Learning in an Ambient Intelligent World: Enabling Technologies and Practices

The rapid evolution of information and communication technology opens a wide spectrum of opportunities to change our surroundings into an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) world. AmI is a vision of future information society, where people are surrounded by a digital environment that is sensitive to their needs, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior, and responsive to their presence. It emphasizes on greater user friendliness, user empowerment, and more effective service support, with an aim to bring information and communication technology to everyone, every home, every business, and every school, thus improving the quality of human life. AmI unprecedentedly enhances learning experiences by endowing the users with the opportunities of learning in context, a breakthrough from the traditional education settings. In this survey paper, we examine some major characteristics of an AmI learning environment. To deliver a feasible and effective solution to ambient learning, we overview a few latest developed enabling technologies in context awareness and interactive learning. Associated practices are meanwhile reported. We also describe our experience in designing and implementing a smart class prototype, which allows teachers to simultaneously instruct both local and remote students in a context-aware and natural way.     

Rainbow Product Ranking for Upgrading E-Commerce

Online product ranking is complicated by conflicting attributes. The authors propose a rainbow ranking system to solve this problem in e-commerce. This approach extends eBay's one-to-one shopping paradigm to a flexible one with many-to-many transactions. The system demonstrates a 50 to 70 percent transaction increase over skyline and eBay ranking methods. Buyers are allowed personalized selections of commodity products, whereas sellers benefit from both wholesale and retailing online. The rainbow scheme thus creates a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers in widened e-commerce marketplaces.     

Inductive semimodules and the vector modules over them

The notion of an inductive semimodule over an ordered *-semiring is introduced and some related properties are investigated. Inductive semimodules are extensions of several important algebraic structures such as Kleene modules, Kleene algebras and inductive *-semirings. We prove that an inductive semimodule over an ordered *-semiring K is a Kleene module if and only if K is a Kleene algebra. Moreover, we establish that the vector module of an inductive semimodule over an ordered Conway semiring is again an inductive semimodule over the matrix semiring. Consequently, in an inductive semimodule over an ordered Conway semiring, least solutions to linear inequation systems can be denoted by linear expressions, avoiding the least fixed point operator. In addition, we also introduce a related notion called weak inductive semimodules, and propose several open problems on them.

Output feedback variable structure control of uncertain linear systems in the presence of actuator dynamics

A new output feedback variable structure control scheme is developed based on a novel passivity idea. This scheme may practically stabilize a class of higher‐relative‐degree uncertain linear systems, and realize output tracking and disturbance attenuation as well. The controller is composed of linear filters and a single relay, without employing real‐time exact differentiators. Under this framework, we also explain how actuator dynamics affect the closed loop behavior. A simulation example shows the simplicity and efficiency of this method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

汉字在招贴设计中的创意运用

汉字是中国的五千年智慧的结晶,包含了深厚的文化内涵和独特的创意的来源。汉字更是平面设计中不可缺少的重要元素,本文从汉字本身进行深层理解其图形的意味,结合一些经典大师的招贴设计来分析汉字在招贴中的创意运用和表现形式,总结出创意字体设计的基本条件。     

网络时代杂志形态的转变与发展

信息化浪潮给人们的生活带来剧变,随着计算机和网络的普及,网络数字化阅读开始成为人们新型的阅读方式。多媒体互动电子杂志作为一种融合了平面杂志、网络多媒体技术特点的新型期刊形式,符合阅读方式发展的潮流。本文通过对传统纸媒杂志与多媒体互动电子杂志的比较分析,总结出了电子杂志自身的无可比拟的优势和目前发展中存在的问题,并对网络时代下杂志未来的发展趋势进行了展望。     

基于二维小波变换的车牌边缘检测的研究

在Matlab环境下运用基于二维小波变换边缘检测方法提取车牌信息的边缘。实验证明这种方法对车牌边缘信息提取的效果比传统的边缘提取算子提取车牌信息边缘的效果要好,特别是对伪边缘和图片噪声的过滤作用比较明显。     

仿盲人摸巷机理的机器人导航方法分析

根据“盲人摸巷”及昆虫“用须探物”的启发,结合物体接触后能产生力的特性,提出基于接触交互信息的机器人导航方法,移动机器人与环境的接触力感觉来自移动机器人的触须,该触须可以是2个多自由度机械臂,其末端装有多维力传感器,或由弹性材料特制而成,达到完成探测、自我定位及局部路径规划任务的目标,是应用图像、光、电磁、声等原理的现有导航方法的很好补充。     

基于SOA的Web Services安全技术研究

WebServices的分布,异构,共享等特性对信息安全提出了更高的要求,以WS--Security协议为基础的WS-＊协议族是目前实施WebServices安全的主要技术手段。在分析了WebServices的安全需求和各种安全技术后,提出了一个基于WS-＊协议族的安全模型。