, we present a new architecture to provide both of them, QoS and high rate mobility using an IP-based mobility protocol and an MPLS-based protocol to deploy Packet Transport Networks (PTN). To achieve this, we had developed analytical models to evaluate registration updates cost, packet loss rate and buffer requirements of the architecture. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanisms can significantly reduce registration updates cost and provide low handoff latency and packet loss rate under various scenarios.

Nowadays consumers dispose of Internet connections with increasing capacity in such a way that those connections are frequently underused. Sharing connections seems like an obvious attractive response, and it has being explored through several initiatives, e.g. OpenSpark, FON, with relative success although inherent risks. The related studies made so far concerning security, incentives, legality, etc., did not allow inferring a global model upon what some analysis and evaluation of this technology could be done. This is partially because there are several entities playing crucial roles in the realization of this model, e.g. users, service suppliers and authorities and aspects from several dimensions, e.g. technical, regulatory and business that must be considered. Aiming to design such a model, it was carried out an inquiry to potential users, in both perspectives of using and providing a shared Internet access. The preliminary study results are presented here.

The complexity of monitoring cloud environments and the lack of standards so far urge for a careful analysis, systematizing and understanding of key points involved when assessing the services provided. In this context, this paper proposes a layered model for Cloud Services monitoring, identifying the multiple dimensions of monitoring, while combining the perspectives of service providers and customers. This process involves the identification of relevant parameters and metrics for each monitoring dimension, focusing on monitoring of resources, quality of service, security and service contracts. Taking a stratified view of the problem, this study contributes to achieve a clearer and more efficient approach to cloud services monitoring.

Historically, electronic communications networks were built to support specific services. For example, fixed and mobile telephone networks were developed to support voice telephone calls, whereas cable networks, satellites, and over-the-air broadcasts were built to support television services (unidirectional linear video). However, these communications networks are currently incorporating new technology and are rapidly evolving into multi-service networks that support voice, video, and data over a single, fully integrated communications platform. NGNs provide to customer access to a large range of services, leading to the increase of the bandwidth demand - For example, if customers encounter their demand on a single network, a triple play product, the bandwidth demand for that network will increase. Moreover, the migration to NGN may require upgrades to the infrastructure to provide sufficient service quality. The entry of new competitors can be based on the resale of services from the incumbent, on building up their own infrastructures, on renting unbundled infrastructure from incumbents, or, on the combination of the above elements. The availability of these options to competitors and price definition are generally determined by regulatory policies. So, the introduction of NGNs by telecommunication network operators obligates the national regulators adapt their access regulation regimes to the new technological conditions. Regulation and/or promotion of competition by regulatory measures need to be analyzed and compared. So, in this paper we explore the role of competition policy and regulation.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) can contribute for the integration and personalization of care services, which are important issues in the required reorganization of the care system to face their sustainability. This paper argues about the importance that AAL can assume as a centrepiece of the digital health continuum, from lifestyle management to hospitalization, if there are adequate information models to potentiate the integration of AAL systems-generated data and user-generated data with institutional information.

The paper presents an indoor navigation system, both mobile and web, applied to a university environment. The case study follows a research methodology. We describe the prototype development, routing algorithm and current achieved results.

The current distributed systems are mainly based on the client – server model. The growing use of the Internet and the development of information and communication technologies has yielded more needs in terms of performance, reliability and security of information. By its synchronous nature, the client – server model no longer seems able to meet these new demands. Several new approaches have been proposed, for example the mobility of the code, involving the emergence of the mobile agents’ paradigm (MA). This paradigm certainly holds great promise, though questions of security arise. In this paper, we propose an extension of the MA model called Seller – Buyer model (SB). This extension is made by making the server component mobile and using market mechanisms between the client agent (the buyer) and the server agent (the seller). While most of works in the area propose asymmetric security solutions, the SB model proposes a symmetric security approach for the MA. The SB model will give the developers a way to use, safely and efficiently, MA to build distributed applications on large-scale networks such as the Internet.

A low cost Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave sensor is proposed in this work as radar module for the long range monitoring of environmental scenarios subject to landslide risk. A radar configuration based on the adoption of a variable scanning antenna array is proposed for the accurate detection of land movements. Furthermore, a X-band radar module prototype is realized and tested to demonstrate the high resolution capabilities of the proposed configuration.

