Introduction

In developed countries, many users of the mobile phones are at the same time the car drivers. As we know from the current statistics, it is often dangerous to drive and use mobile device at the same time and if the problem for phone call service can be relatively easily solved by using hands-free garniture, the problem for advanced services is still there. Millions of car accidents take place every year that leads to a huge loss of lives, comparable to the losses you might see in a serious regional war. For example, in Russia alone during last nine months of 2008, more than 156,000 car accidents took place, in which more than 21,000 people lost their lives and almost 200,000 were injured. We believe that by applying the right design principles and addressing vital needs of the drivers, mobile services can bring new levels of information support and comfort to drivers and even increase safety on the roads. As a result these services could attract a huge new group of active users – car drivers, and help in solving one of world’s largest social problems.

Project description

In the first project stage we would like to implement for cars the analogue of the aircraft’s black box service. By recording video from the main camera of the mobile phone placed in the special holder at the forward panel of the car, we can trace development of the road situation. At the same time, the front camera of the device can be used for capturing information about development of the situation in the cabin. The recorded video along with other key parameters such as speed, can be preprocessed for further use and then deleted, so that by default the services will always store only the last N minutes (e.g. 5 minutes) data. Information about car’s speed can be obtained from the device GPS, car’s computer or recognition of the speedometer value. Availability of this information is useful for guiding the driver about dangerous situation that he/she had created on the road, as well as help to the police and insurance companies to define the actual reason of the road accident and see behavior of all involved drivers.

Unlike aircraft’s black box, the phone is not so well protected from physical damages in case of a road accidents, so depending on user preferences some scheme for uploading data to the external repositories will be considered. Studying this issue is one of the key research questions of the project.

Deliverables:

1. First Symbian demo of the car black box service by end on 2009.
2. Presentation of the project status report at autumn seminar of FRUCT program in 2009.
3. Preparation of the project development paper by spring seminar of FRUCT program in 2010.

Contacts

Project leader: Kirill Alexandrov, student, St Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI”
Tutor: Sergey Balandin, principle scientist, Nokia Research Center

Project description

This project aims at development of an application for planning and managing personal events based on different Internet services (organizer). Such events are created by a user on her own or taken from Internet (e.g., services Google and VKontakte.ru). Therefore, the organizer, in contrast to other organizers, additionally allows surfing the Internet event space with collecting interesting events for personal use.

Events are closely related to concrete persons, and the organizer maintains a contact list. Its content is typically available from the system address book, but the organizer also can exploit user profiles from social networks (e.g., VKontakte.ru). Based on the contacts a user can invite and notify other persons to participate in appropriate events. The FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) ontology is used as a storage format for contact data.

The organizer keeps all events locally. If necessary, user can synchronize the organizer with such services like Google Calendar. The organizer is for the Maemo platform (e.g., Nokia Internet Tablets N8x0).

The basic functionality of organizer is the following:

• Presentation of events structurally (on day, week, etc. basis)
• Editing events. For each event a user can specify the following: date, start time, end time, name, description, location, persons invited, reminding mark, periodicity (e.g., every Monday since 01.03.2009 to 01.04.2009).
• Surfing the Internet event space. A user searches interesting events using such services like Google or VKontakte.ru. The latter provides public events that can be interesting to the user (e.g., a rock concert or a meeting of friends).
• Contact list. At this phase, the service VKontakte.ru is used to retrieve contact data of other persons (exploiting user profiles). For each record in the list the following data are kept: name, photo, home address, work address, phone numbers, fax, email, ICQ, jabber, Vkontakte ID, etc.
• Events reminder. For events with reminding marks a notification message appears on the screen with given periodicity.
• Notification of invited persons. Each invited person is notified about a coming event using the contact list data. Notifications can be sent via such services as VKontakte.ru, e-mail, etc.

Goals

1. Constructing a prototype of the described application for the MAEMO platform.
2. Testing the idea of integration of several Internet services (Google Calendar and Vkontakte.ru).

Timing and Deliverables

February-August 2009:

• Initial plan
• Requirement analysis
• Requirement modeling and specification
• Coding, testing
• Working prototype for Maemo 4

September 2009-April 2010:

• Coding, testing, debugging, localization
• Experiments and porting on Maemo 5
• Architecture refactoring
• Coding, testing, debugging
•  Project presentation

Project Team

Developers:

• Vyacheslav Dimitrov, project leader
• Aleksandr Kolosov, project expert
• Stanislav Epifanov (bachelor student), network interaction
• Kirill Ivashov (bachelor student), storage subsystem, testing
• Evgeniy Tsvetkov, 4rd year student

Screenshots

Several mobile multimedia broadcasting technologies have emerged during recent years. Traditionally, broadcasting has consisted of television and radio transmissions. Nowadays mobile broadcasting is more than just mobile TV. The transmission is general IP datacast (IPDC), which can carry any services such as streaming media or file delivery.

Broadcasting technologies can offer very high date rates to users because the whole (fixed) bandwidth is available for all users all the time. Broadcasting is especially suitable for reaching large number of users within small geographical area, where the capacity of systems like UMTS and WLAN cannot serve all users. When several users require the same content, the point-to-point delivery is a waste of scarce resources. The drawback is that the return channel has to be implemented with some other technology. Mobile broadcasting receivers are implemented typically in mobile phones, thus the return channel is easily available. Current competing standards include DVB-H, MediaFLO, T-DMB and ISDB-T. Also, 3GPP and 3GPP2 have developed broadcasting and multicasting extensions to UMTS (MBMS) and cdma2000 (BCMCS).

