<p>Mobile phones are increasingly becoming common property, which we carry with us practically all of the time. Self-services are also becoming more and more common. Along with the self-service society comes the need to access services at any time, any place, which the mobile phone can provide for. Use of a self-service usually requires exchange of information by means of electronic forms. Finding good solutions for representing forms on mobile phones is a demanding challenge. On the one hand, the small displays and keyboards introduce several design challenges. On the other hand, users with special needs, such as users with cognitive impairments, call for solutions that address accessibility and universal design. This report documents an investigation on how to make electronic forms feasible on mobile phones. The investigation focused on universal design of mobile form user interfaces. Based on the expected potential of multimodality, two target groups were chosen: ‘people with cognitive disabilities that lead to moderate text-reading problems’, and ‘people with cognitive disabilities that lead to moderate number-reading problems’. We investigated the validity of a hypothesis containing two assertions: (1) that specific techniques and form controls can make electronic forms feasible on mobile phones as well as relieve the burden of the users, and (2) that offering visualisation of information as an additional modality in electronic forms on mobile phones can be beneficial for the cognitive processing of content in such forms. The research method used in the investigation comprised several parts: A literature study and a semi-structured theme interview formed a background for setting success criteria for the feasibility of forms on mobile phones and making design choices. Paper prototyping was conducted by making a paper mock-up of a selected case, kindergarten applications, which illustrated how the design choices could appear. The paper mock-up evolved through several iterations, and served as a design specification for a J2ME prototype, which was made in order for users to better be able to evaluate the design decisions. The design evolved further during the prototyping in J2ME, as necessary improvements were discovered. The final part of the research method was a walkthrough evaluation. Ten users went through the form and were afterwards asked to state their opinion on specific design aspects. The results from the walkthrough evaluations provided material to use when assessing the validity of the hypothesis. The investigation led to a list of success criteria with suggestions on how to achieve several of them. We attempted to achieve four of these criteria, by making several design decisions. The final user interface of the kindergarten form had aspects we were concerned about, and addressed in the walkthrough evaluations The most important results of the evaluations were: They were all positive towards a technique used for decreasing the information intensity. None of the users claimed to have problems with or dislike the form control ‘drop-down box’ and a technique used to maintain the form context when drop-down boxes were expanded. ‘Choose’ commands may be unnecessary. The solution for indicating form size and progress was understood by all. A graphical modality presenting kindergartens in a map, accommodating people with text-reading problems, was preferred by seven of the ten users, while none of the users preferred the graphical modality presenting points of time as clock icons, accommodating people with number-reading problems. The results led us to conclude that the first assertion seem to be correct, depending on the outcome of further, suggested tests. We assume that professionally made clock icons, combined with a technique suggested by one of the evaluators would have made more people prefer this presentation. We also se no reason why multimodality, acknowledged to be beneficial for the processing of cognitive content, should be less beneficial on mobile phones, and believe that also the second assertion is true. A number of efforts for further investigations are suggested.</p>

<p>Instead of displaying a simple list with the houses and apartments which are listed for sale, an alternative is to display them geographically in a map to get an overview of where they are located. To make it simple the map also has an icon of where you are located, so you know where you are according to the houses. A prototype of such a system with the most important functionality has been implemented. The system gives the user the option to choose different other facilities he or she wants to show in the map together with the apartments, such as schools and parking spaces etc. The system gives also short information of the different apartments when clicking on them, and the possibility to open the prospect of that specific apartment. The prototype has been evaluated by some “experts” from one of the largest estate agencies, together with a user- and a technical evaluation. The feedback from the “experts” has been very positive, and they are convinced that such a system will be very helpful for potential users. The response regarding the user-friendliness has also been good, except from some comments on too many confirmations needed when running the application. During the technical evaluation we got confirmed that a J2ME application not is directly portable between different devices without slightly adjustments.</p>

