Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed the Knowledge Acquisition Ubiquitous Agent Infrastructure (KAUAI), a framework for gathering and analyzing data from mobile devices in the field without the need for central repositories or back-end systems, which could enable users to quickly send information directly to colleagues in control centers or bases. The researchers say KAUAI takes advantage of the increased power and functionality of the latest mobile devices, which enables them to perform computational tasks. KAUAI is a Java-based mobile agent framework that makes each mobile device a part of a distributed database that can be queried centrally or by other mobile devices. The infrastructure runs on both the standard J2SE Java Virtual Machine and a mobile JVM for Windows Mobile called CrE-ME. “Distributed solutions outperform the centralized solution in terms of speed for each query, and the speed of the distributed search depends on the amount of query-related data in the system,” the researchers write.
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An Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) study examined how appearance, motion quality, and other characteristics of computer-generated characters impact the moral and ethical decisions of their viewers. The research found that the decisions of men were strongly affected by presentational aspects of the simulated woman, while women’s decisions were not. In the study, a simulated female character, whose photorealism and motion quality were varied in four ways, presented participants with an ethical problem related to sexual conduct and marital infidelity. The changes had no significant effect on female viewers, while male viewers were much more likely to rule against the character when her visual appearance was obviously computer generated. “Although it is difficult to generalize, I think the general trend is that both men and women are more sympathetic to real human characters than to simulated human characters,” says IUPUI professor Karl F. MacDorman. The findings could impact the design of future systems created to facilitate medical decision-making and crime reenactments.
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