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Numerous municipalities employ the smart city model in large cities to improve the quality of life of their residents, utilize local resources efficiently, and save operating expenses. This model incorporates many heterogeneous technologies such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and Cloud Computing (ClCom). However, effective networking and communication protocols are required to provide the essential harmonization and control of the many system mechanisms to achieve these crucial goals. The networking requirements and characteristics of smart city applications (SCAs) are identified in this study, as well as the networking protocols that can be utilized to serve the diverse data traffic flows that are required between the dissimilar mechanisms. Additionally, we show examples of the networking designs of a few smart city systems, such as smart transport, smart building, smart home, smart grid, smart water, pipeline monitoring, and control systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An open-source management system of Web-based teaching interventions is presented that can be used in general for science curriculum courses and especially for computer science courses. The proposed solution is called System of Teaching Intelligent Interventions (STII) and facilitates the authoring, deployment, and evaluation of Web-based metaphors. This paper discusses the use of metaphors for assisting students to comprehend the substance of cognitive concepts and their basic background. STII has been applied in a particular educational scenario during the learning process of 228 students attending the course 'computer applications.' The presentation of results from a pilot evaluation of two metaphors demonstrates the usefulness of the system. The evaluation focuses on the impact of the two metaphors on student learning, and on detecting potential correlations between metaphors and students' groups. STII evaluation conclusions strongly support that multimedia metaphors can be used as an alternative instructional tool to assist students in confronting their cognitive constraints and developing functional understanding of curriculum courses. Index Terms--Internet technologies, multimedia metaphors, open learning system, teaching intervention.

Byline: Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Dimitris Kanellopoulos, Athanasios Tsakalidis The proposed techniques facilitate semantic discovery and interoperability of web services that manage and deliver web media content. As a test-bed, a web management system is discussed that provides vocational monographs for occupational guidance. The key idea of the proposed web service based architecture is that the WS of participating members share their vocational monographs and related resources, resulting in the overall system capacity increase. Mechanisms and techniques are presented concerning: an 'information desk', which provides an adaptive search user interface; discovery functions based on semantic representation of the WS' monographs; mining into monographs based on their semantic representation; a metric-based evaluation model for the web monographs; dynamic ranking of retrieved content list; consumption mechanisms for the career counsellors' local WS; e-payment; universal usability access. This analysis can be exploited in the practice of a new Occupational Guidance Policy.

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A multimedia communication system enables multimedia data's generation, storage, management, distribution, receiving, consuming, editing, sharing, and so on. In such systems, there are various security issues, which must be considered such as eavesdropping, intrusion, forgery, piracy and privacy. etc. Until now, various security solutions for multimedia communication systems have been reported, while few works have surveyed the latest research advances. This paper gives a thorough review to multimedia information system security. It introduces a general architecture of multimedia information system, and investigates some security issues in multimedia information systems. It reviews the latest security solutions such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), confidentially, protection, ownership protection, traitor tracing, secure multimedia distribution based on watermarking, forgery, detection, cop), detection, privacy-preserving data mining, secure user interface, intrusion detection and prevention. Moreover, the paper presents some hot research topics such as Trusted Computing, steganography, security in network or service convergence, security of content sharing in social networks, privacy-preserving data processing, multimedia forensics and intelligent surveillance in multimedia information system security. It is expected to benefit readers by providing the latest research progress, advising some research directions and giving a list of references about multimedia system security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet and its World Wide Web service have reshaped the promotion of cultural and tourism products. Well designed and user adaptable e-commerce websites improve business promotion as they attract more e-visitors. Multilingualism, dynamic and thus frequently updated content, email communication and searching capabilities are crucial options of websites. In this paper we empirically build an evaluation methodology to assess the technologies and services of Greek e-tourism and e-cultural websites. The primary focus of our work is to evaluate the technical capability of tourism and cultural websites and to realize the available options offered to users. A number of tourism e-commerce websites and e-museums were randomly selected and their content and technologies were analyzed based on the methodology proposed. The results of this statistical examination are analyzed and discussed. The main conclusion is that although the reviewed websites are rich in multimedia content they need to support customers more efficiently by offering more services or by refining the offered e-services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]