Massive amounts of anthropogenic radiocaesium Cs that were released into the environment by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in March 2011 are widely known to have extensively migrated to Pacific Ocean sediment off of eastern Japan. Several recent reports have stated that the sedimentary Cs is now stable with a remarkably heterogeneous distribution. The present study elucidate...

The use of middleware is the current practice for developing distributed systems. Developers compose reusable services provided by standard middleware infrastructures, e.g., CORBA , DCOM, Java RMI & related services, etc., to deal with problems like distribution, security, transactional processing, fault tolerance, etc.. The development process gets even easier after the evolution of the origin...

The reconstruction of the physical environment using a depth sensor involves data-intensive computations which are difficult to implement on mobile systems (e.g., tracking and aligning the position of the sensor with the depth maps). In this paper, we present two practical experimental setups for scanning and reconstructing real objects employing low-price, off-the-shelf embedded components and...

T he current organizational and technological evolution suggests to conceive tailorability and EUD also in terms of integration of off the shelf applications and devices that support collaboration. To this aim this chapter proposes an approach that leverages the ability of actors to coordinate their activities and then grounds integration on the notion of cooperation. The resulting technologica...

We investigate the application of a Monte Carlo localization filter to the problem of combining local and global observations of a small, off-the-shelf quadruped domestic robot, in a simulated Smart House environment, for the purpose of robust tracking and localization. A Sony Aibo ERS-210A robot forms part of this project, with the ultimate aim of providing additional monitoring, human-system ...

Augmented Reality (AR) techniques can be applied in medicine to help physicians in diagnosis, treatment planning, surgery simulation, among others. In craniofacial treatments, it can also be used to support prediction in patient’s own body. In this context, AR applications should fill more requirements than usual, like markerless support, tracking deformable objects and volume rendering. This p...

Recently one of the first two early installations of the new Siemens hpcLine parallel computer was installed at the Computing Center of the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH). This machine is configured with off the shelf Intel processor boards and connected with a fast SCI network. We investigate the question how such a machine fits into a UNIX environment containing vector supercomputers,...