Voice Driven Emotion Recognizer Mobile Phone

This article proposes an application of emotion recognizer system in telecommunications entitled voice driven emotion recognizer mobile phone (VDERM). The design implements a voice-to-image conversion scheme through a voice-to-image converter that extracts emotion features in the voice; recognizes them; and selects the corresponding facial expression images from image bank. Since it only requires audio transmission; it can support video communication at a much lower bit rate than the conventional videophone. The first prototype of VDERM system has been implemented into a personal computer. The coder; voice-to-image converter; image database; and system interface are preinstalled in the personal computer. In this article; we present and discuss some evaluations that have been conducted in supporting this proposed prototype. The results have shown that both voice and image are important for people to correctly recognize emotion in telecommunications and the proposed solution can provide an alternative to videophone systems. The future works list some modifications that can be done to the proposed prototype in order to make it more practical for mobile applications.

Voice-Enabled User Interfaces for Mobile Devices

The use of a voice interface; along with textual; graphical; video; tactile; and audio interfaces; can improve the experience of the user of a mobile device. Many applications can benefit from voice input and output on a mobile device; including applications that provide travel directions; weather information; restaurant and hotel reservations; appointments and reminders; voice mail; and e-mail. We have developed a prototype system for a mobile device that supports client-side; voice-enabled applications. In fact; the prototype supports multimodal interactions but; here; we focus on voice interaction. The prototype includes six voice-enabled applications and a program manager that manages the applications. In this chapter we describe the prototype; including design issues that we faced; and evaluation methods that we employed in developing a voice-enabled user interface for a mobile device.

Mobile Speech Recognition

This chapter gives an overview of the main architectures for enabling speech recognition on embedded devices. Starting with a short overview of speech recognition; an overview of the main challenges for the use on embedded devices is given. Each of the architectures has its own characteristic problems and features. This chapter gives a solid basis for the selection of an architecture that is most appropriate for the current business case in enterprise applications.

Matching Dynamic Demands of Mobile Users with Dynamic Service Offers

This chapter describes the use of ontologies for personalized situation-aware information and service supply of mobile users in different application domains. A modular application ontology, composed of upper-level ontologies such as location and time ontologies and of domain-specific ontologies, acts as a semantic reference model for a compatible description of user demands and service offers in a service-oriented information- logistical platform. The authors point out that the practical deployment of the platform proved the viability of the conceptual approach and exhibited the need for a more performant implementation of inference engines in mobile multi-user scenarios. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the underlying concepts and domain-specific application constraints will help researchers and practitioners building more sophisticated applications not only in the domains tackled in this chapter but also transferring the concepts to other domains.

Component Agent Systems

One central problem preventing widespread adoption of mobile agents as a code structuring primitive is that current mainstream middleware implementations do not convey it simply as such. In fact, they force all the development to be centered on mobile agents, which has serious consequences in terms of software structuring and, in fact, technology adoption. This chapter discusses the main limitations of the traditional platform-based approach, proposing an alternative: component-based mobile agent systems. Two case studies are discussed: the JAMES platform, a traditional mobile agent platform specially tailored for network management, and M&M, a component-based system for agent-enabling applications. Finally, a bird’s eye perspective on the last 15 years of mobile agent systems research is presented along with an outlook on the future of the technology. The authors hope that this chapter brings some enlightenment on the pearls and pitfalls surrounding this interesting technology and ways for avoiding them in the future.

Context-Awareness and Mobile Devices

Context-awareness is a maturing area within the field of ubiquitous computing. It is particularly relevant to the growing sub-field of mobile computing as a user’s context changes more rapidly when a user is mobile, and interacts with more devices and people in a greater number of locations. In this chapter, we present a definition of context and context-awareness and describe its importance to human-computer interaction and mobile computing. We describe some of the dif- ficulties in building context-aware applications and the solutions that have arisen to address these. Despite these solutions, users have difficulties in using and adopting mobile context-aware applications. We discuss these difficulties and present a set of eight design guidelines that can aid application designers in producing more usable and useful mobile context-aware applications.

