This thesis discusses the creation of a novel platform that incorporates multiple communication methods, including SMS, email and web-based technologies, for interacting with users of mobile communication devices. The platform utilises people in a mobile environment to solve a range of different application problems, where each problem is a separate and distinct scenario type with unique objectives. There are existing applications available that interact with users of mobile communication devices to provide a service, such as regular weather updates to the users. Other applications have been designed to manage and coordinate the users to perform tasks within a mobile environment, such as performing field studies for scientific purposes. However, the existing applications are designed for only one specific scenario, with the design and implementation solely focused on solving the objectives of that scenario. Each component of these applications needs to be developed from scratch in order to cater for the application s requirements. There is currently no integrated communications platform that offers a framework for supporting a range of different scenario types. The new platform, entitled the Connected-Mobile Platform, aims to support the rapid development and implementation of new scenarios. This platform is composed of a framework of generic components that enable the active running of multiple scenarios concurrently, with the ability to tailor to the requirements of new scenarios as they arise via a structured process. The platform facilitates a means to coordinate its users in order to tackle the objectives of a scenario. The thesis investigates several system architectures to determine an appropriate architectural design for constructing the proposed platform. The platform has a generic framework, based on a client-server architecture, to facilitate the inclusion of a multitude of scenarios. A scenario represents a problem or an event, whereby the platform can utilise and interact with users of mobile communication devices to attempt to solve the objectives of the scenario. Three mobile communication methods are supported; the Short Message Service, electronic mail and web-forms via the mobile internet. Users are able to select and switch between the different methods. The thesis describes the platform s tailored communication structure for scenarios and autonomous analysis of messages. The thesis discusses case studies of two different scenarios to evaluate the platform s facilities for rapid scenario development. The Diet Diary scenario, which is for individual users, aims to manage a user s daily calorie intake to help them reach their desired weight goal. The focus is on the platform s functionality for analysing and responding to messages autonomously. The Missing Persons scenario, which utilises multiple users, involves tracking and locating people who have been reported missing. The focus is on the platform s functionality for coordinating the multiple users, through the creation of assignments, in order to distribute the scenario objectives. The thesis concludes by highlighting the novel features of the platform and identifying opportunities for future work.

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to develop software to stream input and output audio from a large number of computers in a network to one specific computer in the same network. This computer will save the audio to disk. The audio that is to be saved will consist mostly of spoken communication. The saved audio is to be used in a framework for modeling and visualization.</p><p>There are three major problems involved in designing a software to fill this purpose: recording both input and output audio at the same time, efficiently receiving multiple audio-streams at once and designing an interface where finding and organizing the computers to record audio from is easy.</p><p>The software developed to solve these problems consists of two parts; a server and a client. The server captures the input (microphone) and output (speaker) audio from a computer. To capture the output and input audio simultaneously an external application named Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) is used. The client connects to multiple servers and receives the captured audio. Each one of the client’s server-connections is handled by its own thread. To make it easy to find available servers an Automatic Server Discovery System has been developed. To simplify the organization of the servers they are displayed in a tree-view specifically designed for this purpose.</p>

The purpose of this thesis is to develop software to stream input and output audio from a large number of computers in a network to one specific computer in the same network. This computer will save the audio to disk. The audio that is to be saved will consist mostly of spoken communication. The saved audio is to be used in a framework for modeling and visualization. There are three major problems involved in designing a software to fill this purpose: recording both input and output audio at the same time, efficiently receiving multiple audio-streams at once and designing an interface where finding and organizing the computers to record audio from is easy. The software developed to solve these problems consists of two parts; a server and a client. The server captures the input (microphone) and output (speaker) audio from a computer. To capture the output and input audio simultaneously an external application named Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) is used. The client connects to multiple servers and receives the captured audio. Each one of the client’s server-connections is handled by its own thread. To make it easy to find available servers an Automatic Server Discovery System has been developed. To simplify the organization of the servers they are displayed in a tree-view specifically designed for this purpose.

