Deep Neural Network–based Enhancement for Image and Video Streaming Systems: A Survey and Future Directions

Internet-enabled smartphones and ultra-wide displays are transforming a variety of visual apps spanning from on-demand movies and 360° videos to video-conferencing and live streaming. However, robustly delivering visual content under fluctuating networking conditions on devices of diverse capabilities remains an open problem. In recent years, advances in the field of deep learning on tasks such as super-resolution and image enhancement have led to unprecedented performance in generating high-quality images from low-quality ones, a process we refer to as neural enhancement. In this article, we survey state-of-the-art content delivery systems that employ neural enhancement as a key component in achieving both fast response time and high visual quality. We first present the components and architecture of existing content delivery systems, highlighting their challenges and motivating the use of neural enhancement models as a countermeasure. We then cover the deployment challenges of these models and analyze existing systems and their design decisions in efficiently overcoming these technical challenges. Additionally, we underline the key trends and common approaches across systems that target diverse use-cases. Finally, we present promising future directions based on the latest insights from deep learning research to further boost the quality of experience of content delivery systems.

Building a Pillowfort: Political Tensions in Platform Design and Policy

Social media platforms make trade-offs in their design and policy decisions to attract users and stand out from other platforms. These decisions are influenced by a number of considerations, e.g. what kinds of content moderation to deploy or what kinds of resources a platform has access to. Their choices play into broader political tensions; social media platforms are situated within a social context that frames their impact, and they can have politics through their design that enforce power structures and serve existing authorities. We turn to Pillowfort, a small social media platform, to examine these political tensions as a case study. Using a discourse analysis, we examine public discussion posts between staff and users as they negotiate the site's development over a period of two years. Our findings illustrate the tensions in navigating the politics that users bring with them from previous platforms, the difficulty of building a site's unique identity and encouraging commitment, and examples of how design decisions can both foster and break trust with users. Drawing from these findings, we discuss how the success and failure of new social media platforms are impacted by political influences on design and policy decisions.

Software Architecture

What is software architecture? A clear and simple definition is that software architecture is about making important design decisions that you want to get right early in the development of a software system because, in the future, they are costly to change. Being a good software architect is not easy. It requires not only a deep technical competency from practicing software architecture design in industry, but also an excellent understanding of the theoretical foundations of software architecture are gained from doing software architecture research. This chapter describes some significant research, development, and education activities that the author has performed during her professional trajectory path to develop knowledge, skills, and experiences around this topic.

Technology for designing innovative processes for creating products and services of a network enterprise using an i4.0 knowledge-based system

The creation of network enterprises based on the digital technologies of the Industrie 4.0 (the 4th Industrial Revolution, i4.0) opens broad opportunities for increasing production flexibility, customer focus and continuous innovation in products and services provided. At the same time, new opportunities necessitate the development of new methods and technologies for designing innovative processes in the context of digital i4.0 platforms, all of which highlights the relevance of the presented research topic. This work aims to define technologies for designing innovative processes to create products and services using i4.0 systems which are based on multi-agent interaction of asset administration shells (AAS), displaying digital twins of product components, and the use of ontological and cognitive methods for forming and justifying design decisions. The work presented here uses the Domain-Driven Design approach, an architectural framework for building i4.0 systems, methods of ontological engineering, quality function deployment (QFD), analysis of the types and consequences of potential inconsistencies (FMEA) and processing of fuzzy sets. The paper proposes principles for identifying bounded contexts of the domain under the design activities for the stages of the life cycle and products’ subsystems (components). For bounded contexts of the domain, it is envisaged to create AAS of i4.0 systems, with the help of which the innovative process is supported and the multi-agent interaction of its participants is carried out. As cognitive tools for making design decisions, we proposed to use services for assessing the importance of the determined quality characteristics of products and minimizing deviations of the proposed solutions from the formed functional and non-functional requirements. The methods of ontological engineering and data modelling allow us to dynamically develop an innovative project and support various versions of the project in the design process. Application of the proposed technology for designing innovative processes to create products and services at network enterprises using i4.0 systems will improve the quality of design decisions, increase the dynamism and continuous design of innovative projects.

