Abstract
Resource contention is a major concern in Optical Burst Switching networks that leads to relatively high burst loss probability. This article presents a clustered architecture for OBS networks, called Cooperative Clustered Optical Burst Switching (C2OBS) network architecture. In this architecture, the network is divided in overlapping zones/clusters with a zone/cluster head having the knowledge of available resources within the zone called Zonal Base (ZB) and maintains a short resource usage history called Short History Base (SHB). A resource reservation strategy for the proposed Cooperative Clustered OBS network architecture (C2OBS-RR) is also presented which is centralized within the zone and distributed in the overall network, for combining the benefits of both the centralized and the distributed resource reservation schemes. This novel approach uses the local state of the resource availability within the zone (ZB) so that the bursts originating at the ingress nodes in the same part of network having been assigned the same wavelength, can be assigned different time offsets. This will proactively reduce the probability of contention at the intermediate nodes within a zone and is expected to significantly reduce the overall network burst loss probability. For illustration purpose, the proposed C2OBS architecture has been applied to the European Optical Network. © 2011 HTE.

Abstract
A major challenge when accessing protected multimedia content in heterogeneous usage environments is the ability to provide acceptable levels of quality of experience to all involving users. Additionally, different levels of protection should be possible to be addressed when manipulating the content towards the quality of experience maximization. This paper describes the use of a context-aware and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-enabled content adaptation platform towards meeting these challenges. The platform was conceived to deliver advanced content adaptation within different application scenarios, among which Virtual Collaboration (VC) was central. Descriptions of use cases implemented by the platform in heterogeneous VC environments are provided. Conducted experiments have highlighted the benefits to users when compared to an operation without the platform. Results of different adaptations suitable to sensed context conditions are also provided and analyzed. A brief description of the platform functionality is included together with pointers to additional information. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Abstract
As the social character of the Web grows stronger, online multimedia resources become more tangled, exhibiting multiple and complex relationships. Often, these relationships are not easily spotted by search engines because they are not explicit. Still, when searching for content, users would certainly appreciate to receive results indicating all resources that are somehow related to their topic of interest without having to explicitly request for it. In spite of this trend, current technology for declaring and describing resources on the Internet as well as their inter-relationships is very much fragmented and the most commonly used standards, such as HTML, do not offer adequate functionality. While the goal of the MPEG-21 standard is to provide an all encompassing, universal and standard way to perform the declaration of digital resources, the work being developed in the IST CONVERGENCE project has shown that this standard, (specifically its part 3, Digital Item Identification), also has a limited ability to specify relationships between digital resources. This document presents a proposed extension to MPEG-21 Digital Item Identification, which enables it to support a uniform, semantically expressive and precise specification of the relationships between MPEG-21 digital items, rendering it a much more effective tool for a ubiquitous representation and interconnection of digital resources. © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract
The goal of this paper is to report on the design of a novel content-centric future Internet platform that can support added value services incorporating mobility, context awareness and enhanced security and privacy. We present the proposed platform together with a use case study, dealing with the provision of added-value health services, consisting in the safe and accurate management of medicine prescriptions. Both the design of the platform and the use case are the results of work performed in the context of the European Research project Convergence [1]. © 2011 IIMC.

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.