ACM International Conference Research Articles

Pervasive technologies for assistive environments: special issue of PETRA 2008 conference

As the diffusion of computing technology into everyday life continues at an exponential rate, the technology is becoming increasingly embedded in artefacts and environments. One important environment for this diffusion is the domestic environment or ‘‘Oikos’’ as it was known in ancient Greece. People’s living environment is particularly important when one takes into account the world’s ageing population and that as people grow older, they will increasingly rely on technology. People will, however, have differing levels of computer knowledge and assisted living needs. In addition, awareness towards the elderly and the need of constant medical supervision for chronic patients or habitants of remote, isolated and underserved locations has risen recently. To this end, services once available at a few centralized locations, such as high quality medical services, are now intended to be made available through a network anytime, anyplace and to anyone [1]. In such an environment, provision of medical data communication is currently dependent on lowbandwidth point-to-point telemedicine systems [2–6]. An easily field-deployable ad hoc wireless network or even a basic sensor network [7] could provide a significant improvement in real-time patient monitoring and emergency communications capability in general. This special issue comes after the successful organization of the 1st ACM International Conference on ‘‘PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments—PETRA 2008’’, which was held from 15th till 19th of July 2008, in Athens, Greece (http://www.petrae.org/). In this special issue, we have tried to include extended in-depth analysis of the best works announced in the PETRA 2008 conference, dealing with the application of pervasive ubiquitous computing to assistive environments, taking also into account the target audience of the PUC journal. As already mentioned, the word ‘‘assistive’’ is used in a general way that includes not only assisting persons with obvious physical limitations and disabilities, but also empowering any human to improve his/her quality of life by enhancing sensing at all levels [8, 9]. The research works included in this special issue show how pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can put computers to the service of man and become assistive. As a result, the special issue is comprised by papers describing systems, algorithms and methodologies from 3 major thematic areas: (1) activity and behaviour recognition [10–12], (2) advanced and personalized human computer interfaces [13, 14] and (3) biomedical monitoring platforms [15, 16, 18]. More specifically, Bamis et al. [10] in their paper present a scalable framework for detailed behaviour interpretation of elders. The paper reports their early deployment experiences and presents the current progress in three main components: sensors, middleware and behaviour interpretation mechanisms that aim to make effective monitoring and assistive services a reality. I. Maglogiannis (&) Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Central Greece, Papasiopoulou 2-4, 35100 Lamia, Greece e-mail: imaglo@ucg.gr

Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence: Magazine Production with a Flickr Special Interest Group

Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence: Magazine Production with a Flickr Special Interest Group

Special issue on “quality of service and security in wireless and mobile networks”

Special issue on “quality of service and security in wireless and mobile networks”

Introducing the New Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Multimedia

As my three-year term as the founding editor of the Journal of Multimedia (JMM, ISSN 1796-2048) ends in August 2008, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Jiebo Luo as the next Editor-in-Chief of JMM. Dr. Luo is internationally known and highly regarded for his work in the field of multimedia. He is a Senior Principal Scientist with the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, NY. He has extensive publications and editorial experience in the field of multimedia. He serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), Pattern Recognition (PR), and the SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI). He has served on the organizing committees of numerous international conferences in this field. He has been serving as the chair of the 2008 ACM International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR), an area chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), a program co-chair of the 2007 SPIE International Symposium on Visual Communication and Image Processing (VCIP), and the founding chair of the International Workshop on Semantic Learning Application in Multimedia (SLAM). Dr. Luo's photograph and biography follow. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all JMM Editors, authors, readers, and reviewers for their great help and support over the past three years. I look forward to a bright future for JMM under the leadership of Dr. Luo.

ITunes Is Pretty (Useless) When You’re Blind: Digital Design Is Triggering Disability When It Could Be a Solution

This article critically examines the promise of Internet-based digital technology to open up the world to people with disabilities, and the parallel danger that the social construction of disability in the digital environment will simply come to mirror pre-existing analogue discrimination. This paper explores how technologies and innovations designed to improve access by the disabled actually enhance access for all users. The first part of the paper focuses on ‘Web 2.0’ and digital access for people with disability, particularly those with vision impairment. The online software that drives the iPod and iPhone and exclusively delivers content to these devices is iTunes. While iTunes seems on the surface to provide enormous opportunity for the vision impaired to access a broad selection of audio content, its design actually works to inhibit access to the platform for this group. Apple promotes the use of iTunes in educational settings through the iTunes U channel, and this potentially excludes those who have difficulty with access to the technology. Critically, it is these excluded people who, potentially, could benefit the most from the new technology. We consider the difficulty experienced by users of screen readers and braille tablets in relation to iTunes and highlight the potential problems for universities who seek to utilise iTunes U. In the second part of the paper we reframe disability accessibility as a principle of universal access and design and outline how changes made to assist users with disability can enhance the learning experience of all students using the Lectopia lecture recording and distribution system as an example. The third section of the paper situates these digital developments within the continuum of disability theory deploying Finkelstein’s three stages of disability development. The focus then shifts to the potential of online virtual worlds such as Second Life to act as a place where the promise of technology to mediate for disability might be realised. Goggin and Newell suggest that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. This article argues that accessibility must be addressed through the context of design and shared open standards for digital platforms.