Determination of rational values of the parameters of the container depot

Today, due to the increase in rail freight traffic, there is a shortage of containers, and the issue of shortage of containers has not been resolved for a long time. This substantiates the practical relevance of the study of container depots in railway transport. Another task is the development of mathematical models of the interconnection of the parameters of the container depot. Currently, there are several different methods and methods for calculating and determining the parameters of container sites, the analysis of which is given in the article. However, there is a need to supplement, clarify and unify the existing methods for calculating all kinds of parameters for a container depot, which justifies the theoretical relevance of the study. Connections with which the purpose of the article is to develop a methodology for the reliable determination of the most rational values of the parameters of the container terminal, thereby improving and increasing the level of customer service in transport in general. Research methods are based on a systematic analysis and generalization of existing methods and methods for calculating the capacity of container depots. The results of the study are presented by the developed methodology for determining the capacity of warehouses on railway transport, which provides a more qualified calculation and selection of container depot parameters, as well as a decrease in erroneous design decisions and an increase in the reliability of projects for the development and improvement of railway transport and the transport network as a whole.

Application of bayesian networks in the evaluation of projects of corporate uniform

The article reveals the problem of making a decision on the design of a corporate uniform in the context of the contradictory requirements for uniformity of clothing for employees and the needs of participants in the dress code for self-expression. The combination of the above factors creates specificity in the assessment of uniform projects, since it becomes necessary to predict the stability of the dress code policy, the acceptance of its requirements by all interested parties. To solve this problem, a method is proposed for assessing the design decisions of a uniform from the standpoint of a balanced reflection in its design of the values of corporate culture and the possibilities of personal self-identification of participants in the dress code. The article considers an example of the development and testing of a semantic map, reflecting the probabilistic relationship of design parameters, in the assessment and refinement of models-proposals of a corporate uniform. The evaluation criteria presented in the semantic map format allow reflecting both the marketing role of the uniform in the promotion of the company′s services and the actual needs of the dress code participants identified during the expert discussions.

Mind Your Outcomes: The ∆Q approach to Quality-Centric Systems Development and Its Application to a Blockchain Case-Study

This paper directly addresses a critical issue that affects the development of many complex distributed software systems: how to establish quickly, cheaply and reliably whether they will deliver their intended performance before expending significant time, effort and money on detailed design and implementation. We describe ΔQSD, a novel metrics-based and quality-centric paradigm that uses formalised outcome diagrams to explore the performance consequences of design decisions, as a performance blueprint of the system. The ΔQSD paradigm is both effective and generic: it allows values from various sources to be combined in a rigorous way, so that approximate results can be obtained quickly and subsequently refined. ΔQSD has been successfully used by Predictable Network Solutions for consultancy on large-scale applications in a number of industries, including telecommunications, avionics, and space and defence, resulting in cumulative savings of $Bs. The paper outlines the ΔQSD paradigm, describes its formal underpinnings, and illustrates its use via a topical real-world example taken from the blockchain/cryptocurrency domain, where application of this approach enabled an advanced distributed proof-of-stake system to meet challenging throughput targets.

Architecture as a Matter of Inclusion: Constructing Disability Awareness in Architectural Education

Environmental and anatomic factors determine the limits of an individual's participation in daily activities. Design decisions determine the inclusivity of the built environment. Within this respect, disability studies take place in the architecture curriculum. This study investigates the disability and design relation within the context of architectural education. It seeks to answer how the experiencing method affects the approach of architecture students to the disability concept. For this purpose, the experiences and activities of undergraduate students of the "Disability in Design" elective course in the Department of Architecture at Duzce University have been analysed and evaluated. Within the scope of the study, enrolled students were asked to form 3–5 membered groups, choose a disability type, and experience the campus according to the determined disability. Data sources of this study are video recordings, empathy maps, student groups' reports, and observation results. The students' work was analysed and discussed to identify the effects of experiencing on disability awareness. The participating students of this study showed that through experiencing, they could relate the designed environment to the physical, emotional, and social aspects of disability. This study reveals that the experiencing method can be a powerful tool to help students comprehend the influential role of design decisions in the participation of different user groups in daily life.