| Abstract: | Hospital's communication infrastructure suffers from different types of common problems. Currently, this infrastructure relies mainly on the use of pagers which are devices particularly interruptive for the daily work of hospital's workers, and moreover they do not support context-awareness communication. Wireless phones are supposed to be a valid alternative to pagers and they can also be used to efficiently increase awareness between workers. Unfortunately, wireless phones can become more interruptive than pagers due to the synchronous communication channel they provide. The aim of this thesis is to propose an implementation of a context-aware solution, based on an Ascom/trixbox communication platform, which tries to overcome this problem. In particular it is specifically designed to balance availability and interruptions gained by using the Ascom wireless phones considering contextual information relating to the users carrying these devices, and it provides several features useful to increase awareness. This work is based on an on-going research project at the Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine (NST), in collaboration with the University Hospital of Northern Norway (UNN) and Telenor. The focus of this project, named Context sensitive systems for mobile communication in hospitals is to design and develop context-sensitive interfaces, middleware and new interaction forms for mobile devices that support multi-modal communication. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/3525 |
| Abstract: | The advent of cloud computing alongside with pervasive form factors such as smart devices, introduces a new meaning to asymmetric system models. These new clients act as a presentational layer alleviating much of the computational and storage concerns to cloud services. The application platforms associated with these creates new opportunities for third party developers to provide domain specific applications (apps) to smart devices. Restricted interaction surfaces on smart device introduce new challenges to how apps are managed on these. Moreover, for security purposes as well as strict resource requirements, apps running in these environments are commonly subject to very strict isolation. We conjure that there are benefits with allowing automatic configuration apps onto a client system. Furthermore, we suggest that integration between apps residing at the same host, as well as different hosts, is beneficial to system functionality. By enabling this we could alleviate much of the interaction necessary for users and reduce the time consumed in using such smart devices. The concrete asymmetric system explored in this thesis is the Windows 8 app platform. This platform poses several hindrances to our conjecture. For security reasons, automatic configuration of apps onto a client system is prohibited. Apps run inside a sandboxed environment where they are isolated from the system and other apps. Access to resources is prohibited unless explicitly allowed by the user. As a consequence, communication between apps is forbidden. This is further complicated by the fact that apps in this environment are suspended when not in use. This thesis introduces Javza, a runtime to support dynamic app configuration and integration in Windows 8. Javza provides support for automatic installment of apps based on simplified contextual information. Furthermore, it provides app integration by allowing apps to share data, both within the same and across different systems. We present and evaluate the associated performance costs of deploying Javza inside a Windows 8 environment. We further evaluate the applicability of Javza by implementing a specific use case involving collaborative search. Lastly we discuss some of the security implications associated with our design, and some future improvements in Windows 8 to support our conjecture. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4397 |
| Abstract: | Computer games with distributed functionality, such as most modern multiplayer games, provide a rich environment in which one can experiment with high performance distribution of computational and graphical resources. Their extremely high requirements for processing power and consistent visual output create a platform with unique demands. Current tiled display walls provide, as a consequence of their architecture, a large amount of computational resources in the form of a networked cluster of computers, driving the individual tiles. Existing forays into creating games intended for display walls have unfortunately made little use of this power, opting instead to centralise computation on a single host and distributing the resulting graphical information, or by running the same computations on all hosts and displaying different parts of the locally generated information. We seek to remedy this situation by distributing computation and visualisation in order to exploit available resources to a greater degree. Achieving a higher level of resource utilisation will allow increasing the complexity of games to involve larger environments with more interactive entities than on comparative single host systems. These are approaches that are used to some degree in Massively Multiplayer Online Games, though rarely with the same focus on distribution or the same demands for visual consistency between adjoining tiles that on a display wall. This thesis discusses techniques for determining and distributing a continually evolving set of information to a cluster of heterogeneous hosts connected by a network. The hosts will be able to simulate a set of mobile entities, where all entities on all hosts share a single virtual environment in which they can interact with each other while keeping a shared and consistent view of the world state. furthermore, the approach is tailored to visualisation on a display wall. To avoid having to design games specifically for the distributed system presented herein, a library is introduced as a method of removing all distribution-related responsibilities from the game itself, as long as the game supports a simple common interface and a limited set of callbacks for the library to modify the game. Do demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and study some of its properties, the Frag library is implemented as a prototype according to the specified design. An ordinary computer game is modified to use Frag, after which the system is tested and measured, leading to comparisons between the original and the Frag-enabled game in terms of scalability in game complexity, in addition to observations about the suitability of the approach. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/232 |
