Abstract
Very few of the current solutions for content recommendation take into consideration the context of usage when analyzing the preferences of the user and issuing recommendations. Nonetheless, context can be extremely useful to help identify appropriate content for the specific situation or activity the user is in, while consuming the content. In this paper, we present a solution to allow content-based recommendation systems to take full potential of contextual data, by defining a standards-based representation model which accounts for possible relationships among low-level contexts. The MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards are used for content description and low-level context representation. OWL/RDF ontologies are used to capture contextual concepts and, together with SWRL to establish relationships and perform reasoning to derive high-level concepts the way humans do. This knowledge is then used to drive the recommendation and content adaptation processes. As a side achievement, an extension to the MPEG-21 specification was developed to accommodate the description of user activities, which we believe have a great impact on the type of content to be recommended.

Abstract
This paper presents an offline tool-chain which automatically extracts loops (Mega blocks) from Micro Blaze instruction traces and creates a tailored Reconfigurable Processing Unit (RPU) for those loops. The system moves loops from the CPU to the RPU transparently, at runtime, and without changing the executable binaries. The system was implemented in an FPGA and for the tested kernels measured speedups ranged between 3.9x and 18.2x for a Micro Blaze CPU without cache. We estimate speedups from 1.03x to 2.01x, when comparing to the best estimated performance achieved with a single Micro Blaze. © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract
This paper presents a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN), established on the basis of fundamental concepts in source based routing (SBR) for ad hoc networks and minimum cost forwarding (MCF) methods for heterogeneous WSNs. Neither routing tables nor network topology information is maintained at sensor level, which makes the proposed protocol part of the reactive routing protocols class. Despite the lack of network information at the sensor, the packets from the sink node to sensors, and viceversa, always follow the optimal communication path with minimum cost. Simulation results have shown that the proposed protocol performs better than MCF protocol alone, and nodes always route the packets through the optimal path up to destination. In fact, according to the energy consumption and throughput found by simulation, this protocol improves on the MCF protocol for applications where the sink node, acting as a server or base station (BS), generates significant amounts of network traffic. All results are based on simulations and data treatment performed with OMNet++ 4, Matlab 7 and Microsoft Visual Studio2010(C#) platform tools.

Abstract

Abstract
The concept of capturing the sound of something for later replication is not new, and it is used in many synthesizers. But capturing sounds and use them as an audio effect, is less common. This paper presents an approach for the resynthesis of a singing voice, based on concatenative techniques, that uses pre-recorded audio material as an high level semantic audio effect, replacing an original audio recording with the sound of a different singer, while trying to keep the same musical/phonetic performance. © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract
This paper describes an algorithm which enables harmonic and noise splitting of the glottal excitation of voiced speech. The algorithm utilizes a straightforward harmonic and noise splitter which is utilized prior to glottal inverse filtering. The results show improved estimates of the glottal excitation in comparison to a known inverse filtering method.