Thesis (M.Info.Tech.-Res.)--University of Wollongong, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Eng.(Computer Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Summaries in Afrikaans and English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-83).

Thesis (Ph.D. (Computer Science)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Σκοπός της παρούσας διπλωματικής εργασίας είναι η δημιουργία συστήματος που θα διευρύνει τις δυνατότητες των εξ’ αποστάσεως εργαστηρίων προσανατολισμένα σε θέματα ψηφιακής επεξεργασίας σήματος και εικόνας. Η υλοποίηση πραγματοποιήθηκε με το LabVIEW v 8.6 και ονομάστηκε R-DSP Server. Αξιοποιώντας τις δυνατότητες που προσφέρει ο R-DSP Server οι χρήστες μπορούν να αναπτύξουν τα δικά τους γραφικά περιβάλλοντα (Graphical User Interfaces -GUIs) τα οποία ονομάζονται προσαρμοζόμενα γραφικά περιβάλλοντα (Customized GUIs,) για τον απομακρυσμένο έλεγχο DSP εφαρμογών. Για την εύκολη και γρήγορη ανάπτυξη τέτοιων γραφικών εφαρμογών στο περιβάλλων του LabVIEW, αναπτύχθηκε μια σειρά εργαλείων που ονομάστηκε R-DSP LabVIEW Toolkit. Η εργασία ολοκληρώνεται με την παρουσίαση της λειτουργιάς του R-DSP Server αλλά και της χρήσης του R-DSP Toolkit. / The purpose of this work is to present an approach which could expand the features of Remote Laboratories focused on embedded Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems. The proposed approach is based on a system which is designed and developed with LabVIEW and is called R-DSP Server. Exploiting this system, users are able to develop their own Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), named Customized GUIs, for the remote control and validation of real-time DSP applications. These GUIs are tailored to the needs of each DSP application and can be implemented in any programming language. The rapid design of Customized GUIs using LabVIEW for the communication with the R-DSP Server is achieved using an implemented set of functions, called R-DSP LabVIEW Toolkit.

Με αυτή την εργασία προτείνουμε και υποστηρίζουμε ένα νέο πρότυπο για τα συστήματα αρχείων νέας γενιάς. Σε αυτό το πρότυπο, η παραδοσιακή άποψη ενός αρχείου αντικαθίσταται από την έννοια της πληροφοριακής μονάδας (information unit) και η παραδοσιακή αντίληψη των ιεραρχικών συστημάτων αρχείων αντικαθίσταται από ένα συνεχώς εξελισσόμενο χώρο δυναμικά αλληλένδετων πληροφοριακών μονάδων. Ένα Οργανικό Σύστημα Αρχείων (OFS) ορίζεται ως ένα σύστημα το οποίο αναπτύσσεται φυσικά και δεν υπόκειται σε τεχνητούς κανόνες και προκαθορισμένους, στατικούς τρόπους προβολής προς τους χρήστες του. Στο επίκεντρο του OFS βρίσκονται νέες αφαιρέσεις που υποστηρίζουν ένα συνεχώς εξελισσόμενο σύνολο πληροφοριακών μονάδων, χαρακτηρισμών των χρηστών για αυτές, και σχέσεων που δημιουργούνται μεταξύ τους από την πρόσβαση των χρηστών σε αυτές. Οι αφαιρέσεις αυτές επιτρέπουν το ίδιο σύστημα και το περιεχόμενό του να είναι ορατό με διαφορετικό τρόπο από διαφορετικούς τύπους χρηστών, σύμφωνα με τις τρέχουσες πληροφοριακές τους ανάγκες. Το OFS είναι ανθρωποκεντρικό, καθώς απαιτείται ανθρώπινη συνεισφορά για το χαρακτηρισμό των πληροφοριακών μονάδων και για την ανακάλυψη και το σχολιασμό των μεταξύ τους σχέσεων. Δεδομένου αυτού, στην καρδιά του OFS βρίσκονται αλγόριθμοι για την αναζήτηση βάσει περιεχομένου στα αποθηκευμένα αρχεία. Στην εργασία αυτή εκθέτουμε τα αποτελέσματα της μέχρι τώρα έρευνάς μας, συμπεριλαμβανομένης μιας υλοποίησης σε επίπεδο πυρήνα του λειτουργικού συστήματος, των βασικών χαρακτηριστικών του OFS, καθώς και τις σχετικές μετρήσεις απόδοσης προς απόδειξη της βιωσιμότητας της προσέγγισής μας. Συζητάμε στη συνέχεια, τις προκλήσεις που παραμένουν και τον αντίκτυπο που μπορεί να έχει το OFS στις σχετικές προσπάθειες έρευνας και ανάπτυξης, επισημαίνοντας τη σχετική έρευνα από άλλους τομείς, όπως η Ανάκτηση Πληροφορίας, το Κοινωνικό Λογισμικό, οι Διεπαφές Χρηστών, και η Διαχείριση Δεδομένων. / We propose and advocate a new paradigm for the next-generation file systems. In it, the traditional view of a file is replaced by the notion of an information unit and the traditional notion of hierarchical filesystems is replaced by an ever-evolving space of dynamically inter-related information units. An Organic File System (OFS) is defined as a system, which develops naturally and which does not conform to artificial rules and predefined, static ways of being viewed by its users. At the core of OFS lie novel abstractions which support a continuously evolving set of information units, users' characterizations of them, and relationships established between them by users accessing them. The abstractional also facilitate the same system and its contents to be viewed differently by different types of users, based on the current information needs. OFS is human-centered, as human input is used to characterize information units and to discover and annotate relationships between units. Given this, at the heart of OFS lie algorithms for content-based search of stored files. We report our R&D efforts so far, including a kernel-level architecture and implementation of the basic features of OFS and relevant performance measures establishing the viability of our approach. We then discuss the large number of challenges that remain and the impact OFS can have in relevant R\&D efforts, highlighting relevant research from other fields, such as Information Retrieval, Social Software, User Interfaces, and Data Management.