With the advancement in information technology, online assessments are getting more attention and online examinations are regarded as important parts of online learning. Online examinations can be easily taken by remote students, help the students get exam results quickly and save their time; online examinations also aid instructors in collecting students' exam answers and generating the exam reports effectively. In addition, online examinations can help reduce cost and save trees for our world. Multimedia elements like images, graphics, video and audio have been widely integrated into online learning environments. They not only help instructors design more engaging online learning content, but also help provide more interactive and pleasant learning experience for learners. However, integrating multimedia elements into online examination systems is rarely reported. Multimedia elements generally consume amounts of computing resources in a separated software system running on a single computer. "Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)" has become a new software paradigm and cloud-based software systems are becoming more attractive due to their dynamic scalability and effective usage of computing resources. Yet, how to effectively integrate multimedia elements into a cloud-based software system for online examinations is not significantly investigated. Although a variety of online-assessment tools have been developed, few of them adopt the "Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)" paradigm and most of them focus on the assessment in a specific domain or an application area with short of multimedia elements. There is a lack of a comprehensive software solution for online multimedia examinations. This thesis tries to utilize the "Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)" paradigm, design and develop a cloud-bAsed softwaRe systEm for oNline multimediA examinationS (ARENAS), and explore a comprehensive software solution for the online assessment field. ARENAS employs a multi-tiered client-server architecture and includes five subsystem modules: user module, question repository module, exam module, exam report module and configuration module. The developed cloud-based software system can present online questions with multimedia elements, and also support a myriad of question types, flexible accounts to the exam-takers, randomized question order in an online exam, flexible grading mechanisms, and analytical exam reports. For instructors, the developed system can help design more engaging online questions; for exam-takers, the developed system can help provide more user-friendly experience; for other educators and researchers, the design and development processes of ARENAS can be taken as a reference to designing and developing other large-scale cloud-based educational software systems. / Master of Science

Natural language understanding has been a persistent challenge to researchers in various computer science fields, in a number of applications ranging from user support systems to entertainment and online teaching. A long term goal of the Artificial Intelligence field is to implement mechanisms that enable computers to emulate human dialogue. The recently developed ALICEbots, virtual agents with underlying AIML scripts, by A.L.I.C.E. foundation, use AIML scripts - a subset of XML - as the underlying pattern database for question answering. Their goal is to enable pattern-based, stimulus-response knowledge content to be served, received and processed over the Web, or offline, in the manner similar to HTML and XML. In this thesis, we describe a system that converts the AIML scripts to Prolog clauses and reuses them as part of a knowledge processor. The inference mechanism developed in this thesis is able to successfully match the input pattern with our clauses database even if words are missing. We also emulate the pattern deduction algorithm of the original logic deduction mechanism. Our rules, compatible with Semantic Web standards, bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages and support interactive content retrieval using natural language.

This diploma thesis deals with design and implementation of a network application for monitoring of computers for a chosen company. The application allows administrators to automate the gathering of hardware and software information. The purpose of the application is also to monitor hardware values, such as processor temperature or harddisk free space. The design uses client-server architecture. Three applications were created: server, client and graphical management console.

Advances in information technology are driving massive improvement to the education industry. The ubiquity of mobile devices has triggered a shift in the delivery of educational content. More lessons in a wide range of subjects are being disseminated by allowing students to access digital materials through mobile devices. One of the key materials is digital-based educational games. These games merge education with digital games to maximize engagement while somewhat obfuscating the learning process. The effectiveness is generally measured by assessments, either after or during gameplay, in the form of quizzes, data dumps, and/or manual analyses. Valuable gameplay information lost during the student's play sessions. This gameplay data provides educators and researchers with specific gameplay actions students perform in order to arrive at a solution, not just the correctness of the solution. This problem illustrates a need for a tool, enabling educators and players to quickly analyze gameplay data. in conjunction with correctness in an unobtrusive manner while the student is playing the game. This thesis describes a client-server software architecture that enables the collection of game-based data during gameplay. We created a collection of web services that enables games to transmit game-data for analysis. Additionally, the web application provides players with a portal to login and view various visualization of the captured data. Lastly, we created a game called "Taffy Town", a mathematics-based game that requires the player to manipulate taffy pieces in order to solve various fractions. Taffy Town transmits students' taffy transformations along with correctness to the web application. Students are able to view several dynamically created visualizations from the data sent by Taffy Town. Researchers are able to log in to the web application and see the same visualizations, however, aggregated across all Taffy Town players. This end-to-end mapping of problems, actions, and results will enable researchers, pedagogists, and teachers to improve the effectiveness of educational games. / Master of Science