<p>Gaming on mobile phones is a business with a great growth potential both in profit and popularity. In today's modern world, the number of potential users of online multiplayer mobile games is enormous. This is because of the wide deployment of mobile phones and the increasing general interest in gaming. For game developers, this is an interesting business area, since mobile games are faster and easier to develop than console or computer games, due to the mobile games' smaller size and reduced complexity. Telecom companies, on the other hand, may profit from this both by attracting users through exclusive contents only available to their subscribers, and trough the potential network traffic generated by online multiplayer games. Some multiplayer mobile games are available on the market today. However, few of these can be played real-time, which often involves a more entertaining and attractive gameplay compared to slower, turn-based games. This project has focused on two main areas. Firstly, different network technologies and transport protocols have been tested to evaluate whether these are suitable for real-time multiplayer mobile games or not. This was done by testing the different networks' response times and transfer speeds. Secondly, a framework for developing this kind of games has been developed. Also, a game prototype has been implemented based on this framework, and the experience from this development has been recorded to provide assistance for future development projects within the same scope. The results from the tests show that, among the widely available mobile networks today, only UMTS (3G) and EDGE offer performance sufficient for a fast and stable real-time multiplayer mobile game. GPRS is too slow and unstable, and using this technology for real-time game communication is likely to lead to lags and an incoherent gameplay. Furthermore, the tests have clearly shown that UDP is far better suited for in-game communication than TCP, because of UDP's superior response time. For developers of such games, there are several challenges that have to be closely considered. Synchronization of clients is a very difficult task because of high network latencies. Furthermore, mobile phones are weak in terms of available resources. Managing these problems requires distribution of calculations and efficient algorithms. The game framework developed in this project has proved to provide a good basis for developing different game concepts within real-time multiplayer mobile gaming. Common functionality for such games is implemented in the framework, thus helping game developers avoid having to reinvent the wheel. This project has shown that successful real-time multiplayer mobile games are definitely possible to implement. However, doing this is a great challenge, both for developers, distributors, and telecom companies offering such games to their subscribers. A middle way has to be found between the complexity of the game, the need for frequent network updates, and the user cost involved with playing the game. If this middle way is found, it is very likely that such a game could be a great success.</p>

<p>This report describes a case-study evaluation of two integration strategies with particular focus on performance. The study is motivated by integration challengers within a company we have cooperated with, and our wish to gain insight into systems integration. The goal of the study has been to evaluate the performance of two message-based system integration strategies. We have evaluated this by implementing several applications which are integrated using either Web services technologies or an integration technology provided by our cooperator. Our research questions have been as follows: Q1: Which integration solution has best performance in a publish-subscribe scenario? Q2: Which integration solution has best performance in a request-response scenario? The results show that the Web service applications has best performance when sending small messages (up to 160kB). For large messages, the applications based on the integration technology from the cooperating company perform better. he contributions of the study may be split in two. The contribution to the company is the performance evaluation of their technology. Collected data for response time and throughput, and performance models for our test applications are also contributed. For a broader context, we contribute with performance evaluation of Web services technologies. Data is collected for response time and throughput on test applications, and performance models are made. The comparisons of integrations based on Web services and MIP also serves as example of the performance of Web services versus other middleware.</p>

<p>In this thesis we propose a novel approach were 3 days of raw Yahoo! News search query logs are analyzed to find semantic relations among queries. The analysis is based on two independent contributions. The first use session data extracted from the query logs. By finding the term best describing each session, we get a vocabulary of queries related to that term. Sessions with similar terms are merged to create larger groups of queries with one common term or phrase. The second contribution is the use of temporal correlation to give a measure of frequency variation similarity. Queries that show a similar variation over time have a high chance of either being semantically related or appear in the same situations. These two contributions are then merged into related term groups, based on their session group label and the most prominent term or phrase of the correlation query. With the use of non strict parameter settings on the contribution calculations, a great number of queries are found. With the intersection of the results this leaves high accuracy groups of related queries with a term or phrase as group label. A prototype search application was developed to use the created term groups in a search environment. The groups of queries were converted into a tree structure with their group label as the main node. This navigation tree structure let the user navigate up and down in the tree or click directly on a tree node to view its results. When a users search match one of the generated groups, he or she is presented with the first search results of the trees main node together with its children.</p>

<p>Software design and architecture specify how a system should be implemented to achieve the required quality attributes. Being able to automatically verify the design adherence during implementation will continuously assure that the system realizes the quality attributes, as well as over time does not drift away from them. This thesis investigates how a software design can be used to automatically verify and enforce rules for implementation. The current tool support for automatic design enforcement is assessed and reviewed. In addition, a prototype contribution to this practice, a plug-in for the Maven software project management system, is presented.</p>

