Web TV

Today, the user is usually confronted with a lot of different multimedia- and telecommunication services in his home environment. These services are delivered on different networks, have different user-interfaces, have different billing-systems and are running on different devices. Furthermore, the services are only used separately and can not be combined.

Not until these services have uniform user interfaces, one billing-system are delivered on a unified IP-based network, these would not lead to an advantage for the user as well as for the network operators and service providers. Because value-added services are supporting interactivity and personalization; they are providing a way to converge entertainment- and communication services either which would result in a rich experience to the user, for which he would have to pay.

On the side of the client the motivation is to have a unified application integration different entertainment- and communication features like VoIP, Chat, Presence, IPTV, Voting, personalized-TV. All these services can be combined to develop more complex services, have unique user interfaces and can be used from any device positioned in the environment of the user in his home. Moreover, a running session can be switched between available appliances seamlessly. Further a recommendation system makes recommendations to the user. These can include the current TV program but also the recordings and media-file uploads of other users. Initially, this recommendation system uses the preferences and settings of the user as basis. On the side of the backend these services are based on the IP Multimedia System (IMS) providing true converged network allowing the development of voice-, video- or data-service on any device. At the same time it integrates QoS, Billing and AAA.

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Mobile Tagging

As the real world becomes closer to Internet world, the real objects also become entities for Internet world. The mobile users can interact with real world objects as if they are on Internet such as fetch related URL’s, information, etc. Other interaction such as sending SMS, email with specific information, buying product, request additional information, seeing related advertisement, reserving tickets are also possible. 

Mobile Tagging is the process of providing data on mobile devices, commonly through the use of data (such as a URL) encoded in a computer readable barcode, meant to be read and inputted using a camera phone. The difference between regular linear barcodes with mobile tagging enabled barcode is that in mobile tagging enabled barcode, the barcode itself is self-descriptive that holds additional information in it, such as in QR code, one can encode up to 7,089 characters if the data is numeric and up to 4,296 characters if the data is alphanumeric. These kinds of barcodes that can hold additional data in it are known as Matrix code or 2D code.

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Augmented Reality

Mobile users get used to use their phones for navigation and location based services. The increasing number of GPS enabled mobile devices, utilize the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. However finding a specific location by only using maps is still hard to use for most of the people. On the other hand, the users also try to find location specific information about any surrounding that they are currently wandering or any interested area.

Augmented Reality (AR) application for mobile users can provide a combined solution for these problems.  Augmented Reality combines real and virtual is interactive in real time is registered in 3D spans from the real environment to a pure virtual environment. For mobile users Augmented Reality can be implemented via their embedded cameras. While users can see their surroundings via cameras, different kind of information that creates a virtual environment can be layered on the top of real environment. These layers can hold any kind of information (or advertisement) about the surroundings of the users, such as street and building names, interested locations (bars, restaurants, pharmacies), historical places. These layers can show not only the names for surroundings but can also show additional information about the places such as historical information, user reviews (for bars and restaurants), contact information, etc.

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Data Augmentation

In the last 50 years Internet and Web have evolved to the current state, and now the next step in Web is anticipated to be the “Network of Data”. Network of data represents the public data in the databases which are related to each other with standard structures. Current web can be named as “Network of Documents” and includes documents published to public, providing links between each other. In “Network of data” case the same structure is replaced with data and again the data is public and provides relation to other data. “Network of Data” is generally named as “LinkedData”.  LinkedData defines ways of describing and linking data across many information providers. Today, LinkedData is on the rise and many databases have gone to public providing data and information about various concepts in the world. The syntax and semantics behind LinkedData rely on Semantic Web elements that have been being improved since the beginning of new millennium. With help of the Web concepts such as User Generated Content, Semantic Web and LinkedData, it is now possible to find and query important information almost about anything.

On the other hand, the content in the Web is increasing and it is getting harder to provide links to other documents. In media such as newspapers and online video providers very limited amount of links to the concepts in the content is provided. This limitation forces people to use search engines while getting information from a media channel. 

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Google Android Security

Google Android is a smart phone operating system that is gaining more and more popularity. Due to its developer openness, new concepts and approaches can be easily deployed to devices. Additionally, the source code of Android is set open source allowing developers to modify even components of the operating system. Android introduces new security concepts while a full scale audit needs to be made for estimating effectiveness and impact of additional security measures.

Knowing about the effectiveness of the security model of Android will allow to design and develop a layered security concept. In this concept, different layers of security will restrict access to different domains, e.g. applications, data, or services. Entering a higher level security domain will trigger an authentication process, where the security of each authentication method will increase corresponding to the increasing security level.

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Smart Home Energy Assistant

Energy costs show a constantly rising trend and bind an ever larger part of the available income (e.g: the rise of the fuel oil costs around 100% in approximately 3 years). Therefore measures targeting energy conservation such as commitments for the reduction of the CO2-emissions have a great economical importance. It is important for the acceptance that the housing comfort is not only insignificantly impaired by any economy measures. A self-learning system for energy consumption control replaces the overcome clock-relay based control/regulation, and derives estimations on the expected power consumption in the future by analyzing the behavior of the inhabitants. 

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Smart Personal Assistant

The greatest accomplishment of the Smart Personal Assistant is the fusion of technology from the areas of Semantic Web and Web 2.0, combined with a seamless Integration of the World Wide Web (WWW), resulting in the convergence of Intranet and Internet data and services. The SPA is capable of recognizing the semantic content of external data such as telephone numbers, addresses or hyperlinks at runtime, and thus supports combining this data with all internal services and data. Users accessing the SPA experience a highly simplified service interaction which allows them to use the provided services in various ways by dynamically integrating separate services and data.

As an exemplary scenario, consider a user dragging a visually enhanced telephone num­ber from a Web page onto the SPA Com­munication Center. Based on the user's current context, the optimal communication channel (PSTN, GSM, and VoIP) is deter­mined and the res­pective connection is established. By reali­zing these concepts the SPA facilitates a novel convergent Web-based service usage which allows the combination of “everything with everything”. Thus, the user may aggregate different services and data at runtime in an intuitive way.

In addition to providing various personalized services offering functionality e.g. for planning recreational activities, the Smart Personal Assistant allows the user to combine the provided services at run-time in an intuitive manner. As an example, the current weather forecast may be interconnected with a list of restaurants in order to restrict these results to restaurants providing suitable facilities, such as outdoor areas in case of fair weather.

In addition to supporting the convergence of Intranet and Internet, the SPA as a generic framework may also be adapted easily to various domains such as home, office, hotel or education. Further­more, the SPA provides an intelligent session management mechanism which allows the user,    to interrupt the service interaction the interrupted interaction at a later point in time, even on a different device or in a different communication network (Seamless Mobility). Finally, the SPA features multi-modal user interfaces allowing the user to split up the service usage into separate communication channels, such as voice interaction and interaction via graphical user interfaces, and subsequently access the services simultane­ously on separate devices, such as a mobile device and an HD-enabled television.

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