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This thesis discusses the challenges and opportunities facing the field of accessibility, particularly as computing becomes ubiquitous. It is argued that a new approach is needed that centres around adaptations (specific, atomic changes) to user interfaces and content in order to improve their accessibility for a wider range of people than targeted by present Assistive Technologies (ATs). Further, the approach must take into consideration the capabilities of people at the human level and facilitate collaboration, in planned and ad-hoc environments. There are two main areas of focus: (1) helping people experiencing minor-to-moderate, transient and potentially-overlapping impairments, as may be brought about by the ageing process and (2) supporting collaboration between people by reasoning about the consequences, from different users perspectives, of the adaptations they may require. A theoretical basis for describing these problems and a reasoning process for the semi-automatic application of adaptations is developed. Impairments caused by the environment in which a device is being used are considered. Adaptations are drawn from other research and industry artefacts. Mechanical testing is carried out on key areas of the reasoning process, demonstrating fitness for purpose. Several fundamental techniques to extend the reasoning process in order to take temporal factors (such as fluctuating user and device capabilities) into account are broadly described. These are proposed to be feasible, though inherently bring compromises (which are defined) in interaction stability and the needs of different actors (user, device, target level of accessibility). This technical work forms the basis of the contribution of one work-package of the Sustaining ICT use to promote autonomy (Sus-IT) project, under the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme of research in the UK. Test designs for larger-scale assessment of the system with real-world participants are given. The wider Sus-IT project provides social motivations and informed design decisions for this work and is carrying out longitudinal acceptance testing of the processes developed here.

The Internet has become the preferred transport medium for almost every type of communication, continuing to grow, both in terms of the number of users and delivered services. Efforts have been made to ensure that time sensitive applications receive sufficient resources and subsequently receive an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). However, typical Internet users no longer use a single service at a given point in time, as they are instead engaged in a multimedia-rich experience, comprising of many different concurrent services. Given the scalability problems raised by the diversity of the users and traffic, in conjunction with their increasing expectations, the task of QoS provisioning can no longer be approached from the perspective of providing priority to specific traffic types over coexisting services; either through explicit resource reservation, or traffic classification using static policies, as is the case with the current approach to QoS provisioning, Differentiated Services (Diffserv). This current use of static resource allocation and traffic shaping methods reveals a distinct lack of synergy between current QoS practices and user activities, thus highlighting a need for a QoS solution reflecting the user services. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and propose a novel QoS architecture, which considers the activities of the user and manages resources from a user-centric perspective. The research begins with a comprehensive examination of existing QoS technologies and mechanisms, arguing that current QoS practises are too static in their configuration and typically give priority to specific individual services rather than considering the user experience. The analysis also reveals the potential threat that unresponsive application traffic presents to coexisting Internet services and QoS efforts, and introduces the requirement for a balance between application QoS and fairness. This thesis proposes a novel architecture, the Congestion Aware Packet Scheduler (CAPS), which manages and controls traffic at the point of service aggregation, in order to optimise the overall QoS of the user experience. The CAPS architecture, in contrast to traditional QoS alternatives, places no predetermined precedence on a specific traffic; instead, it adapts QoS policies to each individual’s Internet traffic profile and dynamically controls the ratio of user services to maintain an optimised QoS experience. The rationale behind this approach was to enable a QoS optimised experience to each Internet user and not just those using preferred services. Furthermore, unresponsive bandwidth intensive applications, such as Peer-to-Peer, are managed fairly while minimising their impact on coexisting services. The CAPS architecture has been validated through extensive simulations with the topologies used replicating the complexity and scale of real-network ISP infrastructures. The results show that for a number of different user-traffic profiles, the proposed approach achieves an improved aggregate QoS for each user when compared with Best effort Internet, Traditional Diffserv and Weighted-RED configurations. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the proposed architecture not only provides an optimised QoS to the user, irrespective of their traffic profile, but through the avoidance of static resource allocation, can adapt with the Internet user as their use of services change.

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La implementación de Rhinoscript en facultades de arquitectura en Latinoamérica se realizó en Santiago de Chile (2006, 2007) y Lima (2008), estableciendo algunos criterios para explorar formas complejas usando la programación, con estudiantes de pregrado bajo estrategias de postgrado. Después de documentar los resultados de las dos primeras experiencias [1], se hallaron métodos que se usaron durante la implementación. El objetivo es evidenciar como las experiencias llevadas a cabo pueden aplicarse a otros contextos regionales, proponiendo tipologías para empezar y recursos disponibles que permitan a los estudiantes desarrollar por si mismos nuevas exploraciones.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / Veda Systems Incorporated has recently completed the development of a completely open architecture, UNIX-based software environment for standard telemetry and more generic data acquisition applications. The new software environment operates on many state-of-the-art high-end workstations and provides a workstation independent, multiuse platform for front-end system configuration, database management, real-time graphic data display and data, logging.

This study asks the question; "How can playing a series of games be considered a continuous experience, rather than isolated experiences?". By asking this question, this study aims to enable game design evaluation from a new perspective, using HCI tools and theories. There is a qualitative study of a sequel game, interviewing players from a GameFlow perspective. Answers are compared to reveal differences based on thei rexperience with previous games in the series. This is done to see if looking at game design through new perspectives opens up for new context-based design opportunities. Design opportunities are analysed from an activity theory perspective, to not only uncover issues, but also explain them. By doing so, this study shows that it is possible to consider a sequelto a game a continuous experience, and that taking this into account during game design opens up for new opportunities.