Alex Vakaloudis

Towards uniformity for smart glasses devices: An assessment of function as the driver for standardisation

Smart glasses come as an autonomous, wearable device that will diminish the gap between intention and action. Being a new technology, there are a plethora of diverse devices under development. We investigate them in order to discover elements of uniform characteristics under a two-fold reasoning. First examine the technical attributes that will facilitate professional usage into specific application domains. Second in a societal context detect the issues that will drive their adoption for consumer purposes. Our conclusion is that although there is a nucleus of common features being formed, further evidence of usability in the professional domains and overcoming societal issues is needed prior to their adoption for consumer applications.

Maximising productivity and learnability in internships

While technical internships as a scheme are considered positive for both the intern and the hosting organisation, carrying out a successful internship session is not neither easy nor trivial. Towards managing an internship, we adopt an Agile-based framework that consists of four phases with a mixture of research, technical and communication tasks and covers the full project lifecycle providing good exposure to a range of professional practices. This framework is flexible to accommodate changes in preferences of an intern and includes a large variety of communication tasks such as project plan generation, technical progress reporting, generation and presentation of ideas and competitive analysis, along with technical tasks for instance Test Driven design and programming, development with C++ and code revision. Apart from interns, the hosting body benefits from the work of the interns which is reliable and of acceptable quality.

A Fuzzy System for Three-Factor, Non-textual Authentication

As text-based authentication has had its critiques, non-textual techniques have been suggested throughout the last two decades. However, it is only lately, with the wide-spread adoption of smartphones and tablet devices that they have found a compelling application. Non-textual authentication may be faster and more secure and it also introduces a new paradigm for the authentication decision. We present a three factor system based on facial recognition, gesture and device ID and we define a fuzzy matching engine to handle authentication. Preliminary results indicate that such an approach can be fast and user-friendly.

Towards successful technical internships: An Agile-oriented training methodology

Although internships contribute to the professional development of a junior engineer, it is not straightforward to achieve a fruitful outcome for either the intern or the hosting the organisation. We discuss a structured framework based on Agile and Scrum concepts with the goal of providing in a flexible manner a mixture of communication, technical and research skills. Not only interns get hands-on exposure to the aforementioned skills but the organisation can make use of their deliverables.

Fuzzy matching engine for non-textual authentication: A case study

The familiar paradigm of authentication by means of a textual username and password has been questioned for some years but it is only relatively recently, with the advent of technological advances in such areas as biometric and gesture recognition that truly alternative approaches to authentication have become feasible. The primary difference between nontextual methods and the classical approach to authentication is that the latter respond only to an exactly matching password while the former must respond to gestures that do not exactly match, but are sufficiently close to the stored prototype. Under this new constraint, the use of fuzzy logic appears to be an appropriate approach to authenticating a user. This paper describes a real application for logging into a secure system. A fuzzy matching algorithm was developed that matches gestures entered at the login prompt against previously registered gestures held in a database.

A framework for rating synchronous video e-learning applications

Setting up a system to broadcast live lectures on the web is a procedure which on the surface does not require any serious technical skills mainly due to the facilities provided by popular LMS and their plugins. Nevertheless, producing a system of outstanding quality is a multidisciplinary and by no means a straightforward task. This complicatedness may be responsible for the delivery of an overall poor experience to the learners and calls for a formal rating framework that takes into account the diverse aspects of architecture for synchronous video e-learning systems. We discuss the specification of such a framework which at its final stage employs fuzzy logic technique to transform from qualitative to quantitative results.