Abstract
The present phenomenon of technology convergence is blurring away the frontiers between the Internet and the TV, operating a shift on the way TV is consumed. TV viewers have now access to a huge selection of TV programming as well as online contents, either previously broadcasted or natively produced for the Internet. This reality creates new necessities whilst opening new opportunities for the creation of services capable of filtering this information and presenting the user with the most relevant content. This article describes an innovative hybrid strategy for delivering recommendations of TV content to individual users. It was developed specifically for the TV entertainment services of hotels, but it can be applied to any multimedia consumption service. Without requiring users to explicitly rate the programs they have watched, it is still able to recommend similar programs to similar users. It adopts an improved Pearson correlation method to establish similarities between different users, comparing profiles that have been automatically generated based on the user viewing history. It builds a predicted user profile, which is then used within a content-based approach to generate recommendations.

Abstract
Context Recognition is an important element for developing context aware mobile applications. However, context is mostly available as low-level sensor data that are in form not suitable for mobile applications. In this paper, we present a process that uses classifiers for recognizing high-level contexts from low-level sensor data. The process demonstrates accurate recognition of user activity contexts, using smart-phone built-in sensors. We describe and illustrate our context recognition model and then demonstrate its application in a context aware mobile multimedia recommendation system.

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This paper presents an extension to a hardware/software system architecture in which repetitive instruction traces, called Megablocks, are accelerated by a Reconfigurable Processing Unit (RPU). This scheme is supported by a custom toolchain able to automatically generate a RPU tailored for the execution of one or more Megablocks detected offline. Switching between hardware and software execution is done transparently, without modifications to source code or executable binaries. Our approach has been evaluated using an architecture with a MicroBlaze General Purpose Processor (GPP) softcore. By using a memory sharing mechanism, the RPU can access the GPP's data memory, allowing the acceleration of Megablocks with load/store operations. For a set of 21 embedded benchmarks, an average speedup of 1.43x is achieved, and a potential speedup of 2.09x is predicted for an implementation using a low overhead interface for communication between GPP and RPU.

Abstract
The genetic algorithm (GA) is an optimization metaheuristic that relies on the evolution of a set of solutions (population) according to genetically inspired transformations. In the variant of this technique called cellular GA, the evolution is done separately for subgroups of solutions. This paper describes a hardware framework capable of efficiently supporting custom accelerators for this metaheuristic. This approach builds a regular array of problem-specific processing elements (PEs), which perform the genetic evolution, connected to shared memories holding the local subpopulations. To assist the design of the custom PEs, a methodology based on highlevel synthesis from C++ descriptions is used. The proposed architecture was applied to a spectrum allocation problem in cognitive radio networks. For an array of 5x5 PEs in a Virtex-6 FPGA, the results show a minimum speedup of 22x compared to a software version running on a PC and a speedup near 2000x over a MicroBlaze soft processor.