Remote Message Research Articles

A CAN/IEEE 802.11b wireless Lan local bridge design

Employing CAN in distributed real-time control applications sometimes critically requires increasing the size of distributed area, and communication with both other LANs and independent CAN segments. An interworking device with wireless support to extend CAN segments, utilizing an IEEE 802.11b WLAN is a practical solution for such an industrial environment. A key objective of this research work is to design and implement an interworking device called Wireless Interworking Unit (WIU) enabling remote CAN2.0A nodes to communicate over IEEE 802.11b WLAN using encapsulation method. Computer modeling and simulations of the proposed WIU are carried out using OPNET Modeler. The SAE Benchmark has been utilized in the networking models to evaluate the simulation results obtained. Considering the total end-to-end delay results of especially remote CAN messages for above 40 kbit/s bus rates, effect of the designed WIU is proved not causing to exceed the required arrival time deadline set by the SAE Benchmark.

Steel Is Made Flesh

Steel Is Made Flesh Matt Samet A Gesture Through Time Elizabeth Block Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net 280 pages; paper, $14.00 Ronald Sukenick once told a group of writing students that the written word and the page it's printed on comprise a physical medium. You must start here if you are truly to appreciate writing. What a delight, then, to read Elizabeth Block's deft A Gesture Through Time, a novel of love—and love lost—that not only exerts its own physicality through the use of two "flip books" punctuating the prose, but also through various treatises on earthly media like steel, light, film, x-ray, porcelain, the Bay Bridge, Bolex cameras, the body, etc. These lift the words out of the two-dimensional page-trap and into the fertile, three-dimensional sculpture garden of the reader-mind. As a narrative framework, we have a starry-eyed youngster, Elizabeth, seduced as a teenager by Magnitude Hortense Zappa, a worker in a Detroit steel mill owned by Elizabeth's father. Imprinted by this experience, she obsesses over recapturing her first love/sexual blooming. Zappa, meanwhile, has become a successful filmmaker in San Francisco, where the narrator lives, and has taken the name Sarah Ona Broome. Only the cryptic Dr. Ratio, therapist to each woman individually, knows that they now share the same city, a place of magical, near-Mediterranean light (and shadow), as imagined in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), that may or may not be the world they inhabit. Thus, when the role of narrator flip-flops from Elizabeth to Magnitude midway through the novel, we, too, reel with vertigo as we struggle to reconcile our notion of story with the disjunctive, but ultimately cohesive, gesture of Gesture. But plot is ancillary to Block's first novel. Block, an accomplished filmmaker and poet who has done graduate work in cultural anthropology, presents a verbal pastiche: traditional narrative; the stark, black-and-white flip books consisting of 16mm film scans; "found footage frames ofearly film technology (zoetropes)"; MRI and x-ray scans and drawings by the artist Evri Kwong; interviews between the narrator and the author; dramaturgical dialogues between such characters as HUMILIATION and PLEASURE or FILMMAKER and WOMAN; and scientific asides on substances, gizmos, and properties. So wherein lies the unity? In a post-millennial novel like Gesture, it finds a home in the marriage of man and machine, much as the director David Cronenberg proposed in such prescient films as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). (James Cameron's work comes to mind here, too.) In 2005, we stroll about with bluetooth technology, loudly, sometimes toxically , broadcasting ourpersonalities through headsets as we receive remote messages through near-invisible earpieces—or, at the other end of the spectrum, jamming one thousand songs onto iPod nanos so we can enter the agora and shirk human contact. However, whereas Cronenberg hypothesized mortification —and only mortification—as a result of the union of metal and flesh, Block, who might harbor some Cronenbergian sympathies, keeps her observations circumspect. Take, for example, Block's description of the x-ray: Paradoxical technology or thanotography, the x-ray represents "death on the body it penetrates." We imagine literal death and other traumatic associations and denials of trauma. The x-ray cannot record the human feeling that precedes the need for the x-ray. No, it certainly cannot. Analogously, can the written word truly convey the human feeling it strives to represent? In the enduring materiality ofits presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture sets itselfapart as an enduring piece ofmetafiction. Contrast that with Block's evocative description of an earthly delight: You move down my body, and I try to keep my hands in the air so the shampoo does not wash away—all this with my eyes closed because I am so mad at you I can not possibly look at you while you are turning me on—and you startto move your mouth right there on the most precious part of my body.... Flesh, here, is revered, even in the face ofanger, but it remains covered by shampoo—a manmade product. Meanwhile, spanning the interstice, we have: "How about technology as an...

