6411174
SMILAuthor: An Authoring System for SMIL-Based Multimedia Presentations
In this paper, an authoring tool named SMILAuthor for SMIL-based multimedia presentations is proposed. SMILAuthor adopts standard SMIL language as the format of the presentation to generate reusable and easily accessible presentations. Moreover, powerful editing functions such as cut, copy, and paste are supported by the system in a timeline-based manner. In order to support timeline-based editing functions, the playback duration of each object in the input SMIL script is first calculated by the parsing process of the system. The parsing process extracts and converts the temporal relationship of the input script to Real-Time Synchronization Model (RTSM), and the playback duration of each object in the script is then computed by traversing the RTSM. Editing results are converted to the SMIL format and saved in the output file. Language structure of SMIL is hidden by the system and the temporal information is visualized in the timeline manner to provide users an easy way to understand and control the timing of each object. Implementation of the system provides a friendly WYSIWYG environment and multiple views/windows are provided by the system to help authors compose multimedia presentations efficiently.
8861403
Design and implementation of the just-in-time retrieving policy for schedule-based distributed multimedia presentations
In order to provide the smooth playback of a distributed multimedia presentation, the object-retrieving engine for the player must fetch each object before its playback time. In this paper, a smart object-retrieving engine is proposed, which adopts a retrieving policy named the just-in-time policy. The policy expects the retrieval process of an object to finish right before the playback time of the object to achieve a better buffer utilization and network bandwidth efficiency. The proposed object-retrieving engine focuses on SMIL1.0-based multimedia presentations. By converting the synchronization relationship of objects in the SMIL 1.0 document to Real-Time Synchronization Model, which simplifies the handling of the synchronization relationship, and considering the end-to-end bandwidth as well as the user interactions, the object-retrieving engine determines the object request time for each object. The engine issues the request to fetch each object for the ongoing presentation at the object request time, and provides the player with proper media objects. The feasibility and better performance of the proposed just-in-time retrieving policy had been proved by performance measurements of system implementation.
17384103
RDT Properties and Evaluations
Proposed for MPCs, RDT has already been proved to support better performances than most of the direct network, such as smaller diameter based on its vector routing algorithm, smaller degree, embedded mesh/torus topology, etc. It gives a network form method to form groups of networks with recursively structured torus/torus-like networks. A RDT structure can be formed with the method and its related parameters. After analyzing its performance by the average distance, the descending vector routing reducing redundant computations and the fault-tolerant routing algorithm are proposed. A simpler structure named RDT(2,2,1)/a are proposed for the parallel systems with no more than 5000 nodes and given its performance evaluation. Considering the structure features of the practical RDTs, they are suitable for the interconnection network of an NoC design. The design of laying out RDT(2,2, 1)/a is proposed and proved to be available
478127
A conceptual framework for society-oriented decision support
Inspired by the operation of human social organisation, this paper presents a new architecture—a pyramid-committee—for developing society-oriented intelligence, whose structure imitates the organisation of human society in its decision making. The system takes a pyramid-like hierarchical structure with links in the pyramid forming a semi-lattice, which relate not only to nodes in the same layer, but also to others in different layers. The output of the system is a result of the negotiation and balancing of different interests. For such a system to function, the main difficulties concern the complicated relationships between different factors or agents. Focussing on the airport environment audit, we discuss the development of a model framework and the role of neural networks.
41260812
Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer and Mobile Agent Security
The mobile agent is a fundamental building block of the mobile computing paradigm. In mobile agent security, oblivious transfer (OT) from a trusted party can be used to protect the agent’s privacy and the hosts’ privacy. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer (VDOT), which allows us to replace a single trusted party with a group of threshold trusted servers. The design of VDOT uses a novel technique called consistency verification of encrypted secret shares. VDOT protects the privacy of both the sender and the receiver against malicious attacks of the servers. We also show the design of a system to apply VDOT to protect the privacy of mobile agents. Our design partitions an agent into the general portion and the security-sensitive portion. We also implement the key components of our system. As far as we know, this is the first effort to implement a system that protects the privacy of mobile agents. Our preliminary evaluation shows that protecting mobile agents not only is possible, but also can be implemented efficiently.
19972899
Exploring Multilingual Negotiation Support for English-Chinese Dyads: An Experimental Study
The increasing number of international negotiations involving multiple languages necessitates a growing reliance on multilingual support. Whereas empirical studies on negotiation support systems (NSS) have shown that NSS generally improve negotiation performance, no existing NSS caters for multilingual negotiations. With multilingual support, communication problems brought by the different negotiators' cultures and languages are expected to be addressed. In this study, a negotiation support system with multilingual support was developed and a laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the impact of such support on six important dependent variables. Findings suggested significant effects of NSS support on individual outcome and joint outcome. Multilingual support helped to improve equality of outcome (under qualified conditions) but the time taken was significantly longer.
5572574
Distributed Concurrency Control in Real-time Cooperative Editing Systems
Efficient distributed concurrency control is one of the most significant challenges in building real-time cooperative editing systems. In this paper, we focus on the definition and verification of an integrated set of distributed concurrency control schemes based on a novel consistency model for solving three inconsistency problems: divergence, causality-violation, and intention-violation in real-time cooperative editing systems.