The Semantic Web through technologies such to support the canonical representation information and presenting it to users in a method by which its meaning can be understood or at least communicated and interpreted by all parties. As the Semantic Web evolves into more of a computing platform rather than an information platform more dynamic structures, interactions and behaviours will evolve lead...

Thesis Supervisor: Chris Csikszentmihalyi Title: Director, Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab In contemporary Western society, electronic devices are becoming so prevalent that many people find themselves surrounded by technologies they find frustrating or annoying. The electronics industry has little incentive to address this complaint; I designed two counter-technologies to help peo...

This paper introduces the task of Chinese personal name disambiguation of the Second CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing (CLP) 2012 that Natural Language Processing Laboratory of Zhengzhou University took part in. In this task, we mainly use the Vector Space Model to disambiguate Chinese personal name. We extract different named entity features from diverse names informa...

Pervasive computing environments will combine everyday physical spaces with network aware devices and services; hence providing computing behaviour that is much more entwined with the environments we inhabit. Within such environments, a nomadic user will own and make use of many services attached to, and organised around, physical space. This study introduces the concept of a personal operating...

Editor's Note: These short, critical reviews of recent papers in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to summarize the important findings of the paper and provide additional insight and commentary. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Review of Holt et al. Personal space is generally defined as the ...

Information is often shared between participants in meetings using a projector or a large display. Shared touch-based tabletop surface is an emerging technology. The shared display may not be able to accommodate all the information that participants want on the display. Moreover, large amounts of displayed information increase the complexity and clutter making it harder for participants to loca...

Near-field virtual reality allows users to interact with virtual objects within arm’s reach of the user. Environments for near-field VR are well suited for direct precise interaction by taking advantage of the user’s hand-eye co-ordination. We discuss the design and initial experience of a near-field virtual environment, the Personal Space Station (PSS). In this system, all interactive 3D tasks...

The Internet is a tremendous resource where one can find documents to enrich a personal information space. The question is: how can one find relevant documents and how can these be organized into an information space? In this paper, we describe a prototype which aims to provide the user with assistance in these two tasks. Our approach assumes the existence of an initial concept structure set up...

The hypothesis that personal space invasions produce arousal was investigated in a field experiment. A men's lavatory provided a setting where norms for privacy were salient, where personal space invasions could occur in the case of men urinating, where the opportunity for compensatory responses to invasion were minimal, and where proximity-induced arousal could be measured. Research on mictura...

There are many routes to reduce one's energy footprint, ranging from picking the right means of transportation to switching off the heating when leaving a room to choosing seasonal local food. Many of these options, however, cannot be selected in an automated fashion, but require a deliberate decision. Pervasive computer systems may support this process, acting as personal energy conservation a...