A new type of slotted microstrip antenna, suitable for wideband radar applications, is proposed in this work. The standard U-slot shape, usually adopted to enlarge the operating bandwidth of a microstrip patch, is properly modified to reduce the undesired cross-polar effects, while providing also a significant size reduction. Validations on X-band and P-band, useful for radar applications, are successfully discussed. In particular, a P-band prototype has been manufactured and tested, while the numerical simulation results of an X-band antenna, performing a 45% bandwidth, are successfully reported.

A high resolution Software Defined Radar system is implemented in this work by adopting the new generation Universal Software Radio Peripheral USRP NI2920, a software defined transceiver. The enhanced available bandwidth due to the Gigabit Ethernet interface is exploited to achieve the high range resolution features. At this purpose, a specific Labview application implementing the radar operations is developed. The realized SDRadar system is successfully validated by preliminary outdoor tests accurately retrieving the distance of a reference target.

A reconfigurable aperture-coupled reflectarray element is proposed for the realization of beam steering antennas, suitable for radar applications. Each reflectarray element is coupled to a microstrip line, which is loaded by a single varactor diode acting as a phase shifter element, thus providing a continuously variable reflection phase. A reduced size reflectarray unit cell is properly designed in order to extend the antenna beam scanning capabilities within a wide angular region, but avoiding the occurrence of undesired grating lobes. The radiating structure is properly optimized to obtain a full phase tuning range at the frequency of 11.5 GHz, thus assuring a good agility and accuracy in the reconfiguration of the reflectarray radiation pattern.

This study examined age-related differences in user performance and preference with three computer input devices (mouse, touchscreen, and trackball) among older, middle-aged, and younger adults. Sixty-six participants were recruited and equally split into the three age groups. The results showed that age and input device had significant effect on task completion time and number of error. There were significant age-related performance differences in task completion time among the input devices. Ratings of users’ preference indicated that the older adults preferred trackball to the mouse and touchscreen. Our findings suggest that the touchscreen could moderate only part of the age-related performance differences and conferred limited benefits to older adults. More research efforts are required to examine user characteristics, user perception on the use of the devices, and task requirements before we can determine the benefits of an input device for users in different ages.

Previous studies have tested population stereotypes for color without considering the specific environments under which color associations are critical for human safety, or whether color associations vary on the basis of various occupations. In this study, a questionnaire survey was administered to 139 steel workers and 74 managerial staff in two industrial companies in China to examine the color associations among occupational groups and to compare population stereotypes for color. Participants were presented with 16 concepts and were asked to select one of 10 colors to represent each concept. Chi-square tests were conducted on each of the sixteen concepts and the results indicated that each concept was significantly associated with at least one color in the two occupational groups. The study also revealed the differences in the color associations produced by participants from different occupations and cultures (Chinese steel workers, managerial staff, Hong Kong Chinese, Yunnan Chinese, and Americans).

This paper addresses a forgotten aspect in electronic commerce: Social Information Retrieval and Culture.

Researches on this topic reference marketing and user studies (person to person), specifically relating to Human Behavior Information, which is the study of information retrieval focused on user needs, particularly in e-commerce. The key to selling is that the client finds the information that indicates that the product being sold is the one they want, and consequently, they buy it when they need it.

The main conclusion is that color is an essential mechanism in the process of choosing an online store and must be determined through a holistic process.

Developments in recent years has resulted in the creation of computational environments with potential for users to carry an immersive environment. This article aims to describe the development process of 3D immersive environments that require the use of specific tools and techniques, that allow the original environment with a set of associated information that will help to describe the own environment. For this purpose prototypes were created and results were evaluated.

In this paper we describe the implementation and evaluation of an augmented reality (AR) application, on mobile devices. It’s based on optical images recognition from real environment, and it has been particularly intended to be used in educational environments. Some improvements have been implemented compared to existing commercial ones, such as the ability to compare and move different models consecutively with a single marker. The objective was to assess the feasibility of using AR on mobile devices in educational environments. In addition we evaluated academic performance improvement using this technology. Validation was done through a case of study where students were able to see a virtual construction process overlapped to real environments. It was carried out by Building Engineering students of the EPSEB (UPC-Barcelona-Tech). Results obtained by student’s PRE and POST test, and by questionnaires responses, demonstrated the application suitability as a new tool to be used in learning processes.

