Thilo Bauer, bluewater multimedia concepts, Heimerzheimer Str., D- Bornheim, Germany Researcher

Pixel binning is a well-known method to reduce the storage capacity of digital images. There remains the question, however, whether binned images obtain an increase of signal or signal-to-noise ratio. Experiments with photographs of point light sources and extended light sources are presented to demonstrate (a) the effect of increase of signal an d (b) the success of pixel binning. The work presen ts a method to compute the signal-to-noise ratio for the binning task. On-chip binning is provided by some hardware devices. On-chip binning will introduce a certain complexity to the calibration of the device and to the derivation of errors obtained from photo metry. Electronic imaging and photography are based on physical constraints. It is shown, that binning does not violate the physical law of conservation o f energy. Binning will provide averaged pixels at lowe red dimension and resolution of the image. Binning does not improve the signal-to-noise ratio or the susceptibility of the device.

Philippe Martin, Université de La Réunion (, adjunct researcher of Griffith University, Australia) Researcher

This article first lists reasons why - in the long term or when creating a new knowledge base (KB) for general knowledge sharing purposes - collaborativel y building a well-organized KB does/can provide more possibilities, with on the whole no more costs , than the mainstream approach where knowledge creation and re-use involves searching, merging and creating (semi-)independent (relatively small) ontologies or semi-formal documents. The article lists elements required to achieve this and describes the main one: a KB editing protocol that keeps the KB free of automatically/manually detected inconsistencies while not forcing them to discuss or agree on terminology and beliefs nor requiring a selection committee.

Valentina Gatteschi . Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica – Politecnico di Torino

The mobility of students and workers is a relevant topic in the Vocational Education and Training fiel d. However, despite the

Myriam C. Traub . Faculty of Digital Media, Furtwangen University, Germany. Researcher

We propose an algorithmic approach for ranking of d iffering textual descriptions (accounts) of the sam e event or story according to their likeliness to bes t describe the source. Application domains include the ranking of eyewitness reports, historical accounts, and news reports. For this, we developed the conce pt of “semantic centrality” as a measure of how centra l a text is among a collection of texts, in terms o f its semantic overlap or similarity with all other texts . This measure is based on natural language process ing theory, as well as graph theory. Using three different collections of humanly genera ted texts (gathered through a recall task, “Chinese Whispers” task, and real-world news reports), we evaluated the proposed method for algorithmic ranking of textual accounts by their trustworthiness to des cribe source events. In one experiment algorithmic ranking is compared to human ranking. Results indica te that semantic centrality as a measure for trustworthiness of textual accounts is promising and deserves further research attention.

Andrzej Olszak, Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen

The decentralized nature of collaborations between objects in object-oriented software makes it diffic ult to understand the implementations of user-observabl e program features and their respective interdependencies. As feature-centric program under standing and modification are essential during software maintenance and evolution, this situation needs to change. In this paper, we present Featureo us, an integrated development environment built on top of the NetBeans IDE that facilitates feature-centric analysis of object-oriented software. Our integrate d development environment encompasses a lightweight feature location mechanism, a number of reusable analytical views, and necessary APIs for supporting future extensions. The base of the integ rated development environment is a conceptual framework comprising of three complementary dimensi ons of comprehension: perspective, abstraction and granularity. Together, these dimensions allow t he analyst to focus the analysis at the right mode of comprehension during software evolution. We demonst rate applicability of our integrated development environment by conducting a case study of change adoption using the JHotDraw SVG .

Ismael Mejía. ASCOLA team (EMN-INRIA, LINA) Researcher, École des Mines de Nantes, France Researcher

The evolution of complex distributed software systems often requires intricate composition operations in order to adapt or a dd functionalities, to react to unan ticipated changes, or to apply performance improvements that cannot be modul arized in terms of existing services and components. These evolutions often need controlled access to selected parts of the implementation, e.g., to manage exceptional situations and crossc utting within services and their compositions. However, existing composition techniques typi cally support only interface-level (black-box) composition or arbitrary access to the implementation (gray-box or white-box composition). In this paper, we present a structured approach to the composition of complex software systems that require invasive modi fications. Concretely, we provide three contributions: (i) we present a small kernel composition language for structured gray-box composition using invasive distributed patterns; (ii) we motivate that gray-box composition approaches should be defined and evaluated in terms of the flexibility and control they provide, a notion of degrees of invasiveness is introduced to help assess this trade-off; (iii) we apply our appr oach to a new case study of evolution and evaluate it in the context of two previous studies involving two real-world software systems : benchmarking of grid algorithms with NASGrid and transactional replication with JBoss Cache. As a main result, we show that gray-box composition using invasive distributed patterns allows the declarative and modular de finition of evolutions of real-world a pplications that n eed moderate to high degrees of invasive modifications.