Due to the multiplicity of computer-aided engineering applications present in industry today, interoperability between programs has become increasingly important. A survey conducted among top engineering companies found that 82% of respondents reported using 3 or more CAD formats during the design process. A 1999 study by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) estimated that inadequate interoperability between the OEM and its suppliers cost the US automotive industry over $1 billion per year, with the majority spent fixing data after translations. The Neutral Parametric Canonical Form (NPCF) prototype standard developed by the NSF Center for e-Design, BYU Site offers a solution to the translation problem by storing feature data in a CAD-neutral format to offer higher-fidelity parametric transfer between CAD systems. This research has focused on expanding the definitions of the NPCF to enforce data integrity and to support associativity between features to preserved design intent through the neutralization process. The NPCF data structure schema was defined to support associativity while maintaining data integrity. Neutral definitions of new features was added including multiple types of coordinate systems, planes and axes. Previously defined neutral features were expanded to support new functionality and the software architecture was redefined to support new CAD systems. Complex models have successfully been created and exchanged by multiple people in real-time to validated the approach of preserving associativity and support for a new CAD system, PTC Creo, was added.

The challenge of interoperability is to retain model integrity when different software applications exchange and interpret model data. Transferring CAD data between heterogeneous CAD systems is a challenge because of differences in feature representation. A study by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) performed in 1999 made a conservative estimate that inadequate interoperability in the automotive industry costs them $1 billion per year. One critical part of eliminating the high costs due to poor interoperability is a neutral format between heterogeneous CAD systems. An effective neutral CAD format should include a current-state data store, be associative, include the union of CAD features across an arbitrary number of CAD systems, maintain design history, maintain referential integrity, and support multi-user collaboration. This research has focused on extending an existing synchronous collaborative CAD software tool to allow for a neutral, current-state data store. This has been accomplished by creating a Neutral Parametric Canonical Form (NPCF) which defines the neutral data structure for many basic CAD features to enable translation between heterogeneous CAD systems. The initial architecture developed begins to define a new standard for storing CAD features neutrally. The NPCF's for many features have been implemented in a multi-user interoperability program and work between NX and CATIA CAD systems. The 2D point, 2D line, 2D arc, 2D circle, 2D spline, 3D point, extrude, and revolve NPCF's will be specifically defined. Complex models have successfully been modeled and exchanged in real time and have validated the NPCF approach. Multiple users can be in the same part at the same time in different CAD systems and create and update models in real time.

Viele statistische Problemstellungen erfordern in der heutigen Zeit den Einsatz von Computern. Der von uns in dieser Dissertation vorgestellte Ansatz kombiniert die Fähigkeiten der statistischen Softwareumgebung XploRe, mit den Vorteilen einer verteilten Client/Server Anwendung und den Möglichkeiten, die sich durch das Internet eröffnen. Um den Client einer großen Gruppe von Anwendern zugänglich zu machen, wurde Java zu seiner Realisierung verwendet. Das Ergebnis ist ein Statistikpaket, nutzbar via World Wide Web, das wie ein herkömmliches statistisches Softwarepaket verwendet werden kann, ohne die Notwendigkeit, das gesamte Softwarepaket zu installieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit gibt einen Überblick über die notwendige Softwareumgebung und erläutert die generelle Struktur der XploRe Quantlet Client/Server Architektur. Die Arbeit zeigt außerdem Anwendungen, in die diese Architektur bereits integriert wurde. / In today’s world, many statistical questions require the use of computational assistance. Our approach, presented in this thesis, combines the possibilities of a powerful statistical software environment, with the advantages of distributed client/server applications, and the opportunities offered by the Internet. In order to offer the client access to a large community, the Java language is used to implement the client’s functionalities. The result is a statistical package - usable via the World Wide Web - that can be used like a traditional statistical software package, but without the need for installing the entire software package on the user’s computer. This thesis provides an overview of the desired software environment, and illustrates the general structure with the implementation of the XploRe Quantlet Client/Server architecture. It also shows applications, in which this architecture has already been integrated.