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Adaptive management of shared resource pools with decentralized optimization and epidemics

2010-02-19, Loureiro, Emerson, Nixon, Paddy, Dobson, Simon

Shared resource pools are facilities featuring a certain amount of resources which can be used by different applications. For managing resources in such pools, the demand of each application can be used. Such a demand, however, is driven by the workload, which varies over time. For that reason, adaptive approaches have been proposed for the management of shared resources pools. Whereas a number of solutions exist in this context, they are either not truly decentralized or do not apply to the problem we are dealing with. In this paper, we then present Darma, an approach for managing shared resource pools in a truly decentralized, adaptive, and optimal way.

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Using situation lattices in sensor analysis

2009, Ye, Juan, Coyle, Lorcan, Dobson, Simon, Nixon, Paddy

Highly sensorised systems present two parallel challenges: how to design a sensor suite that can efficiently and cost-effectively support the needs of given services; and to extract the semantically relevant interpretations, or “situations”, from the flood of context data collected by the sensors. We describe mathematical structures called situation lattices that can be used to address these two problems simultaneously, allowing designers to both design and refine situation identification whilst offering insights into the design of sensor suites. We validate the accuracy and efficiency of our technique against a third-party data set and demonstrate how it can be used to evaluate sensor suite designs.

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Sticking with a Winning Team: Better Neighbour Selection for Conversational Collaborative Recommendation

2007-08, Rafter, Rachael, Coyle, Lorcan, Nixon, Paddy, Smyth, Barry

Conversational recommender systems have recently emerged as useful alternative strategies to their single-shot counterpart, especially given their ability to expose a user’s current preferences. These systems use conversational feedback to hone in on the most suitable item for recommendation by improving the mechanism that finds useful collaborators. We propose a novel architecture for performing recommendation that incorporates information about the individual performance of neighbours during a recommendation session, into the neighbour retrieval mechanism. We present our architecture and a set of preliminary evaluation results that suggest there is some merit to our approach.We examine these results and discuss what they mean for future research.

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Ontonym : a collection of upper ontologies for developing pervasive systems

2009-04, Stevenson, Graeme, Knox, Stephen, Dobson, Simon, Nixon, Paddy

Pervasive systems present the need to interpret large quantities of data from many sources. Context models support developers working with such data by providing a shared representation of the environment on which to base this interpretation. This paper presents a set of requirements for a context model that addresses uncertainty, provenance, sensing and temporal properties of context. Based on these requirements, we describe Ontonym, a set of ontologies that represent core concepts in pervasive computing. We propose a framework for evaluating ontologies in the pervasive computing domain by combining recognised techniques from the literature, and present a preliminary evaluation of Ontonym using these criteria.

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A virtual rehabilitation system for wobble board balance training with children

2008-08, Fitzgerald, Diarmaid, Trakarnratanakul, Nanthana, Conroy, Luke, Nixon, Paddy, Caulfield, Brian

Virtual reality-based computer games may be a useful way to develop motor skills and increase activity levels in children. We have developed an interactive computer platform where users must tilt a wobble board to complete on-screen computer game tasks. We have conducted a pilot study with 81 school children who played the game and used a questionnaire to gather information on children’s enjoyment levels and perceptions of the system. Findings showed a high level of enjoyment with the game and provided useful information for future research and development.