In this paper we present a user-centered interface for a scheduling system. The purpose of this interface is to provide graphical and interactive ways of defining a scheduling problem. To create such user interface an evaluation-centered user interaction development method was adopted: the star life cycle. The created prototype comprises the Task Module and the Scheduling Problem Module. The first one allows users to define a sequence of operations, i.e., a task. The second one enables a scheduling problem definition, which consists in a set of tasks. Both modules are equipped with a set of real time validations to assure the correct definition of the necessary data input for the scheduling module of the system. The usability evaluation allowed us to measure the ease of interaction and observe the different forms of interaction provided by each participant, namely the reactions to the real time validation mechanism.

Understanding

perceived site security

has been identified as a critical issue in current B2C e-commerce practices and research. A literature review reveals that the perceived site security construct has been conceptualized as a multi-dimensional construct; yet, all empirical studies have used uni-dimensional measures. Based on the CIA triad framework, we posit that perceived site security is a second order construct consisting of three distinct aspects of perceived site security: (1) perceived site confidentiality, (2) perceived site integrity, and (3) perceived site availability. The results from this study reveal that the new second order structure of perceived site security measure is superior to both the group factor structure and one factor structure. The results of the structural model also support the nomological validity of the newly conceptualized perceived site security measure.

This paper describes the accessibility study of Fatec sites - public universities in Brazil. It describes the accessibility evaluation done in all Fatec sites using an automatic tool to identify the main problems for people with visual impairment. As a result, it was possible to obtain the most common problems in the websites and suggest some changes in order to make them more accessible.

This paper describes an exploratory study on the design space for mobile payments. The study aims at identifying how some features of potential systems may affect the end-user experience and the overall values associated with it. This work takes an interaction design perspective and is not particularly focused on usability or task efficiency issues. Instead, we provide a set of concepts towards the generation of a framework about the Human values involved in mobile payments. The proposed framework and the results from users’ interviews provide an added-value for anyone designing mobile payment systems. The resources presented should facilitate the reasoning about the major sensitivities involved in mobile payments as well as initial reflections of their implications.

Sketch-based interfaces provide a powerful, natural and intuitive way for users to interact with an application. By combining a sketch-based interface with a physically simulated environment, an application offers the means for users to rapidly sketch a set of objects, like if they are doing it on piece of paper, and see how these objects behave in a simulation. In this paper we present SketchyDynamics, a library that intends to facilitate the creation of applications by rapidly providing them a sketch-based interface and physics simulation capabilities. SketchyDynamics was designed to be versatile and customizable but also simple. In fact, a simple application where the user draws objects and they are immediately simulated, colliding with each other and reacting to the specified forces, can be created with only 3 lines of code.

In this paper, we present the user experience design of Young Europeans for Democracy (YED) serious application. Facing the actually need to support young citizens understanding and participation in Europe, schools have a key role on European studies integration. Accordingly to the growing opportunities of applying technology for training and education, we propose a serious application in a open-source 3D Virtual World environment solution, adopting a problem-based learning approach, role-playing dynamics and group work tasks. The main goal was to design a meaningfully user experience, increasing the students motivation and engagement for learning different knowledge on the topics of European Studies. Some preliminary results are presented, based on participatory observation within the use of the serious application.

Several mobile acceptance models exist today that focus on user interface handling and usage frequency evaluation. Since mobile applications reach much deeper into everyday life, it is however important to better consider user behaviour for the service evaluation. In this paper we introduce the Behaviour Assessment Model (BAM), which is designed to gaining insights about how well services enable, enhance and replace human activities. More specifically, the basic columns of the evaluation framework concentrate on (1) service actuation in relation to the current user context, (2) the balance between service usage effort and benefit, and (3) the degree to which community knowledge can be exploited. The evaluation is guided by a process model that specifies individual steps of data capturing, aggregation, and final assessment. The BAM helps to gain stronger insights regarding characteristic usage hotspots, frequent usage patterns, and leveraging of networking effects showing more realistically the strengths and weaknesses of mobile services.

Authentication technologies using biometrics already play a major role in the context of security systems. Some techniques are used in several services not only to ensure physical access to facilities but also to provide some thoroughness in access control. This study addresses the perception of users regarding the use of biometric authentication technologies. The results derived from a survey indicate a trend of acceptance of such technologies on the access control to health services.

This paper describes a biology game headed to biology students. The game was developed to be a learning tool supporting biology classrooms. The players need to have the basic knowledge of a living cell and the game context involves: the cell constitution, the transport mechanisms, the metabolic reactions, the protein biosynthesis, the growth and the cell division. The game enables the students to dynamically interact with the cell environment and learn the concepts involved in the official programme (guidelines) of biology studied in the two final years of high school in the Portuguese educational system.