<p>Software security is an increasingly important part of software development as the risk from attackers is constantly evolving through increased exposure, threats and economic impact of security breaches. Emerging security literature describes expert knowledge such as secure development best practices. This knowledge is often not applied by software developers because they lack security awareness, security training and secure development methods and tools. Existing methods and tools require too much effort and security is often given less priority in the trade-off between functionality and security. This thesis defines a tool supported approach to secure software analysis and design. Possible vulnerabilities and their causes are identified through analysis of software specifications and designs, resulting in vulnerability cause graphs. The security modelling tool SeaMonster is extended to include security activity graphs; this technique is used with vulnerability cause graphs to model vulnerabilities and security improvement activities. A security activity graph is created to identify activities that keep the vulnerabilities from instantiating in the final software product. The activities in the security activity graph can be the use of security patterns. This way the above approach is used to find a security pattern as a countermeasure to a vulnerability, and can be used with the security pattern design templates implemented in a preliminary project. This is a way of providing coupling between security expertise and software developers to apply security knowledge in software development practice. The approach and tools are tested and demonstrated through a development case study of a medical patient journal system. The main contributions of this thesis are an approach to secure software analysis and design, an extension of the security modelling tool SeaMonster, a case study of the approach and tools that show how security can be incorporated in early stages of software development. The contributions are intended to improve availability of security knowledge, to increase security awareness and bridge the gap between software experts and software developers.</p>

<p>Large music collections are now more common than ever before. Yet, search technology for music is still in its infancy. Audio fingerprinting is one method that allows searching for music. In this thesis several audio fingerprinting solutions are combined into a single solution to determine if such a combination can yield better results than any of the solutions can separately. The solution is used to find duplicate music files in a personal collection. The results show that applying the weighted root-mean square (WRMS) to the problem most effectively ranked the results in a satisfying manner. It was notably better than the other approaches tried. The WRMS produced 61% more correct matches than the original FDMF solution, and 49% more correct matches than libFooID.</p>

<p>Reading an electronic patient record (EPR) is a very challenging task because of the medical jargons, which are almost impossible to understand for the layman. This becomes a highly relevant challenge because of the more extensive use of the internet to get medical information. Also the Norwegian laws state that the patient has the right to read his or her own EPR. A master thesis executed in 2006, and a specialization project in 2007 addressed this subject and developed a prototype for adapting EPRs to a patient presentation. This thesis continues this work and aims to extend the system with more functionality and improve the translation of the EPRs. The main issues discussed in the thesis are how disambiguating between Norwegian words and medical terms, provide summaries of EPRs, and supply the patient with external information about his or her health condition. In addition the refined user interface from the specialization project was implemented. The conclusion of this thesis is that the Support Vector Machine classifier with character bigrams provides good and accurate disambiguation between Norwegian words and medical terms. The external information functionality provides correct and quality assured information from the patient hand book. There are still some issues, and possible improvements on providing only precise and relevant articles. Summarizing of EPRs is achieved through named entity extraction of ICD codes, and then presenting the codes together with their corresponding descriptions. This implementation seems to be accurate, correct, and precise.</p>

<p>The advances in technology over recent years have opened up a lot of opportunities in the field of wearable health monitoring. Technology equipment that was once reserved for hospital use may now be used in the home of a consumer; this could ease the life of many long term patients and their next of kin. We have been in contact with the case of a child, who suffers from a number of rare conditions and complications. She has to be monitored almost all the time in her home by her parents. She has been in and out of the hospital a number of times, without ever figuring out what causes her problems. Her parents have to use a lot of time and effort to monitor her. Our goal in this thesis was two-fold, automate and ease the monitoring of her as well as logging all the data of vital signs so that it may later be used for diagnosing. We made a prototype system using the hardware of a wearable monitoring shirt called the LifeShirt. Our main focus was to create a system that would allow for discussion around potential usage areas of the LifeShirt. We did live testing on the patient and evaluated the solution with the family and the patient’s physician. We found that our prototype concept fulfills a need that is currently unmet. Their monitoring can be simplified, and the physician can get more data to use for diagnosing purposes. Based on our result we see a great potential for using wearable health monitoring technology in the home. We envisage many areas that could benefit from automated monitoring with the LifeShirt, both in home as well as in hospital settings.</p>