An experiment was conducted to determine the effects of subjective culture on the usability of computerized systems. The results of the experiment did not provide sufficient evidence to conclude that any of the tested cultural dimensions affected the usability of the product. Analysis of the results indicated that the differences in scores could have been attributable to variables other than those tested and controlled for. This indicated a need to build a more detailed conceptual model of usability before empirical research of this nature can be effectively conducted. Consequently, further work needed to be done to identify the variables that influence usability, and the strategies for controlling for these variables under experimental conditions. Through a literature investigation, the validity of some of the proposed variables was established, and some additional variables were identified. The valid variables were then incorporated into a conceptual model of usability for use in future research endeavors. / Information systems / M. Sc.

Vision based technology such as motion detection has long been limited to the domain of powerful processor intensive systems such as desktop PCs and specialist hardware solutions. With the advent of much faster mobile phone processors and memory, a plethora of feature rich software and hardware is being deployed onto the mobile platform, most notably onto high powered devices called smart phones. Interaction interfaces such as touchscreens allow for improved usability but obscure the phone’s screen. Since the majority of smart phones are equipped with cameras, it has become feasible to combine their powerful processors, large memory capacity and the camera to support new ways of interacting with the phone which do not obscure the screen. However, it is not clear whether or not these processor intensive visual interactions can in fact be run at an acceptable speed on current mobile handsets or whether they will offer the user a better experience than the current number pad and direction keys present on the majority of mobile phones. A vision based finger interaction technique is proposed which uses the back of device camera to track the user’s finger. This allows the user to interact with the mobile phone with mouse based movements, gestures and steering based interactions. A simple colour thresholding algorithm was implemented in Java, Python and C++. Various benchmarks and tests conducted on a Nokia N95 smart phone revealed that on current hardware and with current programming environments only native C++ yields results plausible for real time interactions (a key requirement for vision based interactions). It is also shown that different lighting levels and background environments affects the accuracy of the system with background and finger contrast playing a large role. Finally a user study was conducted to ascertain the overall user’s satisfaction between keypad interactions and the finger interaction techniques concluding that the new finger interaction technique is well suited to steering based interactions and in time, mouse style movements. Simple navigation is better suited to the directional keypad.

