John P. T. Moore

Open-source platform: exploring the opportunities for offline mobile learning

The mobile technology field is rapidly expanding and the focus on how it can be incorporated to support learning is also growing. However, the barriers to inclusion of information communication technologies in the public schools of Nepal are still significant and the widespread access to digital content remains a key obstacle. Nepal has a poor communication infrastructure and where available, telecommunication and electricity are poorly maintained or too costly to use. The aim of this exploratory research study is to highlight how an offline mobile learning solution may address some of the technical challenges to support one of the current and most urgent requirements to provide an access to digital content. It will investigate the deployment of previously unexplored low-spec sub US

An Open Architecture for Detecting Earthquakes Using Mobile Devices

100 open-source mobile devices to facilitate English language learning and address the knowledge requirements of teachers in government funded public schools of Nepal.

Domain-Specific XML Compression

In this paper we will describe an open architecture for detecting earthquakes using the built in accelerometers available in some mobile phones. Although the idea of building a network of accelerometers for this application is not new, we will take an iterative approach starting with a prototype which exhibits some core functionality. Key questions include: what level of sophistication is required to be confident of the architecture and how does this conflict with the limitations of the mobile device and the network used? By examining these questions and evaluating results from our prototype we hope to build further iterations which increase the chances of generating an accurate alert.

Fingerprinting Seismic Activity across an Internet of Things

Our compression technique is an abstraction of Packed Encoding Rules and has been implemented by the Packed objects structured data compression tool. Rather than trying to support a complex standard we instead describe a very simple technique which allows us to implement a very light-weight encoder capable of compressing structured data represented in XML. We call this work Integer Encoding Rules (IER). The technique is based on a simple mapping of data values belonging to a set of data types to a series of integer values. The data values come from XML data and the data types come from XML Schema.

Offline Mobile Learning: Open Platforms for ICT4D

In this paper we will present technology designed to detect seismic events using pervasive computing. The project is focused on using low-cost open hardware in developing countries to provide an alternative more sustainable solution to the costly infrastructure used in countries such as Japan. The work involves building a network of embedded computing devices capable of forming a broadcast group across a range of different networking technologies including emerging 802.15.4-based networks. Soft- ware is been developed capable of detecting patterns of network activity which will act as an early identifier of significant seismic events across our network.

Towards a Real-Time Data Sharing System for Mobile Devices

In developing countries, mobile devices can play an important role in delivering learning. But, poor information infrastructure and higher costs of mobile devices and connectivity restrict possibilities of providing successful mobile learning services. In the field of Information Communication for Development (ICT4D), this research aims to highlight the possible role of previously unexplored open hardware platforms for delivering affordable and sustainable mobile learning offline. This paper points out the technical challenge of using open hardware and need for a broader study to investigate its potential role in developing countries as supporting mobile learners in their own socio-cultural contexts is a significant challenge.

Towards Markup-Aware Text Compression

Mobile devices are increasingly used for information sharing. The sensors embedded inside these devices are generating a range of information about their location, surrounding environment and user activities. This information can be shared with others in real-time so that it can be used or analysed instantaneously. The popularity of participatory sensing involving humans and mobile devices(phones, PDAs, tablets etc) has also fuelled the growth of large scale data management. Although the typical network bandwidth available in mobile devices has been improving it remains limited with the rise in communication activity. Therefore, data could be optimised on the device to make it more suitable for the available network bandwidth. A scalable real-time data sharing system can be built by using existing message formats, messaging architectures and compression techniques. We will look at the bandwidth limitation and scalability issue with special focus on the impact of message compression in such networks.

XML-compression techniques for efficient network management

Although text compression can be successfully applied to markup languages, it does so without any semantic knowledge of the data types present within the markup. In this paper we illustrate how this added knowledge can be used to develop a hybrid tool which combines traditional text compression with markup-awareness to improve compression size against existing well known text compression tools. Our results show that for highly structured markup it is possible to improve the level of compression by around 20% compared to the best performing existing tool we studied. We describe the limitations of our approach and discuss potential implementation options with the overall goal being to produce a practical Unix-like tool.

Comparison of Messaging Protocols for Emerging Wireless Networks

XML has become a standard widely used in wireless networking technologies to improve flexibility and interoperability between heterogeneous applications. However, applying this technology to areas such as network management across a wireless embedded internet can pose significant challenges due to the verbosity of XML. A number of compression techniques and tools have been applied to this problem to help transform highly-structured data into a more compact form. Despite this choice, there is a lack of support for tools which are optimised for embedded computing. In this paper we will show the performance trade-offs that exist when compression is applied using different techniques. Furthermore, we will describe a tool which has been specially designed to be used within the domain of network management within a constrained environment.

A sustainable information kiosk driven by sound

In this paper we will compare messaging protocols that are suitable for wireless sensor networks. We will discuss different messaging architectures provided by the protocols. The messaging protocol needs to send large amount of structured data with bandwidth limitation in sensor networks. Although processing power of embedded devices on such network is in- creasing it needs to be considered as well. We examine messaging architecture and size of overhead per message used by the protocols.