| Abstract: | INTRODUCTION: Respiration exercises are an important part of the pulmonary rehabilitation in COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patients. Furthermore, there is evidence that showing feedback about their respiration pattern helps them to improve their breathing skills. This study tests the feasibility of monitoring respiration using the Wiimote's infrared camera and showing BPM (breaths per minute) as feedback. A summary of the challenges addressed to achieve such a solution can also be found here. METHODS: A prototype was developed in order to study the viability of using the Wiimote to capture the breathing rate for creating applications to provide guidance to patients. RESULTS: The system implemented was able to acquire breathing data and provide feedback to the patient consisting in its breaths per minute. It is a non-invasive, low cost system, composed of a normal computer, a Wiimote, some markers and an infrared illuminator. It is also a comfortable solution without wires, batteries or any kind of electronics, the patients only wear passive markers. DISCUSSION: Despite the system was able to acquire breathing, it has some important limitations. The user has to be as immobile as it can, otherwise the system will fail. Some other issues found are discussed for future work. Although there exist these problems, the prototype had good outcomes when the subjects were resting of their exercise. They presented less than 15% of maximum error and the RMSE was lower than 6% in all the tests. This study establishes the basis to develop a Wiimote-based system to acquire respiration signals and present feedback or game-based rehabilitation. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2621 |
| Abstract: | Argos is a middleware platform developed at the ArticBeans lab at the University of Tromsø. The purpose of Argos is to provide a personal application platform for custom services. In this thesis we look at how Bluetooth devices along with Argos can be combined to create an application for encouraging and motivating physical activity. Physical activity is steadily decreasing among the population. People are getting more and more unhealthy due to lack of exercise. Playing computer games or watching television is rather normal today, going outside for a walk is something people seldom do. If a person wants to break the habit of sitting still, he will struggle with breaking the habit and committing to the new lifestyle. A person might have a higher chance of success, if he has something to remind him to exercise at a certain time of the day. The most common reason for failing to break a habit, can be due to lack of reinforcement of the new lifestyle. Having a personal application which allows the person to control his exercise, and also lets him see how much he has achieved, might prove both motivating and encouraging to continue to be more active. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1411 |
| Abstract: | Live video search is emerging as a platform for multimedia production and entertainment service. Such systems rely on a stream of live video and metadata describing the video content. A high quality source for such metadata can be found on the web. Identifying and extracting metadata from web pages can be done by crawling and scraping. However, general crawler politeness rules limit per-site polling frequency, and therefore the freshness of the retrieved data is also limited. % our solution In this thesis we present a metadata extraction system capable of combining high metadata freshness, while at the same time adhering to polling politeness rules. To achieve this, the proposed solution uses a pool of web sources containing overlapping information scheduled in a round-robin fashion. % evaluation Our experiments and analysis show that our system is capable of keeping the average metadata freshness higher than any single-source solution, while at the same time adhere to polling politeness rules. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2400 |
| Abstract: | Denne oppgaven ser på mulighetene for å bruke kontekstinformasjon for å kunne tilpasse interaksjonsmodi mot mobile terminaler, spesielt mobiltelefoner. Hensikten er å illustrere hvordan brukere av et transportselskap automatisk kan motta beskjeder om forsinkelser på bussavganger han/hun er interessert i, samt andre beskjeder fra transportselskapet. Brukere skal altså slippe å kjenne til vanlige rutetider. På denne måten blir tjenesten skreddersydd for hver enkelt bruker. Kontekst som identitiet, lokasjon, situasjon og tid brukes for å avgjøre hvilket interaksjonsmodus som skal benyttes. Interaksjonsmodi som ses på i denne oppgaven er SMS og J2ME. Transportsystemet spesifiseres og designes i sin helhet, men kun en demonstrator utvikles. Demonstratoren er utviklet for å fungere på en Sony Ericsson P800, men andre telefoner vil også fungere. Demonstratoren utvikles for å vise at det er mulig å bruke kontekstinformasjon for å avgjøre hvilket interaksjonsmodus som skal benyttes. I demonstratoren er kun J2ME brukt som interaksjonsmodus, mens SMS som interaksjonsmodus ikke er implementert. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/290 |