Les Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication pour l’Enseignement (TICE) peuvent transformer profondément les pratiques pédagogiques. Cependant, pour que ce bénéfice potentiel se réalise, il faut que les solutions produites en conception puissent à la fois s’intégrer à ces pratiques et être sources d’innovation potentielles, en termes de plus-values pour les activités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage. L’objectif de cette thèse est de mettre en avant des facteurs de conception qui permettent d’articuler ces enjeux dans le cadre d’un projet de conception sur technologie émergente pour l’enseignement. Ainsi, la recherche s’intéresse à une démarche participative mise en œuvre dans la conception conjointe d’un système technique (l’application sur table interactive) et des pratiques enseignantes (par l’intermédiaire de scénarios pédagogiques). Nos hypothèses concernent les effets de différents facteurs sur l’élaboration d’un compromis entre des enjeux d’intégration et d’innovation : implication de futurs utilisateurs « pionniers » ; opportunités de confrontation de leurs hypothèses de conception ; cadrage du champ des possibles. Les analyses portent sur l’ensemble de la démarche de conception, afin de caractériser ces effets d’un point de vue longitudinal en les situant par rapport aux différentes méthodes mobilisées et à l’avancement des solutions de conception. En particulier, les justifications des choix de conception relatifs à certaines composantes de l’artefact en cours d’élaboration sont étudiées pour caractériser, d’une part, les facteurs de la conception qui ont contextualisé ces choix et, d’autre part, leurs liens avec les enjeux d’innovation ou d’intégration, voire les deux. Les résultats montrent que : (i) la mobilisation et la redéfinition des scénarios pédagogiques, l’implication d’enseignants en tant que co-concepteurs, la confrontation des solutions de conception sur prototype et en simulation et enfin le recueil des besoins favorisent la définition de caractéristiques techniques et l’intégration du système technique ; (ii) la définition des caractéristiques techniques de l’application, l’implication d’enseignants pionniers, l’identification de leurs besoins et la simulation des solutions favorisent l’adaptation des pratiques enseignantes aux caractéristiques de la technologie en vue d’optimiser son intégration ; (iii) les différentes formes de confrontation à la nouvelle technologie ainsi que les apprentissages mutuels en conception participative vis-à-vis du potentiel technique et interactif des tables interactives contribuent à l’exploitation de ce potentiel par les concepteurs ; (iv) les caractéristiques innovantes des tables interactives, l’anticipation de leurs usages potentiels en salle de classe, la mise en œuvre des solutions de conception en situation réelle, la participation d’enseignants futurs utilisateurs leur permettant de s’approprier la nouvelle technologie et l’identification de leurs difficultés actuelles favorisent l’innovation dans les scénarios pédagogiques et l’amélioration des activités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage. / Information and Communication Technologies have the potential for deeply transforming teachers’ practices. However, this requires design solutions to be adapted to these practices and, at the same time, to foster innovations, in terms of improvements for teaching and learning activities. This thesis aims at highlighting design factors that allow the articulation between these goals, in the context of a design project with emerging technologies for education. The research focuses onthe design process: joint definition of a technical system (an application on an interactive tabletop) and of teaching practices (via pedagogical scenarios); involvement of future users; design hypothesis assessment modalities; framing the scope of design possibilities. Our hypotheses concern the potential effects of these factors on the reaching of a compromise between integration and innovation related goals.Analyses cover the entire design process, in order to longitudinally examine the various design techniques used and the design process advancement. In particular, design choices related to some of the features of the artifact are analyzed to investigate the links between design factors and integration/innovation related goals.Results show that: (i) using and redefining pedagogical scenarios, involving users as co-designers, confronting the design solutions with prototypes and simulations and identifying users’ needs facilitate the technical definition of the application and its integration in future teaching activities; (ii) defining the technical properties of an artifact, involving teachers as experimenters, identifying their needs and simulating on the design solution foster the adaptation of teachers’ practices to the specificities of the technologies and optimize its integration ; (iii) allowing participants to interact with the emerging technology in different ways and the mutual learning processes between designers, regarding tabletops technical and interactional potential,help them capitalize on this potential ; (iv) identifying the innovative features of tabletops, anticipating their potential uses, testing prototypes in real class situations and involving teachers, to let them learn how to use an emerging technology and to express the existing limits of in their teaching practices, foster innovation in their pedagogical scenarios and, thus, can improve teaching and learning activities.

