There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

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Digital processing of speech signals

This survey describes the current state-of-the-art in the development of automated visual surveillance systems so as to provide researchers in the field with a summary of progress achieved to date and to identify areas where further research is needed. The ability to recognise objects and humans, to describe their actions and interactions from information acquired by sensors is essential for automated visual surveillance. The increasing need for intelligent visual surveillance in commercial, law enforcement and military applications makes automated visual surveillance systems one of the main current application domains in computer vision. The emphasis of this review is on discussion of the creation of intelligent distributed automated surveillance systems. The survey concludes with a discussion of possible future directions.

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Intelligent distributed surveillance systems: a review

VSUMM: A mechanism designed to produce static video summaries and a novel evaluation method

Internet and the latest correlated technologies, such as Web 2.0, represent inventions that have changed the world with their social contribution. Yet, digital divide and cyber-balkanization are Internet's discriminatory phenomena well known by field experts. In addition, we want now to raise the attention on the actual employment of these technologies: the vast potential within the Internet is currently dispersed in millions of applications devoted to frivolous and egocentric utilizations. Being (almost) the only use people have made of the most pervasive communication system ever made, this represents an unacceptable waste of opportunities. To revert this trend, we propose a novel utilization paradigm of Internet technologies which is aimed at liberating part of resources that are captured but not used by egocentric applications to give them back to a possible common (and altruistic) use.

/pdf/riding-the-web-evolution-from-egoism-to-altruism-45s0iz8e1c.pdf

Riding the Web Evolution: From Egoism to Altruism

The simple act of listening or of taking notes while attending a lesson may represent an insuperable burden for millions of people with some form of disabilities (e.g., hearing impaired, dyslexic and ESL students). In this paper, we propose an architecture that aims at automatically creating captions for video lessons by exploiting advances in speech recognition technologies. Our approach couples the usage of off-the-shelf ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) software with a novel caption alignment mechanism that smartly introduces unique audio markups into the audio stream before giving it to the ASR and transforms the plain transcript produced by the ASR into a timecoded transcript.

/pdf/enhancing-learning-accessibility-through-fully-automatic-z2yfthiecx.pdf

Enhancing learning accessibility through fully automatic captioning

Twitter is the most popular real-time micro-blogging service and it is a platform where users provide and obtain information at rapid pace. In this scenario, one of the biggest challenge is to find a way to automatically identify the most influential users of a given topic. Currently, there are several approaches that try to address this challenge using different Twitter signals (e.g., number of followers, lists, metadata), but results are not clear and sometimes conflicting. In this paper, we propose TRank, a novel method designed to address the problem of identifying the most influential Twitter users on specific topics identified with hashtags. The novelty of our approach is that it combines different Twitter signals (that represent both the user and the user's tweets) to provide three different indicators that are intended to capture different aspects of being influent. The computation of these indicators is not based on the magnitude of the Twitter signals alone, but they are computed taking into consideration also human factors, as for example the fact that a user with many active followings might have a very noisy time lime and, thus, miss to read many tweets. The experimental assessment confirms that our approach provides results that are more reasonable than the one obtained by mechanisms based on the sole magnitude of data.