| Abstract: | The microprocessor industry has reached limitations of sequential processing power due to power-efficiency and heat problems. With the integrated-circuit technology moving forward, chip-multithreading has become the trend, increasing parallel processing power. The shift of focus has resulted in the vast majority of supercomputers having chip-multiprocessors. While the high performance computing community has long written parallel applications using libraries such as MPI, the performance-characteristics have changed from the traditional uni-core cluster, to the current generation of multi-core clusters; more communication is between processes on the same node, and processes run on cores sharing hardware resources, such as cache and memory bus. We explore the possibilities of optimizing a widely used MPI implementation, Open MPI, to minimize communication overhead for communication between processes running on a single node. We take three approaches for optimization: First we measure the message-passing latency between the different cores, and reduce latency for large messages by keeping the sender and receiver synchronized. Second, we increase scalability by using two new queue-designs, reducing the number of communication queues that need to be polled to receive messages. Third, we experiment with mapping a parallel application to different cores, using only a single node. The mapping is done dynamically during runtime, with no prior knowledge of the application's communication pattern. Our results show that for large messages sent between cores sharing cache, message-passing latency can be significantly reduced. Results from running the NAS Parallel Benchmarks using the new queue-designs show that Open MPI can increase its scalability when running more than 64 processes on a single node. Our dynamic mapper performs close to our manual mapping, but rarely increases performance. We see from the experimental results, that the three techniques give performance increase in different scenarios. Combining techniques like these with other techniques, can be a key to unlocking the parallel performance for a broader range of parallel applications. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1735 |
| Abstract: | Real-time media rich applications rely on live streams of rich and accurate meta-data describing the video content to provide personal user experiences. Unfortunately, the general amount of video meta-data today is often limited to titles, synopsis and a few keywords. A wildly used approach for extraction of meta-data from video is computer vision. It has been developed a number of different video processing algorithms which can analyse and retrieve useful data from video. However, the computational cost of current computer vision algorithms is considerable. This thesis presents a software architecture that aims to enable real-time annotation of multiple live video streams. The architecture is intended for use within media rich applications where extraction of video semantics in real-time is necessary. Our conjecture was that staging video processing in levels will make room for a more scalable video annotation system. To evaluate our thesis we have developed the prototype runtime Árvdadus. Our experiments show that staged processing can decrease the computation time of meta-data extraction. The evaluation of the architecture suggests that the architecture is applicable in a wide range of domains where extraction of meta-data in real-time is necessary |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/3520 |
| Abstract: | Digital photographing has become more and more popular as cameras and mobile phones get more advanced and have newer technology embedded. Manually searching in these growing image collections is problematic because of missing context information related to the image itself. If related context information could be added as an automated process, it could help the user view and locate images and information about the image. In this thesis I purpose a system that tries to collect relevant context information connected to an image using time and date, gps location and a user given image category taken with a Nokia N95 using mobile image capturing software like described in [1]. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2443 |
| Abstract: | Subversion, an open-source centralized version control system, developed by CoallabNet, is currently the second most popular version control system, after the ever popular CVS. Like CVS, Subversion uses a client-server architecture, but has a cleaner, modular architecture. One set of subversion modules, are the filesystem backends modules of subversion. Two ``official'' backends are currently supplied with subversion, a berkleyDB based backend(bdb), and a custom filebased filesystem implementation (fsfs). At least another un-official backend module using an SQL-database exists. Pesto is a secure, decentralized, distributed peer-to-peer storage system, implemented both as a NetBSD filesystem, and as middelware, a portable C-library (libpesto). Currently two applications using libpesto have been written, a C\#\/.Net windows client, and a highly scalable serverfarm for Pesto, written in Java. In this project we integrate subversion with pesto, by creating a new filesystem backend for subversion using libpesto. The result is a version-control system, that works like a centralized version-control system, but has decentralized storage. We show that this system can be used for backup, mirroring of repositories, and as a decentralized version-control system. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1174 |
