Vassilios Vescoukis

A service oriented architecture for decision support systems in environmental crisis management

Efficient management of natural disasters impose great research challenges to the current environmental crisis management systems in terms of both architecture and services. This is mainly due to the fact that a large amount of geospatial content is usually distributed, non-compliant to standards, and needs to be transmitted under a QoS guaranteed framework to support effective decision making either in case of an emergency or in advance planning. Incorporating real time capabilities in Web services, both in terms of dynamic configuration and service selection, is an open research agenda. The things get worst in geospatial context due to the huge amount of data transmitted from distributed sensors under heterogeneous platforms, making the need of synchronization an important issue. In this paper, we propose a flexible service oriented architecture for planning and decision support in environmental crisis management. The suggested architecture uses real time geospatial data sets and 3D presentation tools, integrated with added-value services, such as simulation models for assisting decision making in case of emergency. The proposed architectural framework goes beyond integration and presentation of static spatial data, to include real time middleware that is responsible for selecting the most appropriate method of the available geospatial content and service in order to satisfy the QoS requirements of users and/or application. A case study of a complete, real world implementation of the suggested framework dealing with forest fire crisis management system is also presented.

Assessment of network simulators for real world WSNs in forest environments

Environment protection and preservation is an in season issue today, more than ever before. It has become a critical concern as the climate change threatens the sustainability of human societies; in this context exploitation of any technological advance in protecting the environment is more than welcome. Wireless sensor network applications appear as a promising technology, very helpful to many environmental applications. As the cost of such networks becomes more reasonable, deploying a wireless sensor network at a high spatial density can be a major aid in environmental crisis detection, prediction and even operational management. A typical such case is wild fire detection, but several other applications are also possible. In this context, network simulation tools can play a great role in WSN implementation, in performance optimization, reliability and cost, especially as the scale of deployment can become very large. However, current WSN simulation and visualization tools, most of which are not designed with WSNs consisting of tens of thousands of nodes in mind, still have some shortcomings. In this paper we report our experience from some well known open source WSN simulators and discuss their capabilities and possible weaknesses when used in the simulation of high density WSNs. We compare the results of a common simulation scenario produced by the use of three well-known simulators. These results are also matched against measurements taken out of real world WSN measurements and monitoring in a forest environment, and specifically in a forest area with high vegetation density. In this context, conclusions and assessments are attempted on the maturity of these simulation and visualization tools for large-scale WSN deployments in such environments.

Network-Based Business Simulation Activities in Technical Professional Education.

For a long time on-the-job training has been considered as the single point of contact of technical education with the real world job market. Indeed, traditional on-the-job training activities are of great educational value and complement uniquely any classroom-based learning activity. However, it has been observed that several obstacles arise when integrating on-the-job training with traditional learning and that new network-based tools can be used to improve the situation. Following this concept, in this paper we introduce a network-assisted educational structure for business simulation activities which can be considered as an alternative or a complement to on-the-job training activities in technical professional education. Business Simulation Activities are based on the execution of business scenarios in a controlled educational environment with support by network tools. A simulation of the real world business environment is created and virtual companies are established in order to participate in a virtual marketplace using network-based learning support and aiming to provide on-the-job experience without the shortcomings of traditional on-the-job training. An operational structure, network distribution, implementation issues, as well as some experience from a pilot implementation of the concept, are presented in this paper.

The role of ICTs in building entrepreneurial capacity in the regions of the future

This paper recognises the rising importance of entrepreneurship in regional and national economic development policy and programming. However, it is built on an assessment of the ICT industry and its destabilising (deconstructing) impact on economic and industry structure and an associated radical change in the international division of labour in the production process. This paper builds a four class entrepreneurial typology that sorts entrepreneurs from a little to a great deal of experience and then demonstrates differential demands and needs of ICT for entrepreneurial action. This serves as a framework for assessing policies that purport to promote entrepreneurship and associated behaviour in regions. Underlying assumptions of this paper are that ICT and entrepreneurship are tied together and the relationship is a strong driver of both regional and national development.

Spatio-temporal summarization of dance choreographies

Abstract An important issue in performing dance analysis is the automatic extraction of its choreographic patterns, since these elements provide an abstract representation of the semantics of the dance and encode the overall dance storytelling. However, application of conventional video summarization algorithms on dance sequences cannot appropriately retrieve their choreographic patterns, since a dance is composed of an ordered set of sequential elements which are often repeated in time. Additionally, 3D geometry is lost using color information. For this reason, in this paper we propose a new dance summarization scheme of 3D motion captured data (in the form of skeleton joints coordinates) recorded using the Vicon motion capture system. The proposed key frame extraction method implements a hierarchical scheme that exploits spatio-temporal variations of dance features. Initially, global holistic descriptors are extracted to localize the key choreographic steps of a dance (coarse representation). Then, each segment is further decomposed into finer sub-segments to improve dance representativity (fine representation). The abstraction scheme exploits the concepts of a Sparse Modeling Representative Selection (SMRS) appropriately modified to enable spatio-temporal modelling of the dance sequences through a hierarchical decomposition algorithm. Our approach is evaluated on thirty folkloric dance sequences recorded at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the framework of Terpsichore project representing five different choreographies and on publicly available datasets from Carnegie–Mellon University, which depict performances on theatrical kinesiology. Comparisons with other traditional video summarization methods indicate a clear superiority of the proposed hierarchical spatio-temporal decomposition scheme.

Employing Relevance Feedback to Embed Content and Service Importance into the Selection Process of Composite Cloud Services

Cloud computing is essentially changing the way services are built, provided and consumed. As a paradigm building on a set of combined technologies, it enables service provision through the commoditization of IT assets and on-demand usage patterns. In the emerging era of the Future Internet, clouds aim at facilitating applications that move away from the monolithic approach into an Internet-scale one, thus exploiting information, individual offerings and infrastructures as composite services. In this paper we present an approach for selecting the services (that comprise the composite ones) in order to meet the end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The approach is enhanced with a relevance feedback mechanism that provides additional information with respect to the importance of the content and the service. The latter is performed in an automated way, allowing for user preferences to be considered during the service selection process. We also demonstrate the operation of the implemented approach and evaluate its effectiveness using a real-world scenario, based on a computer vision application.