Compositionality of Statically Scheduled IP

Timing Closure in presence of long global wire interconnects is one of the main current issues in System-on-Chip design. One proposed solution to the Timing Closure problem is Latency-Insensitive Design (LID) [Luca Carloni, Kenneth McMillan, and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. Theory of latency-insensitive design. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 20(no. 9):pp. 1059–1076, 2001; Mario R. Casu and Luca Macchiarulo. A new approach to latency insensitive design. In DAC'04: Proceedings of the 41st annual conference on Design automation, pages 576–581, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press].It was noticed in [Mario R. Casu and Luca Macchiarulo. A new approach to latency insensitive design. In DAC '04: Proceedings of the 41st annual conference on Design automation, pages 576–581, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press] that, in many cases, the dynamically scheduled synchronisations introduced by latency-insensitive protocols could be computed off-line as a static periodic schedule. We showed in [Julien Boucaron, Jean-Vivien Millo, and Robert De Simone. Latency-insensitive design and central repetitive scheduling. In Formal Methods and Models for Co-Design, 2006. MEMOCODE'06. Proceedings. Fourth ACM and IEEE International Conference on, pages 175–183, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2006. IEEE Press; Julien Boucaron, Jean-Vivien Millo, and Robert De Simone. Formal methods of scheduling for latency-insensitive designs. EURASIP journal on embedded system, 2007 (not yet published)] how this schedule could then be used to further optimize the protocol resources when they are found redundant. The purpose of the present paper is to study how the larger blocks, obtained as synchronous components interconnected by LID protocols optimized by static schedule informations, can be again made to operate with an environment that provides also I/O connections at its own (synchronous or GALS) rate.We also consider the case of multirate SoC, using results from SDF (Synchronous DataFlow) theory [Edward A. Lee and David G. Messerschmitt. Synchronous data flow. Proceeding of the IEEE, vol. 75(no. 9):pp. 1235–1245, 1987].

Predictable real-time software synthesis

Formal theories for real-time systems (such as timed process algebra, timed automata and timed petri nets) have gained great success in the modeling of concurrent timing behavior and in the analysis of real-time properties. However, due to the ineliminable timing differences between a model and its realization, synthesizing a software realization from a model in a predictable way is still a challenging research topic. In this article, we tackle this problem by solving a set of sub-problems. The solution is based on the theoretical results for property prediction proposed in Huang et al. (2003, Real-time property preservation in approximations of timed systems. In: Proceedings of 1st ACM and IEEE international conference on formal methods and models for codesign. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp 163–171) and Huang (2005, Predictability in real-time system design. PhD thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands), where quantitative property relations are established between two absolute/relative “close” real-time systems. This theory basically implies that if two systems are “close”, they enjoy “similar” properties. These results cannot be directly applied in practice though, because a model and its realization typically have infinitely large absolute and relative timing differences. We show that this infinite time gap can be bridged through a sequence of carefully constructed intermediate time domains. Then the property-prediction results can be applied to any pair of adjacent time domains in the sequence. Consequently, real-time properties of the implementation can be predicted from the model. We propose two parameterized hypotheses to characterize the timing differences in the sequence and to guide a correctness-preserving design process. It is shown that these hypotheses can be incorporated in a concrete tool set. We demonstrate the feasibility of the predictable synthesis approach through the design of a railroad crossing system.

ACM – CIVR 2007 ACM International conference on image and video retrievalJuly 9–11, 2007 Amsterdam, The Netherlands

BackgroundThe Computer Graphics Educational Materials Source (CGEMS) is an online system that provides curricular material for computer graphics educators. The system includes a method for contributors to submit and editors to jury and control.Announcements/Computers & Graphics 30 (2006) 669–675 the quality of content to ensure sound and robust materials. The fast pace of change in the computer graphics (CG) field makes it difficult for educators to continually design up-to ate, meaningful and robust curricular that address the full potential of new technology. Although small systems and groups of people exist who are trying to address this issue, there is currently no centralized worldwide-refereed repository for CG educational materials. CGEMS supports a way for educators in easily accessing quality course materials and for contributors to share and get recognition for their curricular innovations.ScopeThe CGEMS project aims to serve the computer graphics educational community on a number of levels. First, by making timely and quality materials available to educators, those teaching in the rapidly changing CG field will be able to tap into resources that will aid in their efforts to keep pace. Often it is not enough to know how the technology works, rather it is most important to understand its implications and how best to apply it. Only at this point can an educator design materials for students that fully reveal the potential of the technology. The collective contributions of the computer graphics community will add to a network of knowledge and understanding that educators may use to provide content-rich courses.Aims and objectivesCurricular development in a technically complex and rapidly changing landscape is not trivial.Rather, a successful curriculum is creative and innovative and deserves research recognition. CGEMS seeks to support these efforts by providing an opportunity to have curricular materials peer-reviewed, thus making them worthy of recognition. In order to facilitate content availability and peer recognition, CGEMS implements policies for submission and the subsequent editorial review of materials.