| Abstract: | Argos is a middleware platform developed at the University of Tromsø. It provides tailored, flexible and extensible middleware support. In this thesis we suggest a new approach to creating user services for Argos by using a rule engine to setup the program flow for components in Argos. The users are provided with a graphical tool where they can set up rules that can trigger an action. The input, called a fact, to the rule and the action that is triggered has to be picked from the methods of the components in Argos. These fact/ action-methods are component methods annotated with fact/action annotation which is part of the created rule engine system service for Argos. The created rule engine system service also provides an API that is available to all programmers that want to use rules in their Argos components. There are many advantages to expressing functionality trough rules opposed to conventional declarative programming. By only telling the program what to do and not how to do it, rules are more easily understood by humans. This can benefit both the experienced programmer and the non-technical partner in a project. Lifestyle diseases are a growing problem in Western Europe and North-America. An application, realized trough the rule editor tool, for monitoring a user’s activity and give feedback will also be presented. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1409 |
| Abstract: | In biology the introduction next generation technology is increasing the amount of data generated rapidly. New sequencing machines are able to produce terabytes of genomic data in days and in later years the cost of storing data has become higher than to produce it. With enormous amounts of data arrives great opportunities, but also new challenges; how should biologists analyze and interpret the results? Going through terabytes of data manually is time consuming, and is in reality not practical. Because of this bioinformatics are working together with computer scientists to create programs that can parse, integrate, analyze and visualize data in ways that can aid the biologist to extract novel biological knowledge from it. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/3523 |
| Abstract: | Web services enable businesses to deliver services via the Web. In addition, Web services can be used to improve business efficiency, because Web services can often replace manual activities in a business process. A Web service can be composed of other simpler Web services using the abstraction traditionally known as workflows. The process of controlling the correct and reliable execution of a workflow is known as workflow enactment, but it can also be referred to as Web services orchestration. A centralized approach to Web services orchestration is not an optimal solution, when considering the decentralized nature of Web services and the Internet. The problem is that a centralized workflow engine can easily become a communication and processing bottleneck as well as a central point of failure. Therefore, a decentralized approach to Web services orchestration is needed in order to overcome these obstacles. However, some decentralized approaches require static analysis of workflow specifications, which implies that resources must be allocated prior to the workflow execution. As a result, resources are wasted. In this thesis a prototype is developed to demonstrate a decentralized Web services orchestration based on continuation-passing enactment of distributed workflows. This decentralized approach does not require any pre-allocation of resources, nor is it subject to the limitations of a centralized approach. The continuation-passing mechanism involves continuations, or the reminder of the executions, which are passed along asynchronous messages for workflow enactment. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1355 |
| Abstract: | The duration of video playlists, might be a problem when watching on mobile devices, while on the go. We are exploring the problem of how to reduce the size of a video playlist, while maintain the important parts of the videoclips in the playlist. We have designed algorithms that automatically can cut down a playlist by cutting the duration of clips or sometimes even removing clips. We have shown that our algorithm is better than a naive solution that just cut at the end. Furthermore we have looked at playlist cutting for Davvi. This means playlist cutting for the soccer domain. We have created a hint based cutting algorithm that uses domain knowledge to achieve good results compared to the other algorithms available. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2636 |
| Abstract: | Recently, television broadcasters such as the NRK and TV2 channels, have begun offering live internet television and movie archive along with their regular schedule, much like the known video archives such as Youtube and Vimeo. The amount of all television offered reduces the ability of the user to get an overview of the programs that are available at any given time, making the user will probably miss important events. Regular indexing engines for recommending does not generally work on media since it is hard to index media data. Tags and keywords describing a media le does only describe the whole le, making it difficult to use them for indexing and recommendation of specific scenes within the media. This thesis presents a text event detection system for discovering interesting events based on video subtitles. By performing textual analytics, our system is able to discover events that are not discoverable through regular syntactic search. We have, based on related work, extended algorithms used for discovering semantic relationships between different words. Also, we have experimented with several algorithm for capturing the essence of each sentence, relating the prominent sense of each sense towards the events. Our experiments illustrates how we can increase the accuracy of the algorithm used by performing a context exploration based on event keywords. The results shows that our system improved the base algorithm of the prototype by including more relevance methods like consecutive sentence similarity and similarity based on sentence internals. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/3521 |