Multimedia over Wireless Mobile Data Networks

With the proliferation of wireless data networks, there is an increasing interest in carrying multimedia over wireless networks using portable devices such as laptops and personal digital assistants. Mobility gives rise to the need for handoff schemes between wireless access points. In this chapter, we demonstrate the effectiveness of transport layer handoff schemes for multimedia transmission, and compare with Mobile IP, the network layer-based industry standard handoff scheme.

Ensuring Serializability for Mobile-Client Data Caching

Data management in mobile computing has emerged as a major research area, and it has found many applications. This research has produced interesting results in areas such as data dissemination over limited bandwidth channels, location- dependent querying of data, and advanced interfaces for mobile computers (Barbara, 1999). However, handling multimedia objects in mobile environments faces numerous challenges. Traditional methods developed for transaction processing (Silberschatz, Korth & Sudarshan, 2001) such as concurrency control and recovery mechanisms may no longer work correctly in mobile environments. To illustrate the important aspects that need to be considered and provide a solution for these important yet “tricky” issues in this article, we focus on an important topic of data management in mobile computing, which is concerned with how to ensure serializability for mobile-client data caching. New solutions are needed in dealing with caching multimedia data for mobile clients, for example, a cooperative cache architecture was proposed in Lau, Kumar, and Vankatesh (2002). The particular aspect considered in this article is that when managing a large number of multimedia objects within mobile client-server computing environments, there may be multiple physical copies of the same data object in client caches with the server as the primary owner of all data objects. Invalid-access prevention policy protocols developed in traditional DBMS environment will not work correctly in the new environment, thus, have to be extended to ensure that the serializability involving data updates is achieved in mobile environments. The research by Parker and Chen (2004) performed the analysis, proposed three extended protocols, and conducted experimental studies under the invalid-access prevention policy in mobile environments to meet the serializability requirement in a mobile client/server environment that deals with multimedia objects. These three protocols, referred to as extended server-based two-phase locking (ES2PL), extended call back locking (ECBL), and extended optimistic twophase locking (EO2PL) protocols, have included additional attributes to ensure multimedia object serializability in mobile client/server computing environments. In this article, we examine this issue, present key ideas behind the solution, and discuss related issues in a broader context.

A Novel Fuzzy Scheduler for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

As mobile computing gains popularity, the need for ad hoc routing also continues to grow. In mobile ad hoc networks, the mobility of nodes and error prone nature of the wireless medium pose many challenges, including frequent route changes and packet losses. Such problems increase the packet delays and decrease the throughput. To meet with the dynamic queuing behaviour of Ad hoc networks, to provide QoS and hence to improve the performance, a scheduler can be used. This chapter presents a novel fuzzy based priority scheduler for mobile ad-hoc networks, to determine the priority of the packets. The performance of this scheduler is studied using GloMoSim and evaluated in terms of quantitative metrics such as packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and throughput.

A Study on the Performance of IPv6-Based Mobility Protocols

The performance of IP mobility protocols is highly dependent on the change of mobile nodes’ (MNs’) mobility and traffic-related characteristics. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the effects of these characteristics and to conduct an in-depth performance study of these protocols. In this paper, we introduce a novel analytical approach using a continuous-time Markov chain model and hierarchical network model for the performance analysis of IPv6 mobility protocols: Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). According to these analytical models, we derive the location update costs (i.e., binding update costs plus binding renewal costs), packet tunneling costs, and total signaling costs, which are generated by an MN during its average domain residence time, when MIPv6 or HMIPv6 is deployed under the same network architecture, respectively. In addition, based on these derived costs, we investigate the effects of various parameters, such as the average speed of an MN, binding lifetime period, the ratio of the network scale, and packet arrival rate, on the signaling costs generated by an MN under MIPv6 and HMIPv6. Moreover, we conduct the performance comparison between these two protocols by showing the relative total signaling costs under the various conditions. The analytical results show that as the average speed of an MN gets higher and the binding lifetime period is set to the larger value or as its packet arrival rate gets lower, the total signaling cost generated by an MN during its average domain residence time under HMIPv6 will get relatively lower than that under MIPv6, and that under the reverse conditions, the total signaling cost under MIPv6 will get relatively lower than that under HMIPv6.