Abstract
With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), large volumes of multimedia content are now available on-line in multiple formats. Furthermore, with the proliferation in the mass market of a diversity of multimedia-enabled end-user devices, consumers increasingly expect to be able to access any kind of content anywhere and at any time, regardless of the capabilities of their terminals and the networks to which they are attached. Access to content that meets user expectations and demands, must take into account all the different aspects of this Peterogeneous environment. This paper describes the approach adopted within the European project ENTHRONE-2 to address this challenge. ENTHRONE-2 has conceived, designed and implemented a distributed platform, based on open standards, notably MPEG-21 and Web Services technologies, that supports the kind of network multimedia content access users expect. In particular, it focus on the ENTHRONE Integrated Management Supervisor, the entity that coordinates all the actions required for the provision of quality and context-aware, multimedia services to end-users.

Abstract
This document is a survey in the research area of User Modeling (UM) for the specific field of Adaptive Learning. The aims of this document are: To define what it is a User Model; To present existing and well known User Models; To analyze the existent standards related with UM; To compare existing systems. In the scientific area of User Modeling (UM), numerous research and developed systems already seem to promise good results, but some experimentation and implementation are still necessary to conclude about the utility of the UM. That is, the experimentation and implementation of these systems are still very scarce to determine the utility of some of the referred applications. At present, the Student Modeling research goes in the direction to make possible reuse a student model in different systems. The standards are more and more relevant for this effect, allowing systems communicate and to share data, components and structures, at syntax and semantic level, even if most of them still only allow syntax integration.

Abstract
Shelf-life is defined as the time that a product is acceptable and meets the consumers expectations regarding food quality. It is the result of the conjunction of all services in production, distribution, and consumption. Shelf-life dating is one of the most difficult tasks in food engineering. Market pressure has lead to the implementation of shelf-life by sensory analyses, which may not reflect the full quality spectra. Moreover, traditional methods for shelf-life dating and small-scale distribution chain tests cannot reproduce in a laboratory the real conditions of storage, distribution, and consumption on food quality. Today, food engineers are facing the challenges to monitor, diagnose, and control the quality and safety of food products. The advent of nanotechnology, multivariate sensors, information systems, and complex systems will revolutionize the way we manage, distribute, and consume foods. The informed consumer demands foods, under the legal standards, at low cost, high standards of nutritional, sensory, and health benefits. To accommodate the new paradigms, we herein present a critical review of shelf-life dating approaches with special emphasis in computational systems and future trends on complex systems methodologies applied to the prediction of food quality and safety.

Abstract
In large audio collections, it is common to store audio content with perceptual encoding. However, encoding parameters may vary from collection to collection or even within a collection - using different bit rates, sample rates, codecs, etc. We evaluate the effect of various audio encodings on the onset detection task. We show that audio-based onset detection methods are surprisingly robust in the presence of MP3 encoded audio. Statistically significant changes in onset detection accuracy only occur at bit-rates lower than 32kbps.

Abstract
Traditionally, recommender systems for the Web deal with applications that have two types of entities/dimensions, users and items. With these dimensions, a recommendation model can be built and used to identify a set of N items that will be of interest to a certain user. In this paper we propose a direct method that enriches the information in the access logs with new dimensions. We empirically test this method with two recommender systems, an item-based collaborative filtering technique and association rules, on three data sets. Our results show that while collaborative filtering is not able to take advantage of the new dimensions added, association rules are capable of profiting from our direct method. © 2008 IEEE.

Abstract
This paper addresses the inter-operability problem of multimedia terminal in media content delivery over heterogeneous networks and devices. We design and implement a terminal which includes a content browser providing presentation, navigation and interaction with MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration (MPEG-21 DID) in order to support universal media access (UMA). We optimized the architecture in a client-server distributed approach with Web Service support. This terminal enables the MPEG-21 standard compliant content accessible on different terminal devices via common Web browsers. Such a design strategy illustrates a next-generation multimedia terminal supporting inter-operability in multimedia content adaptation over a heterogeneous delivery chain.