This article presents an in-depth case study analysis of a single rural telecentre located in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The study embraces the sociotechnical research paradigm and uses a combination of hermeneutics and actor-network theory as the theoretical foundation with which to explore the mutual interaction between people and ICTs. The objective of the analysis is to gain...

Due to the demanding acoustic conditions in physical education lessons and the related problems with health and academic success, the aim of this study was to examine the acoustic conditions of teaching in sport halls in Slovenia. Thirtyfive sport halls were selected, reflecting four types of school sport halls grouped according to the period of their construction. The reverberation time was me...

A multi-purpose software tool (BioVoice) is presented, capable of performing automatic analysis of a large range of voice signal, no manual setting being required to the user. This makes the tool feasible for application by non-expert users in several fields, ranging from high-pitched new-born cries, to adult healthy singing vocalizations and to irregular, pathological voice signals. Main voice...

The design of automated negotiators has been the focus of abundant research in recent years. However, due to difficulties involved in creating generalized agents that can negotiate in several domains and against human counterparts, many automated negotiators are domain specific and their behavior cannot be generalized for other domains. Some of these difficulties arise from the differences inhe...

The mobile telecommunications landscape has evolved into a highly competitive and complex ecosystem composed of network operators, mobile device manufacturers as well as software, content and service providers. This major shift has strongly impacted the fundamental nature of mobile devices which have now become complex multi-purpose, multi-context ubiquitous media systems. Such change has engen...

The complex multi-purpose, multi-product character of batch manufacturing plants implies a major need to integrate information from operational activities in the plant and to gain more insight into the relative importance of every activity with respect to the main objective of the enterprise. At Delft University of Technology a management decision support tool is being developed which aims at a...

Object and scene learning and recognition is a major issue in computer vision, in robotics and in cognitive sciences. This paper presents the principles and results of an approach which extracts structured view-based representations for multi-purpose recognition. The structures are hierarchical and distributed and provide for generalization and categorization. A tracking process enables to bind...

This paper presents a novel method to deal with the challenging task of generating photographic images conditioned on semantic image descriptions. Our method introduces accompanying hierarchical-nested adversarial objectives inside the network hierarchies, which regularize mid-level representations and assist generator training to capture the complex image statistics. We present an extensile si...

This paper introduces an online pedestrian crossing detection system that uses pre-existing traffic-oriented video-sensors which, at regular intervals, provide coarse spatial measurements on areas along a crosswalk. Pedestrian crossing detection is based on the recognition of occupancy patterns induced by pedestrians when they move on the crosswalk. In order to improve the ability of non-dedica...