Hannah Thinyane

The Expansion of the Siyakhula Living Lab: A Holistic Perspective

In this paper we discuss the recent expansion of network connectivity within the Siyakhula Living Lab. This is part of an ICT-for-development project located in a rural area on the Wild Coast of South Africa. Thus far, five schools in the area have been the primary points of access to the network for the surrounding communities. Thanks to external funding, eleven more schools will be connected. Consistent with the Living Lab approach, the expansion needs to take into account technical as well as social aspects. Technical challenges relate mainly to the constraints of working in a rugged, mountainous terrain with poor road and electricity infrastructure and harsh environmental conditions such as dust and temperature variances. Social challenges relate to obtaining the buy-in of the local community and to reaching consensus on the criteria for the expansion. In this paper we account for the preliminary work which led to the implementation plan. We hope our experience will inform similar interventions in other parts of Africa.

Hardware and software for skateboard trick visualisation on a mobile phone

First appearing in the 1930s, skateboarding is an extreme sport in which a skater rides and performs tricks on a skateboard. Nokia Corp. aimed to augment the skateboarding experience with elements taken from modern video games, by coupling a movement measuring skateboard with a Nokia N8 smartphone. Their original implementation, while functional, had limited capabilities and suffered from a number of reliability issues. This project aimed to augment the skateboarding experience further by including location-awareness and skateboard trick visualisation capabilities into the application. A number of steps were also taken in order to improve the robustness of the skateboard hardware, these included modifications to the charging circuit, power source, and addressing the sensor boards vibration susceptibility. A user study was then performed in order to determine what effect the modifications had on the usefulness of the system, focusing on the systems potential as a skateboard trick learning tool. The study showed that, even though users found the visualisation interesting, the system offered limited value as a training device due to the current restrictions which exist in its visualisation capabilities.

Visualizing Information in Digital Forensics

The evolution of modern electronic devices is outpacing the scalability and effectiveness of the tools used to analyze digital evidence recovered from them. Indeed, current digital forensic techniques and tools are unable to handle large datasets in an efficient manner. As a result, the time and effort required to conduct digital forensic investigations are increasing. This paper describes a promising digital forensic visualization framework that displays digital evidence in a simple and intuitive manner, enhancing decision making and facilitating the explanation of phenomena in evidentiary data.

Mobile phone performance analysis for camera based visual interactions

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 we are now seeing a plethora of feature rich software being deployed onto the mobile platform. Since these high powered smart phones are now equipped with cameras, it has become feasible to combine their powerful processors and the camera to support new ways of interacting with the phone. 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. In this paper we look at one of the most popular and widespread mobile smart phone systems; the Symbian s60 and benchmark the speed, accuracy and deployability of the three popular mobile languages. We test a pixel thresholding algorithm in, C++, Python and Java and rank them based on their speed within the context of intensive image based processing.

Evaluating text preprocessing to improve compression on maillogs

Maillogs contain important information about mail which has been sent or received. This information can be used for statistical purposes, to help prevent viruses or to help prevent SPAM. In order to satisfy regulations and follow good security practices, maillogs need to be monitored and archived. Since there is a large quantity of data, some form of data reduction is necessary. Data compression programs such as gzip and bzip2 are commonly used to reduce the quantity of data. Text preprocessing can be used to aid the compression of English text files. This paper evaluates whether text preprocessing, particularly word replacement, can be used to improve the compression of maillogs. It presents an algorithm for constructing a dictionary for word replacement and provides the results of experiments conducted using the ppmd, gzip, bzip2 and 7zip programs. These tests show that text preprocessing improves data compression on maillogs. Improvements of up to 56 percent in compression time and up to 32 percent in compression ratio are achieved. It also shows that a dictionary may be generated and used on other maillogs to yield reductions within half a percent of the results achieved for the maillog used to generate the dictionary.

A mobile based technology platform for citizen engagement in Malawi

The proliferation of mobile phones and the internet has presented opportunities to enhance communication between citizens, elected leaders, service providers and local government. This paper examines the status of citizen participation in Malawi and the gaps that exist. We leverage the exponential and continued growth of mobile phones; to develop a mobile responsive web based citizen engagement platform to address the deficiencies that exist in citizen engagement beyond elections as observed by scholars and practitioners. The paper presents work in progress on the development and deployment of this citizen engagement platform in Malawi. The prototype caters for data collection streams through SMS, web forms and social media. It also integrates multimedia files such as images, videos and audio for evidence based reporting. Beyond deployment of the platform, research will be conducted to unearth factors that influence or constrain citizens from adopting technology as a tool for engagement. Results of this study are expected to contribute to the discourse on use of ICTs as a tool for citizen engagement to inform subsequent deployments.

Mobile visualisation techniques for large datasets

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices and data demands, it seems appropriate to provide mobile users with tools to understand information on their devices. Visualisations can be quick and powerful aids for data analysis and information acquisition. This paper discusses the visualisation and interaction techniques that exist on the mobile platform. It further discusses the design and development of a visualisation application that uses categorical and geographic data on the mobile platform followed by a description of a user study conducted to investigate the appropriateness of the developed mobile visualisation application. The paper further presents some of the initial findings from the user study and discusses lessons learned in visualising large geographical and categorical data sets on mobile devices.

Modelling the exposure of services within next generation telecommunication networks

As mobile network operators come to terms with the inevitability of falling revenues from traditional revenue streams, many have begun exploring alternative revenue models. A prominent approach has been to encourage the development of revenue-generating services by exposing network resources to developers through an application programming interface (API). The objective is to use common Internet Protocol (IP) technologies such as web services that appeal to a wider developer audience. This movement is particularly important for developing countries due to the rapid proliferation of mobile broadband networks and the emerging entrepreneurial opportunities that exist within the mobile development space. Notably, what has been missing in this sector is a simple toolkit that developers can utilise to create prototypes. This paper presents a model for telecommunication service exposure and describes an implementation involving a mobile application, an application server and a protocol bridge that translates mobile requests to the internal telecommunication protocols.

WiiMS: simulating mouse and keyboard for motor-impaired users

In this paper, we report on the Wii Multimodal system (WiiMS) a system which simulates mouse and keyboard interaction for motor-impaired users. The human interface is made through a head tracking pointer which consist of a Wii Remote control and Infra-Red LEDs attached to a pair of glasses. WiiMS combines the use of head tracking with speech recognition to provide a simple and easy-to-use user interface for users with motor impairments. A user study was carried out to investigate the following: learnability, intuitiveness, user satisfaction and effectiveness of the WiiMS. WiiMS was found to be learnable, effective, satisfactory and intuitive but was not efficient for text entry even though the proposed system was found to be adequate in the context of use.

An evaluation of a low-cost 3-dimensional gestural interface: Wii3D

The increasing ubiquity of three dimensional output devices suggests a need for additional three dimensional input devices. This paper describes Wii3D, an interaction technique that was developed using two Nintendo Wii Remotes to track the movement of infrared lights attached to the users fingers. Further tracking in three dimensions was achieved using predictive interpolation. A framework was designed and implemented to enable the recognition of predefined gestures using Finite State Automata and Discrete Hidden Markov Models. This paper also presents the results of a user study that was undertaken in order to investigate the usefulness of the Wii3D System and the general intuitiveness of the proposed interface and gestures. The user study asked participants to compare the interaction possible using the Wii3D system with interaction using a standard mouse and keyboard. Participants found the Wii3D System was more intuitive for multi-touch applications, but was not as intuitive as the mouse and keyboard for single pointer applications, even though the proposed interaction technique was found adequate for the majority of the gestures implemented.