— Online (virtual) courses, consisting of essentially textual materials, discussion forums, limited (auto)evaluation, etc., have represented the state of the art in eLearning for some time. Recent technological innovation in the UNED (the only national public distance university in Spain) has enabled to go beyond the concept of " virtual courses " (implicit in eLearning) to give rise to a new t...

This document provides an overview of a workshop held by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) on ’Interconnecting Smart Objects with the Internet’. The workshop took place in Prague on 25 March 2011. The main goal of the workshop was to solicit feedback from the wider community on their experience with deploying IETF protocols in constrained environments. This report summarizes the discussions...

Many researchers introduced special rooms equipped with sensors, devices, networks, and computers to demonstrate ubiquitous computing environment. However, the cost and time for building such a room is a barrier to the deployment of various ubiquitous applications. We have developed Smart Furniture which instantaneously converts the legacy non-smart space into a Smart Hot-Spot which can provide...

A "smart camera" is basically a video camera coupled to a computer vision system in a tiny package. This communication begins stating the main differences between smart cameras and standard smart vision systems. A smart camera architecture is described whereby a combination of an on-board microprocessor and PLD’s allow for the embedding of image processing algorithms in the camera. A static thr...

More and more Ubiquitous computing scenarios arise where computers are embedded into everyday objects as secondary ariefacts. The need for a generic platform to enhance such artifacts is addressed by the Smart-Its project. TecO’s Smart-Its are small-scale embedded computer devices that can be easily attached to everyday objects and simply programmed for a special task. Just like paper Post-Its ...

This paper shows the power of the combination of smart sensor technique and real-time parallel processing. This implementation results in a very compact system which consists only of four cameras and an extension board to a PC.

This paper proposes a novel way that allows users to create pervasive computing environments without experts. In this way, nonsmart components which form everyday objects such as furniture and appliances commonly found in homes and offices are made smart in advance, not in the way to convert non-smart objects to smart ones by attaching computers, sensors, and devices. As our first prototype to ...

Intensive efforts have been made recently in transforming the power grid into smart grid by means of incorporating extensive information and communication infrastructures. In this paper a versatile stochastic optimization approach has been proposed for smart grid, to suffice the residential customers in an efficient energy management comprising high penetration of renewable and distributed ener...

The access privileges in distributed systems are often organized as a hierarchy structure. Chien and Jan proposed an efficient hierarchical key assignment scheme without using the public key cryptosystem in 2003. Nevertheless, their scheme must use the smart card and the information published on the public board contains the essential secrets of the server and the corresponding users. We theref...