Our project focuses on second generation multimedia broadcasting standards, which is currently under active development. The aim is to provide HDTV transmission for terrestrial receivers and to match the capacity offered by state-of-the-art systems like WiMAX and 3G LTE. The project can be divided to two parts:

1. Analysis and enhancement of DVB-H

DVB-H defines a wide set of parameters that affect the performance of the system. Therefore, simultaneous tuning to achieve target data rate and error performance is of essence. For example, three-level error correction coding is defined in the standard, such as concatenated convolutional code and Reed-Solomon code in the physical layer and Reed-Solomon with optional cyclic redundancy check in the link layer. Thus, identical total code rate can be achieved with different code combinations.

The performance of DVB-H could be enhanced with efficient FEC decoding in the receiver. One possibility would be the utilization of soft-decision Reed-Solomon decoding. On the other hand, in broadcasting networks transport layer coding improve the transmission fidelity of video stream, since lost or corrupted data packets cannot be requested for retransmission due to the lack of return channel.

2. Design of future broadcasting systems

As the work for the next generation broadcasting system has started, it is important to find out efficient ways of data encapsulation, protocol stacking, error protection and modulation providing an adequate level of reception quality. The key issues to be dealt with include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How to choose efficient error correction mechanisms in combination with the packet structures used on each sublayer;
• What information should be transmitted in packet headers and how to protect this information in the most economical way;
• What are the best solutions, taking into consideration the limits of equipment complexity;
• What reasonable trade-offs exist between the quality of service and the commercial viability.

Research results are utilized in enhancing the performance of current state-of-the-art systems and offering novel solutions for future technologies. Following topics can be identified:

• Information theoretic aspects of broadcast channels
• Combination of framing (data encapsulation) with error coding
• Comparison of different multicarrier methods
• Combination of multicarrier modulation and MIMO
  Advanced receiver algorithms for multicarrier systems (to be added later)

Contacts

Team leader: Jarkko Paavola

Team supervisor: Valery Ipatov

Students involved in the project: Tero Jokela, Piritta Hakala, Jari Tissari, Eero Lehtonen

The project motivation and summary

Usability testing - this is an experimental method of assessing user Interface product (for example, the site, but not only), built on bringing his actual or potential users.

Tracking the movement of the eye, you can determine where the user watches. There are methods to watching every movement of his eyes, to identify areas that attract his most attention. Research in this area can draw conclusions about how users feel comfortable.

Our main concept is the idea that the eye - the only body senses that directly interact with a graphical interface, which means that it is the eye, will be the first to respond to this interface. If we can identify reactions eyes to the inconvenient elements (to assess the elements that are not quite comfortable or not seen eye), then we can build an effective system to assess graphical interface (GUI), which is not tied to the experts, and is more objective and cheap to use.

Another difficulty is created so that the screen mobile phone - a small, and thus the amplitude pupil (according to the geometric optics) will be significantly less than in the study of images on a computer screen. And the results would be different even from the presence of peripheral vision that encompasses the entire screen mobile phone, on his part not only in the case of the PC.

To date, there are 2 for testing the quality GUI. The first - examines the personal attention that is necessary for promotional purposes (placement of banners, advertisements). The second track - psychophysical analysis of human-machine, identifying the elements of conscious psychophysical maximum load. In this regard apply probabilistic methods based on survey rights - which he likes and does not like.

Project goals

Create an automatic control system of graphical interfaces for mobile phones, allowing only the very interface to find items unsuitable for human perception.
Short-term goals:

1. Develop a program to determine the path of the human eye pupil
2. To explore the features of perception screen mobile devices human eye
3. Identify the elements of conduct pupil eyes at the facilities uncomfortable for the perception of rights
4. Develop a system to assess the convenience of the user interfaces for graphics devices

Long-term goals:

1. Develop a learning neural network, which can play back the path of human eye without a real experiment
2. Combine item 4 and 5 in a uniform system for testing the quality of graphical interfaces

Timeline and deliverables

Short term (5-7 months) the results of the following: 
Articles:

1. Evidence medicine to assess the quality of UI for mobile applications
2. Features perception UI mobile applications

The long-term deliverable is - development of complete technical solutions for this system.

Presentation

Contact

Contact person: Ilina Diana, Mikhail Smirnov

Motivation and summary

With explosive growth of web information services' number users usually have less and less possibility to track new messages from these sources. Solution of this problem were aggregation protocols like RSS or ATOM. But web is evolving and now there are more requirements for such protocols. All protocol inventors are now working on improvement of old formats. For example, RSS 3.0 creation is in progress with many important changes in protocol structure.

We are going to analyse existing weak points and requirements of aggregation protocols, trends in their evolution and propose a novel protocol (or existing protocol improvements) for data aggregation and distribution.

Project goals

The main project goals are creation and implementation of novel protocol for data distribution and aggregation.

We see following steps during our work:

1. detailed review of existing aggregation protocols
2. determination of their weak points and evolution trends
3. proposing of a novel protocol based on investigations done in 2
4. implementation of such protocol

Timeline and deliverables

Suggested time for this project is 6-8 months. Final results will be presented at spring FRUCT seminar.

Main deliverables are:

• An article describing current state of art, weak points, trends and proposed protocol
• A technical implementation of server and client both using this protocol

Team

Petr Nuzgnov, student at N.I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod - project leader
Diana Ilina, student at N.I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod
Alexey Koren, PhD student at SUAI