Interface[s] Montréal :: [Mobility]

[Mobility]
The new nomadic culture
The nomadic lifestyle is changing our daily lives. We no longer communicate
in the same way and, whether sedentary or on the move, anyone can be connected
to a given communications network at any given time. Taking full advantage of
this omnipresent and ubiquitous access – the telecommunications, games
and digital arts industries are continuously innovating.

Speakers:
Denis Fluet – Nortel
Pierre Boucher – Ericsson
Danny Collard – Ultra Electronics
Stéphane Coulombe – ETS, Department of Software
and IT Engineering
Michael Longford – Concordia University, Mobile Digital
Commons Network

[Denis
Fluet] Nortel
Mobility in rurual and dispersed communities, an enabler
Next generation access and wireless technologies are pushing the bandwidth.
Wireline and wireless networks are converging over common functional elements.
Those changes will significantly transform the way we are using the telecommunication
network. The relationship between the user and the content will be at the heart
of it ” “Any content, anywhere, anytime”.

Healthcare, business, education, entertainment, … all sectors will be impacted.
Nortel, Bell Canada, and the city of Chapleau have initiated a research project
on how broadband technologies and related applications will effectively change
the economy and social activities in rural and dispersed communities. City of
Chapleau will be provided with broadband telecommunication infrastructure which
should enable economic growth, social development, and enhance healthcare and
education services. Researchers from Canadian universities will be participating
in studying the transformation that the population should experience.

[Pierre
Boucher] – Ericsson
Mobile technologies: their contribution to every day life
With the integration of IP services, mobile telephony and interactive TV, new
applications are now emerging in areas such as public security, interactive
entertainment and the health sector, to name only a few. This document offers
a preview of a healthy mobile solution. The overlying objective of all healthcare
organizations is to provide more and better health to every citizen who needs
it. It may either be a patient who is sick and will be provided for by society
or it may be a healthy individual who wants to achieve more health or to have
a better quality of daily life. Many people nowadays want to lead a better life,
for instance to stop smoking, loose weight or do more physical exercise just
to live longer and thereby get a “longer” life with “more”
quality altogether. The Ericsson Healthcare Solutions will greatly enhance the
way patients and health-customers may attain both better contacts with their
healthcare professionals and the freedom of mobility. Bodily data either from
medical sensors (objective data) or patient diary responses or messaging (subjective)
are sent, in real time, by a safe and validated Ericsson Bluetooth/GPRS communication
to a central server with a hosted service. The data is available to the end
users (healthcare professionals and service chain professionals) at all times.
The end user application ensures that data may be retrieved in the form that
is best suited for the end user.

[Danny
Collard] Ultra Electronics
Ad Hoc Networks
Various events over the last few years, such as war, natural catastrophes, acts
of terrorism, etc., have exposed the fragile nature of our communications infrastructures.
These systems, based on fixed installations and managed by centralised components,
comprise many weak points and are highly susceptible to collapse. The capacity
to implement alternative networks capable of transmitting multimedia information
in just a few minutes has become an essential need at both the tactical and
civilian levels. A newly emerging technology called Ad Hoc Networks would appear
to respond to these recent concerns. These wireless networks are mobile, dynamic,
stand-alone, and do not require infrastructures or access points. They do, however,
bring about certain corollary problems relating primarily to security, broadcast
delays and traffic loads. Solutions must be developed to counter these issues.
Ad Hoc type nomadic networks will be used primarily for the deployment of tactical
and public-security networks. Does this technology have applications across
other services?

[Stéphane
Coulombe] École de technologie supérieure(ETS), Department of Software
and IT Engineering
Multimedia adaptation and transcoding for mobile applications
Because of the fast pace of technological evolution and mobile terminal market
segmentation (different models addressing different user needs), their characteristics
are very diverse. They support different multimedia formats and have different
amounts of memory, processing power, and screen resolution, etc. As a result,
efficient access to multimedia content and interoperability between mobile terminals
is seriously compromised. A solution to such problem is to adapt or transcode,
most often in a server, the multimedia content, to meet the specific characteristics
of each terminal. This presentation will provide an overview of the applications
requiring adaptation. It will then present the architectural elements of an
adaptation system and existing technologies available to develop such a system
(e.g. UAProf and the Standard Transcoding Interface). Some highly efficient
image and video transcoding algorithms are then presented. These algorithms
perform transcoding in the DCT domain and provide significantly improved performance
compared to the straightforward full decoding, processing and re-encoding. Finally,
current research areas in the field of multimedia adaptation are presented.