Leaks represent a very important hazard for the buildings and they can affect all sorts of building materials and specially wood due to its hygroscopic properties. Excessive moisture content can affect in a negative way building processes such as the installation of wooden floors or the use of wood as a structural material. Moisture meters can provide prompt and non-destructive determination of...

The combined SHARON-Anammox process is a promising technique for nitrogen removal from wastewater streams with high ammonium concentrations. It is typically applied to sludge digestion reject water, in order to relieve the activated sludge tanks, to which this stream is typically recycled. This contribution assesses the impact of the applied control strategy in the SHARON-reactor, both on the e...

Banks expect the mobile channel to become more important for collaborating with customers. However, a lack of trust continues to prevent a faster dissemination of such mobile banking services, especially for the private banking customer segment. Hence, this paper discusses various determinants of trust and follows a theory-driven approach rooted in the collaboration engineering methodology. Gro...

To be perceived as believable partners in human-machine interactions, virtual agents have to express adequate social attitudes. The social attitude expressed by an agent should reflect the social situation of the interaction. The agent ought to take into account its role and its social relation toward its interactants when deciding how to react in the interaction. To build such an agent able to...

The spread of smartphones triggers the universal use of smartphone-based social networking services (SNS) from younger generations in their teens and twenties to older ones in their fifties and sixties. SNS would no longer be the preserve of younger generations. Smartphone-based SNS can be enjoyed by everyone irrespective of age or gender. Under the circumstances, this study attempts to shed li...

This document explores an ambiguity in the interpretation of the element of the Presence Information Data Format for Location Objects (PIDF-LO) in cases where PIDF-LO is conveyed by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). It provides recommendations for how the SIP location conveyance mechanism should adapt to this ambiguity. Documents standardizing the SIP location conv...

Facts about AS was initially a small booklet developed in 1987 to help launch the Angelman Syndrome Foundation organization and to help inform parents and professionals about the syndrome. The Facts document is now in its seventh edition. Over the years, it has grown in scope and complexity and this year the " pamphlet/brochure" has been reformatted for a web presence. Current authors are:

This paper presents work in the field of distributed exertion games, which are controlled by moving the body. People play these games together while being located at different places in the world. The novel contribution of this paper is the introduction of distributed team play in which both collocated and distributed players participate. In our Distributed Interactive Pong Playground (DIPP) pl...

Previous studies have shown that website design elements (such as text and pictures) can be manipulated to increase the perception of Social Presence (SP) among online consumers, which can then impact trust, usefulness and enjoyment. This paper seeks to determine if the impacts of infusing SP in websites is culture specific or universal. We were able to demonstrate similar results with Chinese ...

Recent work by our group at Motorola Labs has focused on applying the principles of ambient interfaces to the domain of mobile communications. Our methods incorporate both formative ethnographic studies and field evaluation of prototypes to investigate how people make use of ambient information in the course of everyday communication. Our goal is to enable applications that provide rich presenc...