martin brooks - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by martin brooks

This report analyzes recent literature and contributes expertise from researchers and practitione... more This report analyzes recent literature and contributes expertise from researchers and practitioners in the field to develop good practice guidelines for multi-site videoconferencing - linking people in multiple sites with videoconferencing. Our goal was to develop effective, empowering and contextually-sensitive good practice guidelines that encourage participation in multi-site videoconferencing.

Thanks to the emergence of digital video, producing and distributing video is now possible in way... more Thanks to the emergence of digital video, producing and distributing video is now possible in ways that were previously limited to video production companies. Yet the functions of current digital media players differ little from the VCR’s play, rewind, fast-forward, and pause functions, which may not support learning tasks appropriately. Therefore, we designed an enhanced digital media player, ReView, to better support video-based learning. To test ReView’s usefulness, advanced music students in the Young Artists Programme of the National Arts Centre of Canada were given the opportunity to use the media player to review a video recorded lesson. In this paper, we present the students’ ratings of the usefulness of ReView’s features, and the frequency with which the features were used. We discuss these findings with respect to technological support for browsing video content. Additionally, we present findings related to the content of the video that the students chose to watch. Specifically, we found that students prefer to watch themselves play rather than review instructions received from a coach.

MannTall is a decision support system for deployment of rescue craft during an emergency on an of... more MannTall is a decision support system for deployment of rescue craft during an emergency on an offshore oil platform. MannTaU uses heuristic counting and estimation techniques to compute b stand worst-case scenarios for the locations of the platform crew. MannTall is fully operational as a part of Saga Petroleum’s safety and emergency preparedness procedures. Use of MannTall in Large Scale Rescue Operations MannTan is a stand-alone system for keeping track of personnel during an emergency on an offshore oil platform. MannTall is used at Saga Petroleum’s Emergency Operations Room at Forus, on the west coast of Norway. MannTall provides a running analysis of the whereabouts of the platform crew in the form of upper and lower numerical bounds and the possible identities of crew members on the platform, in the sea, and on the various rescue craft. MannTall’s input is a stream of messages regarding sightings and transfers, for example: "Abel, Berg, and one unidentified person have b...

Proceedings of the ninth ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '01, 2001

This demonstration reports on the current stage of development of a web-based environment to supp... more This demonstration reports on the current stage of development of a web-based environment to support video sharing and annotation. The initial requirements and their implementation are briefly presented. The application is aimed at supporting the professional development of teachers with a multimedia application over a broadband network. However, work with teachers has pointed us to new requirements, differentiating VSA from

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2005

Domain novice users in the beginning stages of researching a topic find themselves searching for ... more Domain novice users in the beginning stages of researching a topic find themselves searching for information via information retrieval (IR) systems before they have identified their information need. Pre-Internet access technologies adapted by current IR systems poorly serve these domain novice users, whose behavior might be characterized as rudderless and without a compass. In this article we describe a conceptual design for an information retrieval system that incorporates standard information need identification classification and subject cataloging schemes, called the INIIReye System, and a study that tests the efficacy of the innovative part of the INIIReye System, called the Associative Index. The Associative Index helps the user put together his or her associative thoughts-Vannevar Bush's idea of associative indexing for his Memex machine that he never actually described. For the first time, data from the study reported here quantitatively supports the theoretical notion that the information seeker's information need is identified through transformation of his/her knowledge structure (i.e., the seeker's cognitive map or perspective on the task for which information is being sought).

First Monday, 2005

The technical requirements for widespread deployment of broadband video over the Internet are rap... more The technical requirements for widespread deployment of broadband video over the Internet are rapidly being met. But a harder challenge remains: how can video–based technologies promote collaboration and learning? We present a case study: the MusicGrid Project. Running from 2002 to 2004 with partners in several Canadian and international locations, this modestly funded initiative ran over one hundred successful multi–site education and performance sessions. The rationale, development, and operation of the project are discussed, along with general lessons learned. We believe that our experience and the opportunities and issues identified will be useful to all those interested in large–scale, video–based collaboration projects.

Canada has a high level of broadband use (Zamaria & Fletcher 2007). Canadian youth in particular ... more Canada has a high level of broadband use (Zamaria & Fletcher 2007). Canadian youth in particular are heavy users of information communication technology and statistics gathered by the Media Awareness Network show that their use of communication tools is increasing (Media ...

