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This study investigated the feasibility of developing a smart 3D learning space with multi-touch interaction on a typical large TV display. Based on a consumer 52-inch LCD TV and with little extra cost, a home-brew 52-inch large display was constructed using image-based method to capture fingertips positions. The development of the system is based on the open source Second-Life simulator-OpenSim, Sloodle, and Hippo viewer. Usability study of the system was conducted by field experiment and survey questionnaires, and the result is very promising. Pedagogical implication and guidelines for future development are addressed and discussed in details.

Acetaldehyde has been produced biologically using whole-cellPichia pastoris in a semibatch fermentor. Ethanol and air were fed continuously, and the product, acetaldehyde, was removed by the air stream. Operation of the reactor exceeded 100 h, maintaining high alcohol oxidase activity. Low cell-mass concentration (9.9 g/L) minimized product inhibition. Ethanol concentration in the broth, oxygen concentration in the air, and pH were evaluated for their effects on the fermentation process.

Currently, most city maps browsing or displaying applications only support high-end mobile devices such as PDAs or smartphones. With GSM or GPRS network widely deployed around the world, there is a continuous demand for map applications to support resources constrained mobile phones. The study presents a map-on-demand delivery scheme which utilizes the SVG and J2ME technologies to dynamically deliver maps to users' mobile phones according to their locations and devices' capability. By taking advantages of spatial locality and temporal locality, pre-fetching and buffering schemes are also developed to enhance system performance. A prototyping system has been built and demonstrated to evaluate the proposed system's feasibility. The results showed that depending on devices' memory and network bandwidth, the simplest pre-fetching and buffering algorithms might in fact outperform the more complicated ones.

Location-based data visualization employing geographical information system and information visualization provides an advanced means to assist with visual data exploration, hypothesis formation and decision making. An effective location-based data visualization system can significantly enhance the communication among decision-makers and facilitate the agreement on the most appropriate alternatives. This study presents SmartGIS, a tool integrating SVG, Web GIS, and data visualization techniques to augment the analytical capabilities of GIS-based spatial and temporal decision-making process. It provides an intuitive, interactive manipulation of SVG-based SARS map, dynamically generated from GIS database. SmartGIS provides hierarchical operations to allow a user to view SARS data at multiple levels of details on the Web. This facilitates the continuously visualizing and monitoring of SARS outbreak status. The implementation issues of SmartGIS are described and its applications to other areas are discussed.

The popularity of Internet and the emergence of wireless technology have changed people's lifestyle. In the past, as people walked around their surrounding environment, many impulse-induced transactions were deferred, mostly due to the lack of adequate technology or decision-making ability to conduct them. Although mobile shopping related research topics have been widely studied in the past few years, seldom have they been done in the issues of how to design a framework to provide timely shopping, location, and decision-making information to mobile shoppers to help them conduct transactions promptly and efficiently. This study presents an agent-based framework to fulfill the requirement of impulse-induced mobile shopping. The proposed framework utilizes agent technology, location-based information, and user preferences to provide an environment that is capable of responding to users' shopping needs at the point of impulse generation. A prototyping system of the proposed framework is built and its feasibility is discussed.