This paper presents the INSITU research project initiated to provide a systematic approach for effective sharing, integration and use of information from different sources, to establish a common operational picture (C...
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Generic, type-driven web-based editors have been an integral feature of the iTask Framework (iTasks) since its conception, and even predate it in the form of the iData library. Generic editors enable rapid prototyping...
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450389631
Generic, type-driven web-based editors have been an integral feature of the iTask Framework (iTasks) since its conception, and even predate it in the form of the iData library. Generic editors enable rapid prototyping, because they allow the generation of graphical userinterfaces from any first-order type. As applications mature, the need for increased control over the look and feel of editors arises. This can be accomplished by creating customised editors. Unfortunately defining custom editors is no trivial task in iTasks. The interface for creating custom editors from scratch is sufficiently powerful, but exposes many implementation details that make it complicated to use. In this paper we present a new interface and composition API for editors in iTasks. This new approach is based on an asymmetric typed interface for editors with separate type parameters for data that is consumed by, and data that is produced by, the web editors. We demonstrate the new possibilities by reconstructing a previously builtin editor as a composition of simpler editors and various other examples.
Distributed systems, services and databases are at the core of the information society and increasingly pervade many aspects of our daily lives. While mobility and pervasiveness require support for systems that adapt ...
ISBN:
(纸本)9781595937537
Distributed systems, services and databases are at the core of the information society and increasingly pervade many aspects of our daily lives. While mobility and pervasiveness require support for systems that adapt themselves to changing environments, resources, and user needs, the middleware infrastructures become more and more heterogeneous and complex. This trend is further fueled by the emergence of service oriented computing. In addition, we can see an increasing demand for dependability and security of such systems, taking into account the software as well as the surrounding environment. This mismatch between increasing demand for dependability on one hand and a degradation of dependability caused by complexity, scale, and dynamics has recently been termed by Laprie as the "dependability gap".
Virtual personal assistant (VPA) services, e.g. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are becoming increasingly popular recently. users interact with them through voice-based apps, e.g. Amazon Alexa skills and Google Ass...
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450394758
Virtual personal assistant (VPA) services, e.g. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are becoming increasingly popular recently. users interact with them through voice-based apps, e.g. Amazon Alexa skills and Google Assistant actions. Unlike the desktop and mobile apps which have visible and intuitive graphical userinterface (GUI) to facilitate interaction, VPA apps convey information purely verbally through the voice userinterface (VUI), which is known to be limited in its invisibility, single mode and high demand of user attention. This may lead to various problems on the usability and correctness of VPA apps. In this work, we propose a model-based framework named Vitas to handle VUI testing of VPA apps. Vitas interacts with the app VUI, and during the testing process, it retrieves semantic information from voice feedbacks by natural language processing. It incrementally constructs the finite state machine (FSM) model of the app with a weighted exploration strategy guided by key factors such as the coverage of app functionality. We conduct a large-scale testing on 41,581 VPA apps (i.e., skills) of Amazon Alexa, the most popular VPA service, and find that 51.29% of them have weaknesses. They largely suffer from problems such as unexpected exit/start, privacy violation and so on. Our work reveals the immaturity of the VUI designs and implementations in VPA apps, and sheds light on the improvement of several crucial aspects of VPA apps.
We describe an audio service for CVEs, designed to support many people speaking simultaneously and to operate across the Internet. Our service exploits a technique called Distributed Partial Mixing (DPM) to dynamicall...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781581135305
We describe an audio service for CVEs, designed to support many people speaking simultaneously and to operate across the Internet. Our service exploits a technique called Distributed Partial Mixing (DPM) to dynamically adapt to varying numbers of speakers and network congestion. Our DPM implementation dynamically manages the trade-off between congestion and audio quality when compared to the approaches of peer-to-peer forwarding and total mixing in a way that is fair to the TCP protocol and so operates as a "good Internet citizen". This paper focuses on the large-scale deployment of DPM over wide area networks. In particular we raise and examine the issues when deploying DPM within the context of large dynamic environments. We argue that DPM paradigm remains feasible and desirable in such environments.
We address the problem of computing a sequence of dense disparity maps from two synchronized video streams recorded by slightly displaced cameras. Generating such disparity videos is becoming increasingly important in...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781424456499
We address the problem of computing a sequence of dense disparity maps from two synchronized video streams recorded by slightly displaced cameras. Generating such disparity videos is becoming increasingly important in the light of new autostereoscopic displays and novel viewpoint applications. We propose a good-quality, computationally fast and easy-to-use solution to accomplish this task. This paper describes the four major steps of our 2D to 3D video conversion procedure. (1) The user segments the video into its scenes. (2) For each scene, we rectify the uncalibrated stereo pairs so that correspondences lie on the same horizontal scanline. (3) A fast and accurate dynamic programming-based stereo matcher is then applied to compute a dense disparity map for each stereo pair. (4) We perform temporal smoothing on the computed disparity sequence to reduce the disparity flickering problem. All of these functionalities can be accessed via an easy-to-use Graphical userinterface, which makes our conversion procedure applicable even for technical unskilled users. We demonstrate the good quality of our results using various challenging real-world stereo streams.