TRank: Ranking Twitter users according to specific topics

The current mobile gaming market is filled with the socalled casual games. Simple and easy, these games are well suited for devices with limited resources and for people who play games now and then. This is why Tetris and Pac-man are among the best sellers games of several mobile games charts. In this paper we analyze current developing platforms, networking technologies, delivery models and game characteristics of the current mobile gaming scenario, in order to identify directions that will lead to the near future of the mobile gaming scenario. THE MOBILE GAMING MARKET The success and the popularity of mobile games are making the mobile gaming a successful market. Expectations are high as reported by different research reports, which forecast the mobile gaming market between 10 and 20 US$ billions by 2011 (see, Gibson (2006)). Nowadays the mobile gaming scenario is filled with a wide range of games (from very simple graphic games to cutting edge 3D graphics; from single to multi players games) (see, Figure 1). However, looking at today’s mobile gaming market sales, it is interesting to note that customers prefer the so-called casual games, easy and simple to play. Just see the best sellers mobile game charts of different cellphone network operators, to note that most of the titles are simple and easy to play: Tetris, Pac-Man, Pong, Frogger, just to name a few. The success of casual games has various reasons: i) mobile games are basically used by normal people, the so-called casual gamers, to kill time or to mitigate boredom and are not meant to replace powerful gaming console, ii) limited screen size and input keyboard are a burden for complex games, whereas they are sufficient for casual games, iii) old titles, usually simple and easy to play, are familiar to a large segment of current mobile device’s owners and familiarity is an important factor in a game purchase decision (see, Telephia (2007)), iv) the computational power of current cellphones is limited with respect to gaming console, but is comparable to the one of old gaming console, and hence sufficient to support simple games. Will casual games play a fundamental role in the future of the mobile gaming market? Will casual gamers be principal target of the game industry? Will hardcore gamers be more considered in the future mobile gaming scenario? In this paper we analyze the current mobile gaming scenario in order to identify directions that will lead to the near future of the mobile gaming scenario. In doing this, we focus on developing platforms, networking and graphics technologies, delivery models and games characteristics. Based on the highlighted directions, the future mobile gaming scenario is likely to be no longer focused on casual gamers, but hardcore gamers will be the main target; casual games and complex games will coexist and mobile games will massively use features like multi-player capabilities, social aspects, location and proximity information and high quality graphics. Figure 2 summarizes a possible evolution of the mobile gaming scenario. DEVELOPING PLATFORMS Today, the mobile scenario suffers from a considerable platform fragmentation problem (see, Koivisto (2006)), which is a real burden for the popularity of mobile applications and of mobile gaming in particular. In addition, since the number of different mobile devices is enormous, game developers are practically unable to release a game version for any different platform and for any different mobile device. Needless to say, making a game available to the entire mobile market is almost impossible, as the inter-platforms porting cost may be higher than the developing cost of the entire game. Currently, Java ME, Brew, Symbian and Flash Lite are the most popular software platforms used to develop mobile games. Java Micro Edition (Java ME) is a collection of technologies and specifications to develop software for devices with limited resources and is currently the most ubiquitous application platform for mobile device. The main advantage of using Java ME is that an application can be written once and can be used on every device Java ME compatible. However, the only way to guarantee that the developed application will run on a particular device is to test it on that particular device. Needless to say, this is a limitation. Furthermore, Java ME applications run slowly compared to applications specifically Snake Tetris Nba live 2008 A dog’s

Mobile Games: What to expect in the near Future.

Our smartphone is full of applications and data that analytically organize, facilitate and describe our lives. We install applications for the most varied reasons, to inform us, to have fun and for work, but, unfortunately, we often install them without reading the terms and conditions of use. The result is that our privacy is increasingly at risk. Considering this scenario, in this paper, we analyze the user’s perception towards privacy while using smartphone applications. In particular, we formulate two different hypotheses: 1) the perception of privacy is influenced by the knowledge of the data used by the installed applications; 2) applications access to much more data than they need. The study is based on two questionnaires (within-subject experiments with 200 volunteers) and on the lists of installed apps (30 volunteers). Results show a widespread abuse of data related to location, personal contacts, camera, Wi-Fi network list, running apps list, and vibration. An in-depth analysis shows that some features are more relevant to certain groups of users (e.g., adults are mainly worried about contacts and Wi-Fi connection lists; iOS users are sensitive to smartphone vibration; female participants are worried about possible misuse of the smartphone camera).

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Marco Furini

Papers

Riding the Web Evolution: From Egoism to Altruism

Enhancing learning accessibility through fully automatic captioning

TRank: Ranking Twitter users according to specific topics

Mobile Games: What to expect in the near Future.

Privacy Perception when Using Smartphone Applications