The New Old World

Steel Is Made Flesh Matt Samet A Gesture Through Time Elizabeth Block Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net 280 pages; paper, $14.00 Ronald Sukenick once told a group of writing students that the written word and the page it's printed on comprise a physical medium. You must start here if you are truly to appreciate writing. What a delight, then, to read Elizabeth Block's deft A Gesture Through Time, a novel of love—and love lost—that not only exerts its own physicality through the use of two "flip books" punctuating the prose, but also through various treatises on earthly media like steel, light, film, x-ray, porcelain, the Bay Bridge, Bolex cameras, the body, etc. These lift the words out of the two-dimensional page-trap and into the fertile, three-dimensional sculpture garden of the reader-mind. As a narrative framework, we have a starry-eyed youngster, Elizabeth, seduced as a teenager by Magnitude Hortense Zappa, a worker in a Detroit steel mill owned by Elizabeth's father. Imprinted by this experience, she obsesses over recapturing her first love/sexual blooming. Zappa, meanwhile, has become a successful filmmaker in San Francisco, where the narrator lives, and has taken the name Sarah Ona Broome. Only the cryptic Dr. Ratio, therapist to each woman individually, knows that they now share the same city, a place of magical, near-Mediterranean light (and shadow), as imagined in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), that may or may not be the world they inhabit. Thus, when the role of narrator flip-flops from Elizabeth to Magnitude midway through the novel, we, too, reel with vertigo as we struggle to reconcile our notion of story with the disjunctive, but ultimately cohesive, gesture of Gesture. But plot is ancillary to Block's first novel. Block, an accomplished filmmaker and poet who has done graduate work in cultural anthropology, presents a verbal pastiche: traditional narrative; the stark, black-and-white flip books consisting of 16mm film scans; "found footage frames ofearly film technology (zoetropes)"; MRI and x-ray scans and drawings by the artist Evri Kwong; interviews between the narrator and the author; dramaturgical dialogues between such characters as HUMILIATION and PLEASURE or FILMMAKER and WOMAN; and scientific asides on substances, gizmos, and properties. So wherein lies the unity? In a post-millennial novel like Gesture, it finds a home in the marriage of man and machine, much as the director David Cronenberg proposed in such prescient films as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). (James Cameron's work comes to mind here, too.) In 2005, we stroll about with bluetooth technology, loudly, sometimes toxically , broadcasting ourpersonalities through headsets as we receive remote messages through near-invisible earpieces—or, at the other end of the spectrum, jamming one thousand songs onto iPod nanos so we can enter the agora and shirk human contact. However, whereas Cronenberg hypothesized mortification —and only mortification—as a result of the union of metal and flesh, Block, who might harbor some Cronenbergian sympathies, keeps her observations circumspect. Take, for example, Block's description of the x-ray: Paradoxical technology or thanotography, the x-ray represents "death on the body it penetrates." We imagine literal death and other traumatic associations and denials of trauma. The x-ray cannot record the human feeling that precedes the need for the x-ray. No, it certainly cannot. Analogously, can the written word truly convey the human feeling it strives to represent? In the enduring materiality ofits presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture sets itselfapart as an enduring piece ofmetafiction. Contrast that with Block's evocative description of an earthly delight: You move down my body, and I try to keep my hands in the air so the shampoo does not wash away—all this with my eyes closed because I am so mad at you I can not possibly look at you while you are turning me on—and you startto move your mouth right there on the most precious part of my body.... Flesh, here, is revered, even in the face ofanger, but it remains covered by shampoo—a manmade product. Meanwhile, spanning the interstice, we have: "How about technology as an...

