Authoring is the collection, selection, preparation and presentation of information to one or more readers by an author. The thesis takes a new, critical look at traditional approaches to authoring, by asking what knowledge is required and at which stages of the process. From this perspective, traditional authoring is seen to entrench an early commitment to both form and content. Although the late binding of form is now commonplace in structured document preparation systems, a similar delay in the binding of content is necessary to achieve user-tailored interaction. The authoring paradigm we have developed to service this goal is called intent-based authoring, because the author supplies at compile-time a communicative goal, or intent. Just as SGML editors and HTML browsers defer rendering decisions until run-time by referring to a local style-sheet, intent-based authoring systems defer content-selection decisions until run-time when they refer to models of both author and reader(s). T...

A speech recognizer is a device that translates speech into text. Many current speech recognizers contain two components, an acoustic model and a statistical language model. The acoustic model indicates how likely it is that a certain word corresponds to a part of the acoustic signal (e.g. the speech). The statistical language model indicates how likely it is that a certain word will be spoken next, given the words recognized so far. Even though the acoustic model might for example not be able to decide between the acoustically similar words "peach" and "teach", the statistical language model can indicate that the word "peach" is more likely if the previously recognized words are "He ate the". Current speech recognizers perform well on constrained tasks, but the goal of continuous, speaker independent speech recognition in potentially noisy environments with a very large vocabulary has not been reached so far. How can statistical language models be improved so that more complex tasks c...

A synthesis of the literature suggests that the key characteristics for classifying online communities are: (i)their attributes, (ii) supporting software, (iii) their relationship to physical communities, and (iv) the sociological concept of boundedness. A classification schema based on these four characteristics is presented in this paper. Examples of each type of community are discussed. These classification schema have important implications for the design and management of online communities. Computer networks, such as the Internet, have begun to connect people around the world. In the past, access to computer-mediated communication was mostly limited to employees in the government, military, or university research communities (King, Grinter, and Pickering, 1997), and to work-related tasks (Greif, 1988). As more diverse groups of people gain access to computer networks, a new type of communication group, known as an online community, has begun to emerge. What is an online community (also called a virtual community or an electronic community)? Although there is an increasing amount of research being done on online

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With the initiation of studies in 1996, AudioLAN has been a pioneer project in voice-over-IP technology for Voice Communication Systems (VCS). The Eurocontrol Experimental Centre (EEC) was the first player of the Air Traffic Control (ATC) community to understand the potential of this technology. Deployment of a simulation environment for the EEC; Instilux Luxembourg; Paris Roissy CDG Airport; Ecole Nationale de la Navigation Arienne (ENAC); French, Turkish, Hungarian and South African Civil Aviation Authorities; and the Military ATC, began in 1998. Today, AudioLAN is working within the operational environment, with the potential to support 470 positions and six license agreements with industrial organizations for commercialisation.

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An exploration- comprising an Analytical Study and an Empirical Survey- of System Dynamics ’ potential for promoting scientific reasoning and computational thinking, and in modifying the science learner’s epistemological commitments, respectively.

E-commerce is a rapidly expanding sector all over the world. While this is apparently good news to the world’s consumers and business companies, it is creating big challenges to information security experts and legal experts. The former are striving to develop and implement technical solutions that can deter, detect, react and/or provide recovery measures from an attack. On the other hand, legal experts are working hard to ensure that e-business is conducted in a legally acceptable manner. In this paper, we focus on legal aspects of IT security in e-commerce environment. Specifically, we discuss the legal ramifications of e-procurement including privacy issues, electronic signature interpretation in different jurisdictions, and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) handling in e-commerce. We conclude by suggesting three different approaches to address legal-IT related security problems in e-commerce.