Now showing items 1-20 of 30
Next Page| Abstract: | Several actors are involved in all layers the handset architecture, from hardware producers to service providers, and the numbers are raising. Lack of collaboration amongst these actors across and within layers has led to a complex development-process of services and applications, which in turn leads to difficult use of such applications and services. In this thesis we took a closer look at the mobile phone, examined challenges surrounding development and use of services on mobile phones, and found initiatives by actors to handle these challenges. This knowledge was used to design and implement a solution to handle identified challenges. The solution involves using the UICC as the main application platform and container of state, with the possibility to deploy handset-specific parts of an application on the handset. Standardized tools on the handset give UICC-applications the means to communicate with external processes and users. In addition the network operator is given an important role to administrate and adapt applications on the UICC as services change communication technology and application standard. The designed architecture facilitates more widespread development and use of services on the mobile handset. The architecture is realizable through current platforms and standards. By implementing a simulation and subset of our design on a handset the design was substantiated. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1136 |
| Abstract: | With the emergence of the internet and e-commerce in the 90’s new common problems arose when developing applications that span the internet. These common problems include among others scalability, robustness, networking, database usage and heterogeneity. Software developers creating internet applications saw themselves reinventing the wheel repeatedly. This lead to the creation of middleware systems that aimed to solve these common problems. This thesis will present Argos which uses a different way of building middleware systems. Argos is able to provide tailored, flexible and extensible middleware support using reflection, dependency injection, Java Management Extensions (JMX) notifications and hot deployment. The result is a platform capable of tackling domain specific challenges. It provides rapid development of feature rich applications for managing and processing information. Argos has gone through thorough testing proving production stability. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1138 |
| Abstract: | People love to take images, but are not so willing to annotate the images af-terwards with relevant tags. Manually tagging images is both subjective (dependent on annotator) and time consuming. It would be nice if the tag-ging process could be done automatically. A requirement for effective searching and retrieval of images in rapid growing online image databases is that each image has accurate and useful annotation. This thesis shows that automatic tagging of images with relevant tags is possible by using a combination of the capture location, the date/time when the image was captured and an image category. The use of image categories (together with location and date/time) ensures that many relevant tags are returned and restrict the occurrence of noisy tags to a very low level despite using a noisy image database (Flickr). Other methods used for further re-stricting noise are to restrict usage of more than one image from same user (as basis for tagging the query image) and a dynamic approach for using many images when possible, and fewer images when not many relevant im-ages are found. The designed system is able to tag an image as long as there are a sufficient number of geo-referenced and already tagged images that is relevant for the query image available on Flickr. The query image must also have been geo-referenced and it is assumed that the user provides an image category. Im-ages are processed based on which category the images belongs to, i.e. an image is processed with the best method to handle images belonging to that specific category. In short, this means that images of objects or places are processed differently than images from events. The evaluation of the system indicates that usage of image categories is very helpful when tagging images. The system finds more relevant tags and fewer noisy tags than baseline systems using only location. It also performs good compared to a system using both location and content-based image analysis. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/2633 |
| 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: | 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: | 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: | Video is dominating consumer internet traffic. Restless internet users expect smooth playback and low latency when watching video content and vendors risk losing customers if this cannot be provided. Distributed storage systems specialized for delivering video content and for handling the high traffic this lead to, have been developed over many years. This thesis look into building and deploying a distributed video storage to deliver video content to an enterprise sport analytics web interface using open source solutions. We look into properties such as horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, security and privacy to outline an architecture that can scale horizontally and deliver video content in an efficient way to a HTML5 web interface. Our conjecture is that developing such a distributed storage solution from scratch is not feasible, and that other, accessible, storage solutions should be evaluated. We ended up with deploying OpenStack Object Storage on our cluster, integrating it with the web front end for uploading, managing and accessing video content. Our experiments test and evaluate the performance and boundaries of our system. We also discuss elasticity problems related to sudden spikes in interest, and solutions in the context of privacy and economic issues. The final deployed video storage system has replaced an old centralized approach that previously has been used. It is currently in production delivering video content to a web interface that is used for soccer analytics by our sport partner Tromsø IL. A case study has been made to observe how they have been using our systems for the last year. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/5163 |
| 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: | 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: | 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: | 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: | Everywhere we go we are overwhelmed with impressions and experiences making our day. Research has proven these to change over time, thus psychologists and experimenters in surveys are interested in what a person actually experienced at a particular point in time, referred to as immediate experience. Whether it was as a reaction to some event or just at specific times during the day, is determined by the purpose of the project. By allowing an experimenter to ask questions to a set of participants at predefined times and dates, the approach called Experience Sampling Method (ESM) aims at capturing user experiences. To be able to ask such questions participants are required to carry some kind of device running the actual survey. Since most people possesses a mobile phone, this can serve as an excellent host for ESM surveys. In this thesis we have studied the ESM approach, and the design and implementation of a prototype framework for creating, running and collecting results from surveys based on ESM will be presented. Several mobile operating systems and devices exist, hence an important concern in our work has been interoperability between different devices. To achieve this goal we have emphasised on expressing all information exchanged between a computer and a mobile device in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). From our work we have seen that the flexibility of the prototype makes the system not limited to psychological surveys only, but the approach can be used as a very powerful tool for example in market analysis. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1042 |
| 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: | 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: | 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: | 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: | 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: | 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: | In recent years, an increasing amount of personal images, video, sound and text data are captured and stored in a digital format. Increased storage capacity at lower cost entice us to attempt to store everything, but without effective information retrieval techniques, the usefulness of the data becomes limited. Some people have taken personal data capture to extremes and have begun to capture digitally all aspects of their life, which creates enormous archives of multimedia data. This is not a new idea: in 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote his visionary article “As We May Think” where he described Memex, the first Human Digital Memory (HDM). Today we have projects like Microsoft MyLifeBits building on the Memex vision, however there has been little focus on organizing this kind of data effectively. By applying data reduction, we show the benefits of removing redundancy from HDMs, and illustrate how the same data reduction framework can be used to effectively support information access from HDMs. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10037/1825 |
| 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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