Elena Sánchez-Nielsen

An open and dynamical service oriented architecture for supporting mobile services

Mobile services (m-services) play an important role in daily life and work of modern societies. Current service oriented architectures (SOA) are widely used to offer Web Services on wired networks. However, no significant research has been done in m-services field to provide availability service and dynamical discovery to mobile users. Nowadays, mobile devices are characterized by limited resources such as processing power, memory, display screen and connection bandwidth. In this context, we propose a service oriented architecture that addresses the following issues: (1) dynamical integration of new services by providers at anytime, (2) dynamical discovery of available services and (3) the use of open source software to develop the solution. With this approach, users require no prior knowledge of accessible services nor require updating the application of their mobile devices when new services are incorporated. The paper includes results with service scenarios, showing that Web Services can safely be used as paradigm to support m-services.

Particle Swarms as Video Sequence Inhabitants For Object Tracking in Computer Vision

A solution based on a swarm intelligence metaphor with a prey-predator scheme is proposed for real time object tracking in video sequences, which is a basic process in multiple computer vision tasks. Swarm predator particles fly on a Boid-like fashion over image prey pixels, using combined image features to guide individual movement rules. Object tracking emerges from interaction between predator particles and their environment. The paper includes methods description and experimental evaluations on video streams that illustrate the efficiency of swarm based methods in different vision tasks

eParticipation in Practice in Europe: The Case of "Puzzled by Policy: Helping You Be Part of EU"

This paper focuses on the case study of “Puzzled by Policy: Helping you be part of EU”, a European e-participation project, which studies the needs of concerned citizens, stakeholders and decision makers, and provides a unique platform for users to learn and discuss about policy at the EU and national level, while finding out what particular policies mean to them on the national level so that they can contribute to policy drafting. The findings of our study suggest that the path to successful e-participation should not only involve ICT, but should first incorporate a conceptual model of e-participation, i.e. questions such as how to model the policy to be debated in the democratic process, how to define the public engagement model, what communication model should be used, and what deliberation methods should be addressed.

Inform-consult-empower: a three-tiered approach to eParticipation

While most existing eParticipation projects have embraced the need for citizen engagement to achieve effective democracy, as of yet only limited success has been achieved. This lack of success stems from many challenges and barriers: in some cases, it is a lack of interest in policy issues and low levels of trust in politicians; in others, it is a lack of vision or awareness about the benefits of citizens participation inside the policy-modelling process. This paper describes a three-tiered approach to eParticipation based on a multi-stream policymaking model with three levels of participation: Inform, Consult, Empower. This approach focuses on the level of participation by the user: what are the goals of participation at each of these levels and how do each of these levels of participation relate to current policy-modelling practices. The Puzzled by Policy project will adopt and implement the Inform-Consult-Empower approach, which shows how the social complexity barriers, political culture barriers, technological barriers and organizational structure barriers can be reduced in order to provide effective participation. A use case of how this model will be used to engage Spanish citizens with immigration policy is presented.

Personalized Audiovisual Content Delivery at the Palm of your Hand

Delivery of personalized multimedia content is an important challenge for versatile video podcast environments. In this paper, we focus on the opportunities given by MPEG-7 metadata standard for content delivery in terms of user preferences when podcasting technology is used. By means of MPEG-7, multimedia content can be described at several levels of granularity and abstraction. We propose the use of this description in order to produce and publish personalized information according to users demand on podcasts environments and to compute at a dynamic way the different feeds of the podcast information system when it is demanded by users. We describe this approach for the motivating scenario of audiovisual content for legislative assemblies.

Learning from eParticipation initiatives of regional and local level authorities in Greece and Spain

In this paper, we examine the eParticipation progress of public authorities in two EU Member States, Greece and Spain. We do this in two steps: At the regional level (Regions and Provinces/Prefectures) we employ a published evaluation framework for evaluating the eParticipation sophistication of regional authorities‟ websites. At the local level we examine one good practice case from each country analysing the lessons learnt from them. Overall, although eParticipation is a political priority at the EU level, the results indicate that it is not yet adequately advanced in the two countries under examination. Spain scores good in information provision and average in consultation, while Greece scores average in both; however, active participation measures are really low in both countries.

Mobile and Dynamic Web Services

Making mobile phones capable of consuming Web services over wireless networks is a challenging task because of the different issues to be addressed and the limited resources of mobile devices. In this paper, we focus on the issue of how to perform dynamic discovery and invocation of Web services from mobile phones when a J2ME wireless middleware is used. In order to solve the limitations of the middleware platform when mobile phones act as Web services requestor we propose a Web service based dynamic proxy between service providers and mobile consumers. With this approach, we provide the following features to mobile devices: (1) support of dynamic binding, (2) support of UDDI specification, (3) support of SOAP messages with encoded representation and (4) handling of complex data types. The paper includes the description of the dynamic proxy, implementation and experimental results with the performance of the approach proposed.

Fast and accurate hand pose detection for human-robot interaction

Enabling natural human-robot interaction using computer vision based applications requires fast and accurate hand detection. However, previous works in this field assume different constraints, like a limitation in the number of detected gestures, because hands are highly complex objects difficult to locate. This paper presents an approach which integrates temporal coherence cues and hand detection based on wrists using a cascade classifier. With this approach, we introduce three main contributions: (1) a transparent initialization mechanism without user participation for segmenting hands independently of their gesture, (2) a larger number of detected gestures as well as a faster training phase than previous cascade classifier based methods and (3) near real-time performance for hand pose detection in video streams.

Heuristic algorithms for fast and accurate tracking of moving objects in unrestricted environments

Tracking of objects is a basic process in computer vision. This process can be formulated as exploration problems and thus can be expressed as a search into a states space based representation approach. However, these problems are hard of solving because they involve search through a high dimensional space corresponding to the possible motion and deformation of the object. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm that combines three features in order to compute motion efficiently: (1) a quality of function match, (2) Kullback-Leibler measure as heuristic to guide the search process and (3) incorporation of target dynamics for computing promising search alternatives. Once target 2D motion has been calculated, the result value of the quality of function match computed is used in other heuristic algorithm with the purpose of verifying template updates. Also, a short-term memory subsystem is included with the purpose of recovering previous views of the target object. The paper includes experimental evaluations with video streams that illustrate the efficiency for real-time vision based-tasks.

Engaging Citizens in Policy Issues: Multidimensional Approach, Evidence and Lessons Learned

E-participation offers individuals, groups and non-governmental institutions the opportunity to learn about and discuss policy so they can make more informed choices in their personal lives as citizens, and to contribute to policy drafting as an instrument to strengthen the quality of decision-makers’ actions. Although a growing body of literature has been devoted to the main benefits and opportunities that ICT can offer in e-participation, little is known about the driving forces that foster public participation and citizens’ active engagement. This paper describes a multidimensional engagement approach, supported by an inform-consult-empower framework, to strengthen the foundation for participatory policy-making. This approach addresses the following key issues: public participation, public involvement, deliberative democracy, and collaborative governance. This approach has been designed, investigated and applied in the context of the European Commission project “Puzzled by Policy: Helping you be part of the EU”. The findings suggest that the use of a multidimensional engagement approach with a user-centric focus from the outset is essential to foster social participation, raise trust between citizens and government, and promote constructive narratives to put into the policy-making process.