0000000000309132
AUTHOR
José H. Canós
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…
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
Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations
[EN] Emergencies are critical situations that demand immediate action to avoid adverse consequences to life and property. Recent events around the world highlight the importance of the theme. A key challenge in Emergency Management is decision-making under time pressure, with an overload of unconfirmed, uncertain and conflicting information, including the management of many people, with distinct and possibly fluid roles, in different places. Collaboration in these settings is an interesting element, since emergency response generally involves multiple agencies and the public, which, having different views, protocols and priorities, must act in concert to handle the situation. In addition, a…
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…