| Abstract: | Applications that adapt to environmental and situational changes are difficult to build because computers cannot capture, represent or process context information as easily as human beings. Nevertheless, context information is very valuable because it allows applications to be made more user-friendly, flexible, and adaptable. This realization has spawned a multitude of research efforts to simplify development of context-sensitive applications. A result of one of these research efforts is the Argos middleware platform, which is an application server created specifically for personal applications that can adapt to changes in their environment. Applications that rely on context information must often collect this information from external measurement devices, commonly known as sensors. These devices respond directly to physical stimulus to produce meaningful information about their surroundings. Typical examples are sensors that produce location, temperature or motion information, but they can also, for instance, be devices that monitors the physical condition of a person. The goal of this thesis has been to design, develop and evaluate functionality for the Argos middleware platform that makes it easier for Argos applications to collect and use sensor measurements. The functionality has been developed in collaboration with the National Center for Telemedicine (NST) who wants to use Argos for monitoring patients. They intend to develop a system that can give patients semi-automatic feedback and advice on how to maintain and improve their lifestyle. To do this they want to use personal sensors that monitor attributes relevant to a patient's condition. The functionality developed in this thesis has provided a starting point for NST to develop their system and contributed lots of technical information that will prove useful for their project. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1137 |
| Abstract: | Current GPUs have many times the memory bandwidth and computing power compared to CPUs. The difference in performance is getting bigger as the evolution speed of the GPUs is higher than of the CPUs. This make it interesting to use the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU). I begin by looking at the architecture of the GPU, and some different techniques for programming on a GPU, including some of the available high-level languages. I have implemented the Mandelbrot computation on a cluster of GPUs (the HPDC display wall), and compared it against two different CPU implementations on the cluster. I have also implemented the Mandelbrot computation in both Cg and Brook, and compared the performance of the two languages. My experimental study shows that the GPU implementation of the Mandelbrot application is up to twice as fast as the load-balanced CPU implementation on the cluster of 28 computers, and up to 6 times faster on one computer. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1565 |
| Abstract: | Software systems today are becoming larger and more complex, resulting in a growing need for good and efficient testing routines. An approach used by several software developers is to automate the test process. Test automation has the benefits that it reduces the time of the testing process and that automated tests are more accurate and precise than manual tests.
Manufacturers who wish to develop products using the Bluetooth technology, the Bluetooth logo and trademark has to go through a qualification program. This program is expensive, thus the manufacturer has incentives to make sure that the product is well tested before sending it to qualification. A Bluetooth stack is an example of a product that must be qualified. An automated tool for testing of Bluetooth stacks is therefore desired. FAT is a framework that provides functionality to write and execute tests on a Bluetooth stack. The framework makes use of the ability to stitch generic test layers in-between the layers of the stack. These test layers can operate on messages passing through the stack. Our test layers provide an API to insert, modify, copy and delete messages. FAT introduces a test system client (TSC) where a tester can write tests and choose tests for execution. The tests are written in Java, where each test is a single method. The tester uses the test layer’s API to interface with the stack. The communication mechanism between the TSC and the test layer is XML-RPC. The TSC may therefore be executed on a different node than the stack itself. This thesis motivates FAT, and describes how the framework is designed and implemented. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/233 |
| Abstract: | This thesis investigates how head tracking can be implemented by using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware for a 6 x 3 meter high-resolution display wall. The tracking system has been integrated into to an existing event system, Shout, that allows for inter-program communication. An application called htsim has been developed that is used for testing different head tracking configurations in a virtual environment. Developing in a virtual environment does not require access to head tracking hardware. Tracking algorithms developed in the virtual environment can directly be used for head tracking in a physical environment. The tracking system is able to track a user's head with cameras that are placed behind the user. htsim is also used for configuring the head tracking system used in the physical environment. Experiments detail out the overall latency in the system and sources of jitter. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2634 |
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