Cornell University - arXiv, Mar 16, 2015

Continuous interpolation of real-valued data is characterized by piecewise monotone functions on ... more Continuous interpolation of real-valued data is characterized by piecewise monotone functions on a compact metric space. Topological total variation of piecewise monotone function f : X → R is a homeomorphisminvariant generalization of 1D total variation. A varilet basis is an orthonormal collection of piecewise monotone functions {gi | i = 1. .. n}, called varilets, such that every linear combination aigi (ai ∈ R) has topological total variation |ai|. A varilet transform for f is a varilet basis for which f = αigi. Filtered versions of f result from altering the coefficients αi.

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)

A new notion of participation is at stake with advances in technologically mediated work environm... more A new notion of participation is at stake with advances in technologically mediated work environments. Insufficient bandwidth and insufficiently powerful, crudely coordinated tools resulted in distributed task-based modes of collaboration that did not allow full participation by members of the distributed design team. The emergence of Service Oriented Architectures and User-Controlled LightPaths ("intelligent infrastructure") herald the beginning of a new age where fully participatory multi-site design may become possible. This paper will briefly outline the "mise en scène" or staging of the technical configuration of the Eucalyptus project; observations and results from the creative activity of the PDS in the context of two case studies; and speculate on the implications for design activity, pedagogy, and a more robust mode of participation.

A new approach to building descriptions of English is 6utlined and programs implementing the idea... more A new approach to building descriptions of English is 6utlined and programs implementing the ideas for sentence-sized fragments are demonstrated. Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence

ArXiv, 2016

A novel topological segmentation of retinal images represents blood vessels as connected regions ... more A novel topological segmentation of retinal images represents blood vessels as connected regions in the continuous image plane, having shape-related analytic and geometric properties. This paper presents topological segmentation results from the DRIVE retinal image database.

arXiv: Trading and Market Microstructure, 2017

There is a large body of work, built on tools developed in mathematics and physics, demonstrating... more There is a large body of work, built on tools developed in mathematics and physics, demonstrating that financial market prices exhibit self-similarity at different scales. In this paper, we explore the use of analytical topology to characterize financial price series. While wavelet and Fourier transforms decompose a signal into sets of wavelets and power spectrum respectively, the approach presented herein decomposes a time series into components of its total variation. This property is naturally suited for the analysis of scaling characteristics in fractals.

Proceedings. Eleventh IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises

This paper presents a summary of multifaceted evaluation factors that we have identified through ... more This paper presents a summary of multifaceted evaluation factors that we have identified through our research with Broadband Visual Communication (BVC) projects involving multiple stakeholders. The main benefit of these evaluation factors is that they provide a general evaluation framework for multiple stakeholder projects. The factors are social infrastructure, technical infrastructure, physical space, interaction style and content.

Robots and Biological Systems: Towards a New Bionics?, 1993

This paper addresses the problem of endowing a robot manipulator with the ability to skillfully m... more This paper addresses the problem of endowing a robot manipulator with the ability to skillfully manipulate objects in its environment. We propose applying pattern matching techniques to sensory data as a mechanism for starting and stopping simple compliant motions. We describe a pattern matching task controller's role in a control hierarchy having a human supervisor at the topmost level. Control of the manipulator is shared between the supervisor and the task controller, allowing the task controller to operate the manipulator autonomously for periods of a few seconds during execution of previously rehearsed tasks. This autonomous control consists of execution of a sequence of predetermined motion states, i.e. simple compliant movements and/or applications of force, where the transitions between motion states are triggered by the pattern matcher in response to highly processed sensor data. The contents of the motion states and the discriminants used by the pattern matcher are learned during an earlier training phase.

31st Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference - Vol. 2 - (COMPSAC 2007), 2007

Most industries and organizations use collections of tools, devices, and applications that are gr... more Most industries and organizations use collections of tools, devices, and applications that are growing in complexity. New tools or applications may be acquired and old tools may become obsolete over time. They are often running on a variety of platforms, have different bandwidth and QoS requirements, and in most cases they cannot be accessed through a single point of entry. Moreover, some tools may require specific configurations done by technical experts, or require for a specific bandwidth network. To address these issues, we propose an extensible, reliable, and simple software architecture that can hide the complexity of provisioning the network, running and coordinating the tools. We introduce Eucalyptus, a service-oriented approach for creating an agile infrastructure to provision devices, applications, and their underlying networks, which we collectively refer to as resources. New resources can be custom-built or imported from a third party. They can be integrated into Eucalyptus using a set of Web Service-enabled APIs. Eucalyptus provides a single point of entry to manage and configure available resources, to launch and run them simultaneously at multiple locations, and to coordinate and monitor their activities at runtime. The streams of the events of these resources are captured and used for monitoring and diagnosing each resource. We also provide a workflow management service allowing users to orchestrate services based on the description of the resources, their dependencies and the captured streams to perform certain tasks.