Notions like markedness, competition, underspecification, context sensitivity and pragmatic implicatures play an important role in traditional Slavic aspectology. I propose in this paper to give these somewhat vague theoretical constructs a more explicit status within the framework of bidirectional optimality theory (BiOT), introduced in (Blutner 1998, 2000). Blutner’s BiOT can merge these elem...

The smart home concept brings innovation and convenience to our every day's life style. Without context awareness, smart home applications can neither offer adaptive services based on users’ dynamic situations nor provide preferential treatments according to users’ various preferences. Such a design paradigm forces human to live in the world of machines rather than a human-centric world. The us...

Wireless telecommunications are revolutionizing communication. People can communicate with one another from anywhere, and vast information resources are becoming increasingly accessible anytime, anywhere. As wireless telecommunications technology improves, the future holds countless possibilities and opportunities to enhance people’s lives and methods of work. Japan’s wireless telecommunication...

Telepresence is the art of enabling social proximity despite geographical or temporal distances through the integration of computer, audio-visual, and telecommunications technologies. The Ontario Telepresence Project (OTP) has constructed a variety of software and hardware systems to support telepresence applications and it was the mandate of the project to deploy these applications in the fiel...

The conflict between intellectual property rights and standardization has become clearly visible with the examples of the second generation (2G) wireless GSM system and the third generation’s (3G) WCDMA and CDMA-2000 systems. Now, on the verge of standardizing fourth generation (4G) systems, the mobile telecommunications industry has become highly sensitive to issues resulting from the ownershi...

This paper introduces Gulliver’s Genie a context-aware tourist guide that assists roaming tourists. The approach adopted within this system is the deployment of intelligent agents, which collectively determine the user context and retrieve and assemble multi-media presentations that are wirelessly transmitted and displayed on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). As a backdrop, we first consider ...

Telecommunications companies are facing a challenge in satisfying changing customer demands related to telecommunications services. Historically, the industry challenge was managing the changing technology; today, the industry must also focus on the management of telecommunications services. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (1) to provide an argument for the importance of the management ...

Telecommunications has been considered a critical infrastructure for any nation. National competitiveness increasingly depends upon the telecommunications infrastructure because telecommunications and information technology have become a critical driving factor for social and economic development. However, the telecommunications infrastructure in Thailand is considered below the world average d...

1 Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China 2 Key Laboratory of Network control & Intelligent Instrument, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400065, China 3 Automation Institute, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China 4 College of Compu...