Disease Management and Its Implications for Outpatient Physician Practice

While disease management may be viewed with skepticism, suspicion, or outright hostility, there are several reasons why this approach to care may warrant physician support. The care of patients with chronic illness in usual primary care practice is beset by significant quality gaps, and significant improvement due to other initiatives such as the electronic health record, pay for performance, or consumer-directed healthcare insurance has yet to be consistently demonstrated. In contrast, an emerging body of peer-reviewed literature is demonstrating that disease management does lead to improvements in clinical quality. Disease management is also an intervention that is closely linked to primary care and, thanks to its willingness to assume many of the tasks of patient engagement, can offload and improve practice efficiency. If successful, it can lead to greater reimbursement from pay for performance, and future iterations of disease management may also reimburse physicians for work effort and quality achievements that support its programs. The electronic health record may introduce new challenges, such as a greater reliance on remote messaging, that can also be addressed by this approach to care. It is also possible that future versions of consumer-directed plans will accommodate disease management approaches in an attempt to protect the healthcare consumer with chronic disease from high out-of-pocket expenses. Last but not least, as disease management and the chronic care model evolve, physicians and the sponsors and suppliers of disease management services may find approaches to care that adopt the best elements of each.

A scalable group communication mechanism for mobile agents

Many multi-agent applications based on mobile agents require message propagation among group of agents. A fast and scalable group communication mechanism can considerably improve performance of these applications. Unfortunately, most of the existing approaches do not scale well and disseminate messages slowly when the number of agents grows. In this paper, we propose Sama, a new group communication mechanism, to speed up message delivery for a group of mobile agents on a heterogeneous internetwork. The main contribution of Sama is distribution and parallelization of message propagation in an efficient way to achieve scalability and high-speed of message delivery to group members. Sama uses message dispatcher objects (MDOs), which are stationary agents on each host, to propagate messages concurrently. The proposed mechanism is independent of agent locations and transparently delivers messages to the group using constant number of remote messages. It also transparently recovers from host failures. We also present a Hop-Ring protocol that considerably improves the performance of message dissemination in Sama. Our experimental results show that message propagation in Sama is significantly fast compared to the previously proposed methods.

CONNECT: a personal remote messaging and monitoring system to aid people with disabilities

In this article we introduce CONNECT, an infrastructure running on small wireless devices (e.g., PDA phones) and servers that aids people with disabilities in leading their everyday lives. We refer to the target (client) devices as personal portable devices (PPDs). The architecture of the CONNECT system is described, with emphasis on the accessibility services provided to its clients. As an example, the reminder service of CONNECT is profiled where care providers and community organizers (or general users who have appropriate rights) can send timely reminders to the PPD owners, giving them a chance to respond to these messages. In conjunction with the connect project, 600 PPDs are deployed to people with disabilities for evaluation purposes.

SPAM on the menu: the practical use of remote messaging in community care

This paper presents some early design work of the 'Digital Care' project, developing technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with different support needs. Our focus is on developing a SMS Public Asynchronous Messenger (SPAM) system for SMS messaging to a situated display in hostels for ex-psychiatric patients run by a charitable Trust. Such settings pose both methodological and design challenges. We face the methodological challenge to uncover requirements in such a sensitive domain by using ethnography, cultural probes and user workshops. The design challenge in this care setting is to provide support rather than new forms of dependence, and we report on early experiences of the deployed system.

A New Method to Build the FF Schedule Time List

In a single segment Foundation Fieldbus system, a link active scheduler, according to a pre-defined schedule time list, controls all remote periodic message transfers between different field devices on bus. The remote periodic message not only has time constraints but also often has precedence constrains. In this paper a new method to build the schedule time list is proposed, in which both time constraints and precedence constrains are considered and described by modifying release time and deadline. The method proposed is based on slack time monotonic and local search. An example of application shows the process of building FF schedule time list.