Report on the 7 th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005)

The 7th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005) was held at the Hilton Bremen Hotel in Bremen (Germany), on November 5, 2005, in conjunction with the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2005). The main objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners, and developers to discuss how Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed to provide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications. WIDM 2005 was sponsored by ACM SIGIR and by GI (Gesellshaft für Informatik) and was in cooperation with ACM SIGMOD.

Report on the 6th ACM international workshop on web information and data management (WIDM 2004) held at CIKM 2004

The 6th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2004) was held at the Hyatt Arlington Hotel, in Washington DC, on November 12-13, 2004, in conjunction with the 13th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2004). The main objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners, and developers to discuss how Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed to provide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications. As for previous years, WIDM 2004 was sponsored by ACM SIGIR.

The berkeley software MPEG-1 video decoder

This article reprises the description of the Berkeley software-only MPEG-1 video decoder originally published in the proceedings of the 1st International ACM Conference on Multimedia in 1993. The software subsequently became widely used in a variety of research systems and commercial products. Its main impact was to provide a platform for experimenting with streaming compressed video and to expose the strengths and weaknesses of software-only video decoding using general purpose computing architectures. This article compares the original performance results with experiments run on a modern processor to demonstrate the gains of processing power in the past ten years relative to this specific application and discusses the history of MPEG-1 video software decoding and the Berkeley MPEG research group.

Workshop report

The motivation for organizing a workshop on “Multimedia Databases” at ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (ACM CIKM 2003) was the fact that more and more multimedia data are now available and effective management of these multimedia data is becoming a critical need. As a consequence, multimedia databases have emerged as an important research area. A multimedia database management system must provide the support for managing text, video, audio and image data, and it must also manage multimedia data types. In addition, the relationships between the objects and the representation of the spatial and/or temporal relationships may involve the extensions to the database management system.

New query refinement and semantics integrated image retrieval system with semiautomatic annotation scheme

Relevance feedback is a powerful and widely used technique in content-based image retrieval systems. However, most relevance feedback approaches use only weighted feature sum of the feedback images to optimize the query for refining image similarity assessment. Such approaches do not work very well in most cases, especially when the user wants to express an ‘‘OR’’ relationship among the queries. In this paper, we propose three methods, weighted distance sum, minimal distance (MD), and minimal distance rank (MDR), to measure the similarity between images in database and the feedback images in query refinement. After experimental comparisons we propose a relevance feedback scheme using the MDR method and the MD method to describe the user’s multiple intentions. Based on this scheme, an image retrieval and semiautomatic annotation system, iFind [Y. Lu, C. H. Hu, X. Q. Zhu, H. J. Zhang, and Q. Yang, ‘‘A unified framework for semantics and feature based relevance feedback in image retrieval systems,’’ in Proc. 8th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 31–37 (2000) and X. Q. Zhu, W. Y. Liu, H. J. Zhang, and L. D. Wu, ‘‘An image retrieval and semi-automatic annotation scheme for large image databases on the web,’’ in Proc. SPIE 4311, 168–177 (2001)], which integrates query refinement and semantic information, is presented. Experiments show that the proposed methods can result in substantial improvement in retrieval accuracy and can be especially useful for retrieval or annotating large image databases.

Need for a Revision of the Normal Limits of Resting Heart Rate

The current definition of sinus tachycardia is a heart rate >100 beats per minute (bpm).1 This limit was set arbitrarily when heart rate was not yet regarded as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, probably with the main purpose of distinguishing between a disease state (fever, thyrotoxicosis, anemia, congestive heart failure, etc) and a normal condition. In recent years, interest has been aroused by the awareness that fast heart rate is a potent precursor of hypertension, atherosclerosis, and their sequelae.2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 In addition, many leading epidemiological studies have shown that tachycardia is associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular and noncardiovascular causes. This relationship has been found in general populations,3 4 5 6 7 in elderly individuals,9 and in hypertensive cohorts.10 In all of these studies, the heart rate value above that in which a significant increase in risk was observed was below the 100 bpm threshold (Table 1⇓). Only in the study by Levy et al3 was tachycardia defined as a heart rate >99 bpm, but in that study the cutoff between normal and high heart rate was chosen arbitrarily, and the highest heart rate value measured during the examination was taken to define the subject’s heart rate. In all the other studies, the threshold level between normal and fast heart rate was between 79 and 90 bpm. View this table: Table 1. Heart Rate Values Above Which a Significant Increase in Risk Was Found: Data From 9 Epidemiological Studies The normalcy limits of a clinical variable can be established according to different criteria. For many parameters, such as most biochemical indexes, the 95% confidence interval is calculated to identify the upper normal limit of the variable. This statistical approach does not appear suitable for those clinical variables …