Suite à l’amélioration des outils de capture et de stockage des données, ces dernières années ont vu les quantités de données à traiter croître énormément. De nombreux travaux, allant du traitement automatique à la visualisation d’information, ont alors été mis en place, mais certains domaines sont encore trop spécifiques pour en profiter. C’est le cas du Renseignement d’Origine ÉlectroMagnétique (ROEM). Ce domaine ne fait pas uniquement face à de grandes quantités de données mais doit aussi gérer des données et des usages complexes ainsi que des populations d’utilisateurs ayant de moins en moins d’expérience. Dans cette thèse nous nous sommes intéressés à l’usage de l’existant et des nouvelles technologies appliquées à la visualisation pour proposer des solutions à la combinaison de problématiques comme les données en grandes quantité et les données complexes. Nous commençons par présenter une analyse du domaine du ROEM qui a permis d’extraire les problématiques auxquelles il doit faire face. Nous nous intéressons ensuite aux solutions gérant les combinaisons de telles problématiques. L’existant ne contenant pas directement de telles solutions, nous nous intéressons alors à la description des problématiques de visualisation et proposons une caractérisation de ces problématiques. Cette caractérisation nous permet de décrire les représentations existantes et de mettre en place un outil de recommandation des représentations basé sur la façon dont l’existant résout les problématiques. Enfin nous nous intéressons à identifier de nouvelles métaphores pour compléter l’existant et proposons une représentation immersive permettant de résoudre les problématiques du ROEM. Ces contributions permettent d’analyser et d’utiliser l’existant et approfondissent l’usage des représentations immersives pour la visualisation d’information. / As a result of the improvement of data capture and storage, recent years have seen the amount of data to be processed increase dramatically. Many studies, ranging from automatic processing to information visualization, have been performed, but some areas are still too specific to take advantage of. This is the case of ELectromagnetic INTelligence(ELINT). This domain does not only deal with a huge amount of data but also has to handle complex data and usage as well as populations of users with less and less experience. In this thesis we focus on the use of existing and new technologies applied to visualization to propose solutions to the combination of issues such as huge amount and complex data. We begin by presenting an analysis of the ELINT field which made it possible to extract the issues that it must faces. Then, we focus on the visual solutions handling the combinations of such issues but the existing work do not contain directly such solutions. Therefore, we focus on the description of visual issues and propose a characterization of these issues. This characterization allows us to describe the existing representations and to build a recommendation tool based on how the existing work solves the issues. Finally, we focus on identifying new metaphors to complete the existing work and propose an immersive representation to solve the issues of ELINT. These contributions make it possible to analyze and use the existing and deepen the use of immersive representations for the visualization of information.

A administração pública, em suas esferas de atuação, utiliza-se de mecanismos para intensificar e facilitar relações entre cidadãos e governos, por intermédio de inovações de processo. Com a utilização da internet, percebe-se a modernização e aproximação dos segmentos da sociedade com o governo, permitindo ofertar serviços públicos de forma eficiente e efetiva. Em vista disso, o presente estudo teve por objetivo identificar a percepção dos gestores públicos municipais na utilização do portal eletrônico do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul quanto à inovação de processo. Para tanto, foi realizada pesquisa aplicada, quantitativa, descritiva por meio de survey, com 62 gestores municipais dos 497 municípios do Rio Grande do Sul. Como resultados observou-se que o portal eletrônico possibilita melhorias nos serviços públicos e agilidade, auxilia na elaboração de políticas públicas, melhora a interação da sociedade com o governo e a transparência dos atos públicos. Além disso, o portal eletrônico é visto como inovação de processos, que minimiza gastos da administração pública e dos usuários, e possibilita melhorias nos processos para o cidadão. Identificou-se ainda por meio de análise fatorial, que os fatores agruparam-se em três fatores, sendo eles tecnologia, processos, e interação, não apresentando diferenças entre os resultados dos grupos por mesorregiões do Rio Grande do Sul. Por fim, observou-se ainda que há correlação significativa entre Tecnologia e Processos (0,680), Tecnologia e a Interação (0,740), e Processos e a Interação (0,616), indicando que quanto melhores os resultados de um dos fatores na gestão pública, melhores serão os resultados dos demais fatores. / Submitted by Ana Guimarães Pereira (agpereir@ucs.br) on 2017-09-29T19:25:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Andrea Simoni Kiekow.pdf: 1069075 bytes, checksum: c1733ad34ae6e364e81a4993622bac40 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-29T19:25:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Andrea Simoni Kiekow.pdf: 1069075 bytes, checksum: c1733ad34ae6e364e81a4993622bac40 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-29 / The public administration, in its spheres of action, uses mechanisms to intensify and facilitate relations between citizens and governments, through process innovations. With the use of the Internet, the modernization and approximation of the segments of society with the government is perceived, allowing to offer public services in an efficient and effective way. In view of this, the present study aimed to identify the perception of municipal public managers in the use of the electronic portal of the State of Rio Grande do Sul regarding process innovation. For that, a quantitative descriptive survey was carried out with 62 municipal managers from the 497 municipalities of Rio Grande do Sul. As a result, it was observed that the electronic portal allows improvements in public services and agility, helps in the elaboration of Enhances society's interaction with government and the transparency of public acts. In addition, the e-portal is seen as process innovation, which minimizes public administration and user spending, and enables process improvements for the citizen. It was also identified by means of factorial analysis, that the factors were grouped in three factors, being technology, processes, and interaction, not presenting differences between the results of the groups by mesoregions of Rio Grande do Sul. Finally, it was observed although there is a significant correlation between Technology and Processes (0.680), Technology and Interaction (0.740), and Processes and Interaction (0.616), indicating that the better the results of one of the factors in public management, the better the results of the other factors.