Introduction to Special Issue on Mobile Agents

Over the last years, mobility has been one of the most thoroughly researched topics of the agent field. As the technology has evolved and matured, research on mobility is now focusing on subtopics crucial to the long-term success of mobile agents. For this special two-part issue, we have selected seven papers which, collectively, provide in-depth coverage of essential research issues, such as composition, security, resource management, and communication. Five of these papers have appeared, in shorter versions, at the First Joint Symposium of Agent Applications and Systems, and Mobile Agents ’99 [1]. The remaining two papers are published here for the first time. In the context of agent technology, what does the term mobile mean? A mobile agent is not bound to the system where it begins execution. It has the unique ability to transport itself from one system in a network to another system. Created in one execution environment, it can transport its state and code to another execution environment in the network, where it resumes execution. By the term state, we typically mean the attribute values of the agent that help it determine what to do when it resumes execution at its destination. The term code, in an object-oriented context, means the class code necessary for the agent to execute. The ability to travel allows a mobile agent to move to a system that contains an object with which the agent wants to interact, and take advantage of being in the same host or network as the object. Mobility is an orthogonal property of agents—that is, not all agents are mobile. These that do not or cannot move are called stationary agents. A stationary agent executes only on the system where it begins execution. If it needs information that is not on that system, or needs to interact with an agent on a different system, it uses conventional means of communication such as various forms of remote procedure calling and messaging. In (Lange and Oshima 1999) [2] we listed seven reasons for choosing mobile agents in software application development:

Portable computer device for audible processing of remotely stored messages

A battery powered hand-held portable computer device for audible processing of messages stored at one or more remote central message facilities. A telephonic interface is included within the portable computer device. A connection between the portable computer device and the remote central message facility is automatically established in response to a connection to a telephonic network and the operation of a single switch. Thereafter, selected audio and/or digital messages from a remote central message facility are transferred to the portable computer device, digitized if necessary, and stored within random access memory or stored utilizing analog storage systems. The portable computer device preferably utilizes a limited number of tape recorder-like switches. In response to a single operation of a "start" switch, electronic messages stored in a digital format are sequentially coupled to a text-to-speech conversion application and converted to audible speech through a speaker or headphone. In one embodiment of the present invention, the portable computer device includes a microphone and analog-to-digital conversion circuitry which permit a spoken input to be digitized, stored and subsequently transmitted to the remote central message facility. Additionally, a message may be "scanned" or "rewound" at higher than normal speed to access a selected portion thereof.

CPI-C: An API for distributed applications

Distributed applications have fostered the standardization of application programming interfaces for the underlying communication services. Three popular communication models—remote procedure calls, messaging and queuing, and conversations—support distributed applications across different networking protocols and physical media. Access to the conversational services of Advanced Program-to-Program Communication and Open Systems Interconnection-Distributed Transaction Processing is provided by the Common Programming Interface for Communications (CPI-C), a standard, easy-to-use interface for communication programming. This paper introduces the basic concepts of CPI-C, describes the conversation services available to programs, and presents examples of CPI-C programming.

Process for encrypted information transmission

A secure voice transmission system is disclosed in which enemy interception problems are overcome by analyzing the speech characteristics of a password from a known operator. Some of the voice characteristics remain in the central computer, while others are stored in the message entry device. If a captured operator is forced to enter the password, the characteristics under such extreme stress will not match those stored within the devices and the capture of the operator will be assumed. Before the start of the mission, the portable device receives a preliminary public key; the first remote message of the mission can thus be sent in the clear, with no chance of the enemy using the information or the device, should the operator be prematurely captured. After the operator has been recognized as being a noncaptive, his device requests permission from the command center to create a crypto keyset; the device keeps the private key and transmits the public key to the command center. In this way, the command center has an opportunity to send the final public key to the device, thus establishing two-way crypto communication.

