MoMo: enabling hybrid museums
Present-day museums are not mere passive institutions for the preservation of a society's cultural heritage. They have become instead learning environments, research centres and even tourist attractions. The paper introduces the notion of a hybrid museum (HM) in which wireless personal digital devices (PDAs) are used to tailor digital contents to the visitor to enrich both the learning and entertainment experience. The paper describes a fully functional hybrid museum infrastructure (MoMo) implemented with the.NET compact framework running on the PocketPC platform. Several research challenges that had to be faced during the implementation of the system such as the exploration of large sets o…
PRISMA: towards quality, aspect oriented and dynamic software architectures
The development of software systems must be done using platforms that allow the description of quality, complex, distributed, dynamic and reusable architectural models. We present in this paper PRISMA, an architectural modelling approach based on aspects and components that uses a component definition language (components, connectors and systems) to define architectural types at a high abstraction level and a configuration language to design the architecture of software systems. The component definition language increases reuse allowing importation of COTS and reduces complexity by integrating two modern software development approaches: component-based software development and aspect-orient…
A grid ant colony algorithm for the orienteering problem
In this paper we propose a distributed ant colony algorithm to solve large scale orienteering problem instances. Our approach is based on a multi-colony strategy where each colony works in an independent portion (cluster) in the original graph. This results in no need for communicating pheromones information among colonies and in increasing speedup. We have implemented our algorithm as a .NET Web services infrastructure following a grid computing philosophy and we provide some promising experimental results to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach
HabitApp: New Play Technologies in Pediatric Cancer to Improve the Psychosocial State of Patients and Caregivers
[EN] Childhood cancer involves long periods of hospitalization that trigger emotions such as fear or sadness. Previous research has studied the positive effects of technology games on improving the hospitalization experience, but most do not focus on caregivers and none allow interaction with the real time observation of a zoo. The present study evaluates the impact of HabitApp and assesses the short-term impact on the psychosocial state of patients and caregivers in order to improve the hospitalization experience. The participants in this study were 39 patients plus 39 caregivers. A quantitative analysis revealed a significant improvement in patient's and caregiver's psychosocial factors f…
Tangibot: A collaborative multiplayer game for pediatric patients
[EN] Background Previous research has studied the effects of games in pediatric wards, but none of it has focused on the impact of the hospital¿s school staff on the psychosocial state of the children nor on the gameplay itself. Objectives To present the Tangibot application and evaluate its impact on the children¿s psychosocial state in the short term and the impact of the teacher on their psychosocial state, communications and coordination during the activity. Methods A study was conducted in a hospital classroom with 20 participants, who participated twice in the game: one with the teacher playing along and another without her. An observational scale was used by two evaluators in order t…
Remote interspecies interactions: Improving humans and animals wellbeing through mobile playful spaces
[EN] Play is an essential activity for both humans and animals as it provides stimulation and favors cognitive, physical and social development. This paper proposes a novel pervasive playful environment that allows hospitalized children to participate in remote interspecies play with dogs in a dog daycare facility, while it also allows the dogs to play by themselves with the pervasive system. The aim of this playful interactive space is to help improving both children¿s and animal¿s wellbeing and their relationships by means of technologically mediated play, while creating a solid knowledge base to define the future of pervasive interactive environments for animals.
An Application of Ant Colony Optimization to Decision Making on Affective Virtual Entities
Learning is a never ending activity for humans; it takes place everywhere and even when we do not realize. However, current learning environments make students deal with lectures, mostly associated with low control of the situation and implicit motivation. In contrast, previous researches have shown that sports, games or hobbies are activities that make people reach optimal experiences where self-motivation, control of the situation, high level of concentration and enjoyment are present. Some current efforts to design next generation of learning environments make use of ubiquitous systems to encourage students to perform learning activities everywhere and at anytime. However, those approach…
A Semantic Publish/Subscribe Approach for U-VR Systems Interoperation
As ubiquitous virtual reality (U-VR) systems become more and more popular and several systems coexist all together, sharing events between them in order to improve the user experience and increase their scope and functionality will be mandatory. Since U-VR systems have a dynamic and decoupled nature, and they have their own event model, we propose in this paper a semantic publish/subscribe infrastructure that lies on a description logics reasoner and OWL ontologies for managing heterogeneous event models and performing the matching of events and subscriptions in such U-VR systems.
Strategies for accelerating ant colony optimization algorithms on graphical processing units
Ant colony optimization (ACO) is being used to solve many combinatorial problems. However, existing implementations fail to solve large instances of problems effectively. In this paper we propose two ACO implementations that use graphical processing units to support the needed computation. We also provide experimental results by solving several instances of the well-known orienteering problem to show their features, emphasizing the good properties that make these implementations extremely competitive versus parallel approaches.
A multimedia approach to the efficient implementation and use of emergency plans
Because of the complexity of emergency procedures, the stressful situations during which they're executed, the emergency plan must be meticulously designed so that safety managers can quickly find needed information. Regardless of the complex procedures it describes and the trying situations where it would be used, the plan's success is always measured by how effective the evacuation is. Thus, safety-conscious organizations continually try to improve their emergency procedures and the way they present them in the emergency plan. Integrating incoming information during an emergency and correlating this information with the plan's procedures is a manual task for many safety managers. The dang…
A Web-Based Coordination Infrastructure for Grid Collective Services
Virtual Organizations (VO) consisting of heterogeneous institutions and individuals that share resources dynamically and in a coordinated way to support collaborative problem-solving are emerging in many fields. Consequently, new types of distributed infrastructures known as Grids have been proposed to cope with these new sharing requirements. Grids offer sets of collective services to support collaborative tasks which are distributed in nature and need asynchronous communication. Existing approaches to this problem lack of flexibility, adaptability and are tightly bound to the collective service that is provided. We present here a generic event model to build collective services that requi…