Abstract
Ubiquitous computing poses new usability challenges that cut across design and development. We are particularly interested in "spaces" enhanced with sensors, public displays and personal devices. How can prototypes be used to explore the user's mobility and interaction, both explicitly and implicitly, to access services within these environments? Because of the potential cost of development and design failure, the characteristics of such systems must be explored using early versions of the system that could disrupt if used in the target environment. Being able to evaluate these systems early in the process is crucial to their successful development. This paper reports on an effort to develop a framework for the rapid prototyping and analysis of ambient intelligence systems.

Abstract

Abstract
Knowledge plays a key role in software development, and the effectiveness of how it is captured into artifacts, and acquired by other team members, is of crucial importance to a project's success. The life-cycle of knowledge in software development is derived from the adopted artifacts, practices and tools. These axes are here reviewed from a knowledge capture and acquisition perspective, and several open research issues are identified. The present work is being carried out in the context of the author's doctoral research. The research objectives are derived from the presented open issues, and a research strategy is outlined. Some preliminary results are also presented.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper is concerned with support for the process of usability engineering. The aim is to use formal techniques to provide a systematic approach that is more traceable, and because it is systematic, repeatable. As a result of this systematic process some of the more subjective aspects of the analysis can be removed. The technique explores exhaustively those features of a specific design that fail to satisfy a set of properties. It also analyzes those aspects of the design where it is possible to quantify the cost of use. The method is illustrated using the example of a medical device. While many aspects of the approach and its tool support have already been discussed elsewhere, this paper builds on and contrasts an analysis of the same device provided by a third party and in so doing enhances the IVY tool.

Abstract
Sorting is an important operation in a myriad of applications. It can contribute substantially to the overall execution time of an application. Dedicated sorting architectures can be used to accelerate applications and/or to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an efficient sorting unit aiming at acceleratin. The sort operation in FPGA-based embedded systems. The proposed sorting unit, named Unbalanced FIFO Merge Sorting Unit, is based on a FIFO merger implementation and is easily scalable to handle different data-set sizes. We show results oy the proposed sorting unit when isolated and when integrated in a software/hardware solution. When using a Xilinx Virtex-5 SX50T FPGA device. The logic resources for a 32 Kword machine is lower than 1%, an. The block RAM usage is about 22%. When compared to a quicksort pure software implementation, our Sorting Unit provides speed-ups from 1.2× to 50× and about 20× when isolated and when integrated in a software/hardware solution, respectively. © 2009 IEEE.