Angelo Di Iorio, Antonio Feliziani, Luca Furini, Fabio Vitali

Enterprises need to produce a lot of digital docume nts: from internal reports to official documentatio n, from confidential data to public advertisements, fr om customers' letters to worksheets, and so on. The process of editing and publishing typographically sophisticated documents is difficult and very often outsourced. The production of such documents, in fa ct, still requires competencies and resources that only professional typesetters can provide. In this paper we present a flexible architecture designed e ither to improve professional publishing processes or to make it easier authoring and publishing for inexper t users: combining automatic content extraction with advanced formatting techniques, we automatically produce high-quality documents, in particular PDF f iles. Actually, both input and output documents can be expressed in different data formats. IsaPress is a java implementation of such architecture, based on a set of format-specific smart parsers, XSLT meta-stylesheets and an improved version of FOP.

Tekos George. University of Thessaly

Τhe paper introduces the design and development of q uality interactive multimedia educational software based on students’ empirical ideas and conceptual d ifficulties, identified in Greek students 7–12 year s old. The software promotes interdisciplinary study of geometrical optics concepts. We present a survey , which investigated 40 students’ initial ideas about light phenomena using personal interviews. Τhen we describe the design of the educational software “Light-Life”, which was designed based on constructivist views of learning and students’ initial ideas about optics phenomena, such as linear propagation of li ght, shadows formation, light reflection, diffusion and refraction, synthesis of colour light beams, and vi sion. Appropriate printed worksheets were also developed for the students. Τhe proposed approach intends to improve the quality of educational approach and too ls to better respond to students’ needs of learning with understanding and help them reformulate their empirical ideas to better explain everyday life situations related to basic optics phenomena.

Yves Vanrompay. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Computer Science, Celestijnenlaan Researcher

Home automation or domotics systems are ambient inte lligence systems that are designed to help people proactively, but sensibly. In this paper we propose a system that l earns and automates patterns in the interactions of the user with the home automation de vices. We show our appro ach and architecture. An event processing tool is used to handle the events from the home automation devices, prediction algorithms predict the next action and both rule-based algorithms as reinforcement learning decide which actions are suitable to be automated. We show the results of our system on both a synthetic data set and a real data set. The automation system manages to au tomate a significant number of interactions for the user.

Samia Benabdellah Chaouni ENSIAS, Mohammed V Souissi University, Rabat Researcher, Morocco Researcher

Model integration problem occurs during the integra tion of enterprise information systems. Models comparison is an essential step of the integration, and has been discussed in several domains and vari ous models. However, previous approaches have not corre ctly handled the semantic comparison. In the current paper, we develop a comparison hybrid appro ach which takes into account the syntactic, semantic and structural comparison aspects. We provide a rule-based system for models comparison. For this purpose, we use a domain ontology as well as other resources such as dictionaries.

Björn-Helge Busch. Leuphana University Lueneburg – Institut VauST. Volgershall

The actual demographic trend predicts a significant increasing percentage of elderly people in the German society until 2050. According to this trend, it must be assumed that the number of elderly persons who wants to live self-sufficiently in their habi tual environment will rise as well. In this paper a human centered assistance system is tightly descri bed and proposed as a resolve for the coherent challenges of this structural, societal changes which relate to home care and geriatrics; thereby the focus of consideration lies on the statistical analysis of gath ered process data in order to derive an intelligent emergency detection based on probabilistic modeling. Using room automation states and events to design and train Hidden Markov Models for position tracking, complemented with the stochastic evaluation of telemedical devices a nd contactless sensor networks, the ma in issue is to achieve a solid, robust situation recognition mechanism. Due to the knowledge of the hidd en user states or i.e. situations, this approach offers the opportunity to detect emer gency situations instantl y and to prevent harmful aftermath for the user through interventions like emerge ncy calls. This pa per illustrates the architectural concept of the assistance system with its implemented techniques and demonstrates the approximation of user situations through a clear example. Simulation re sults are discussed and finally, a first conclusion with an outlook on further progress of research closures this article.

Pedro Isaías

Editorial preface for Volume 6, Issue 1 of the IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems (IJCSIS). This issue brings together peer-reviewed original research contributions covering the wide spectrum of Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Digital Transformation.