Transparent forwarding: First steps

Traditional object-oriented systems tend to be single-user. As we move from personal to interpersonal computing, we must look for ways to extend our programming paradigms. This research extends the Smalltalk-80 system to send messages transparently to objects residing on remote machines. We discuss two models for remote message sends, describe our current implementation, and suggest areas for future research.

Distributed data processing in NMR spectroscopy

The development and use of a communication system for the chemical laboratory is described. It provides local access to instruments, computers and personal work stations (PC) as well as connection to wide area networks via the X.25 standard protocol and respective gateways on the basis of the DFN services (Deutsches Forschungsnetz) dialog, remote job entry, file transfer and message handling (EAN X.400). The standardization of digital spectra is considered.

Critical Issues in the Development of Speech Technology for Man-Machine Integration

It is evident that speech technology, recognition and generation, has grown rapidly in the last few years with new commercial and industrial products developing almost overnight. Speech technology offers the potential of a natural, efficient, and hands-free communication medium for humans to interact with computers. This exciting new man-machine interface concept is not merely looking for a new home, it is in desperate need of much good human factors research. The capabilities demonstrated by human and machine are very different. This means that the integration of a new technology should enhance, in particular, those human tasks that are difficult and fatiguing. In other words, the primary consideration should be in designing for the human's needs and capabilities. The machine and the interface can be redesigned and improved with time and scientific progress. Speech technology as a new interface medium offers another opportunity for the roles of human and machine to be complementary. Speech technology requires an expansion of the traditional concept of the visual-manual interface. A verbal capability permits new dialogue formats and information access and should not be viewed as a mere one for one substitute for visual or manual operations. The research reviewed will include performance studies in time-shared environments, which illustrate that voice recognition can be a preferred method of input over a keyboard. The speech generation studies reviewed indicate the utility of remote location spoken messages for alerting functions. However, there appears to be a lack of research effort in exploiting the interplay of the two speech technologies as a natural conversational dialogue interface. Some key basic research studies are sorely missing and their suggested format will be described. This presentation attempts to summarize the kinds of research issues that have been addressed in the application of speech technology to the human-machine interface, especially within the context of military and industrial environments. Merely determining technically that a particular task can be performed using the speech medium does not imply that this same task should be implemented using speech technology. Such features as user utility, role within the whole work station, type of payoff, and additional environmental factors need to be simultaneously considered and weighted accordingly for each particular application. Some methodological approaches that have been developed to aid in these determinations will be discussed. Guidelines for both human factors considerations and methodology development will be described to include the following: a. Criteria for assessing task utility b. Vocabulary selection using confusion matrices c. Structure of task-oriented grammar d. Structure of dialogue tasks e. Potential linguistic-semantic enhancements f. Recommended performance evaluation tests g. Operator training recommendations h. Impact of environmental constraints i. Problems encountered in restricted communication modes j. Potential of multi-modal communications k. Enhancements to hardware and software configurations In addition to these guidelines for speech technology implementations, some specific considerations that need to be given for speech recognition and generation individually will be described. For example, the impact that connected or continuous speech recognition may have on man-machine interfaces, and the use of flexible word order entry needs to be considered. There are also some concerns about the additional auditory memory loadings that may be placed on operators using lengthy speech generation feedback messages. Furthermore, speech generation implementation requires complex prioritization and inhibition logic trees to be developed to prevent simultaneous receipt of two messages with vastly different user impact. Guidelines and recommendations for speech technology users and researchers alike will be discussed. The current gap in the development of speech technology as a successful and useful input/output mode focuses on the need for good human factors research. This discussion portrays what is known about the strengths and limitations of speech technology. In doing this, it illustrates the kinds of human factors issues and cautions that have to be addressed before speech technology can find its rightful role in enhancing any man-machine interface.