Today's Computer Science (CS) students may not give enough attention for the importance of the userinterfaces (UIs) they design for class projects, which becomes even more critical when they design for mobile app...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450329668
Today's Computer Science (CS) students may not give enough attention for the importance of the userinterfaces (UIs) they design for class projects, which becomes even more critical when they design for mobile applications. They also lack the required organization skills that help them manage how they work together. Although agile methods proponents and UI experts follow different guidelines for each to achieve their goals, integrating agile and UI design practices seems to be a promising combination that can help CS students (and developers in general) to better design for various mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, smart watches etc.) as well as to follow a semi-structured development approach to help them manage their programming work. Our research is concerned with studying the various approaches that can be used to combine agile practices with UI design guidelines for designing mobile applications. We are designing a framework that uses Pair Programming (PP) -- as an agile practice to guide the mobile UI design and application development processes. Unlike the previous studies that applied agile methods in classrooms, we are concerned with the special requirements of mobile devices as well as the regular development tasks. Moreover, we are focusing on applying certain practices that we believe to be easier to follow than the broader agile guidelines. Our current work aims at providing CS educators with a new adaptive teaching approach that is more student-oriented instead of the traditional task assignment approaches. Our research will then be extended to include teams from software development companies that are working on mobile application development. We believe that our practice-oriented framework that integrates agile with mobile UI design and development practices has much to do with industry as well as classrooms.
We present DIVERSE, a highly modular collection of complimentary software packages designed to facilitate the creation of device independent virtual environments. DIVERSE is free/open source software, containing both ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)0769514928
We present DIVERSE, a highly modular collection of complimentary software packages designed to facilitate the creation of device independent virtual environments. DIVERSE is free/open source software, containing both end-user programs and C++ APIs (Application Programming interfaces). DgiPf is the DIVERSE graphics interface to OpenGL Performer/sup TM/. A program using DgiPf can run on platforms ranging from fully immersive systems such as CAVEs/sup TM/ to generic desktop workstations without modification. We describe DgiPf's design and present a specific example of how it is being used to aid researchers.
This paper presents an overview of version 1.6 of QRAS, the Quantitative Risk Assessment System. QRAS is a PC-based software tool for conducting probabilistic risk assessments (PRA), which was developed to address nee...
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This paper presents an overview of version 1.6 of QRAS, the Quantitative Risk Assessment System. QRAS is a PC-based software tool for conducting probabilistic risk assessments (PRA), which was developed to address needs held by NASA, but can be used in a wide range of industries. The software is different from other PRA tools in three key areas. First, QRAS bridges communication and skill gaps between managers, engineers, and risk analysts by using representations of the risk model and analysis results that are easy to comprehend by each of those groups. For that purpose, event sequence diagrams (ESD) are used as a replacement for event trees (ET) to model scenarios, and the quantification of events is possible through a set of quantification models familiar to engineers. In addition, QRAS' graphical userinterface provides a more structured guidance than other tools in order to facilitate its use by nonexpert users. Second, QRAS includes a strong support for modeling approaches not typically found in tools developed for the nuclear industry, such as phased-mission modeling. Finally, QRAS applies leading edge reduced ordered binary decision diagram (ROBDD) technology for the accurate and efficient computation of risk results.
Handheld augmented reality (HAR) applications must be carefully designed and improved based on user feedback to sustain commercial use. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues foun...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450332538
Handheld augmented reality (HAR) applications must be carefully designed and improved based on user feedback to sustain commercial use. However, no standard questionnaire considers perceptual and ergonomic issues found in HAR. We address this issue by creating a HAR Usability Scale (HARUS).To create HARUS, we performed a systematic literature review to enumerate user-reported issues in HAR applications. Based on these issues, we created a questionnaire measuring manipulability -- the ease of handling the HAR system, and comprehensibility -- the ease of understanding the information presented by HAR. We then provide evidences of validity and reliability of the HARUS questionnaire by applying it to three experiments. The results show that HARUS consistently correlates with other subjective and objective measures of usability, thereby supporting its concurrent validity. Moreover, HARUS obtained a good Cronbach's alpha in all three experiments, thereby demonstrating internally ***, as well as its decomposition into individual manipulability and comprehensibility scores, are evaluation tools that researchers and professionals can use to analyze their HAR applications. By providing such a tool, they can gain quality feedback from users to improve their HAR applications towards commercial success.
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