In this paper, a mobile competition game was developed in the form of a competitive board game for engaging students in learning local cultural. The students were asked to learn with the mobile game by throwing a dice to determine their moves on a tablet computer. Each move of the mobile game was related to a real-world observation task or an online information-searching question. The former aimed to guide the students to acquire knowledge and gain experiences via observing real-world targets, while the latter aimed to help the students obtain supplementary materials from the web. An experiment was conducted to collect feedback from students. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach significantly prompted the students' interests in learning local culture.

Because of the unique feature of platform-independent and the advantages of easy-to-develop and easy-to-deploy, Java-based applications are widely adopted by large-scale software-intensive information systems, and the monitoring-related functions in such environments are becoming more and more important. One single Application Server can deploy multiple instances of applications in Java EE environments, but the support of Application Server monitor tools does not evolve as the progress of Application Server itself. This paper will propose a new monitor architecture “Thread-based Monitor System Architecture (TMSA)”, which will exercise Thread-based technologies to detect and analyze the conditions of resource-leakage in Application Server, and proactively quarantine and terminate the potential abnormal resource-leakage processes, in order to increase the stability of the whole system dramatically.

Memory leaks generated by a running program may exhaust memory resources and degrade system performance. It is hard to reproduce these kinds of leaks, let alone to identify and fix them early in the development phase. Thus online memory leak detection is required. In this paper we propose a two-phase approach to the online memory leak detection problem for Java programs. In phase one (offline analysis), the user executes the investigated program for a while and analyzes its heap with the proposed agent. The agent then summarizes the total occupied bytes of data structures in the heap offline, and the user is then able to select classes whose object instances seem to be potential leaks by examining the total occupied bytes summary. In phase two (online monitoring), to reduce the space and time overhead at runtime, the agent monitors online the objects of selected classes instead of monitoring all objects in the heap. The approach reports the last accessed time and location (including the source file name and the line number) of each leak candidate, with which the user can identify and fix leaks in the program.

State management is a basic requirement for multiuser virtual environments (VEs) such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Current MMOGs rely on centralized server-clusters that possess inherent scalability bottlenecks and are expensive to adopt and deploy. In this paper, we propose Voronoi state management (VSM) to maintain object states for peer-to-peer-based virtual worlds. By dynamically partitioning the VE with Voronoi diagrams and aggregating game states of overloaded nodes onto superpeers, VSM supports existing consistency control to enable scalable, load balanced, and fault tolerant VE state management. As both client and server-side resources are utilized collaboratively, VSM also integrates both client-server and peer-to-peer VE designs in a unified approach.

Seeking answers to questions is a natural part of our learning and social interactions. Although search engines, web-based forums, and inquiries to friends via e-mails or instant messengers are all methods we use today, in many cases, much time is still spent to search, organize, or wait for responses. If knowledgable people can be found online to answer questions in real-time, then the time spent to browse webpages, wait for forum responses, or ask multiple people may be much reduced. In this position paper, we propose Connet, a peer-to-peer (P2P)-based people search system that helps people to have questions answered in real-time by knowledgable contacts via people's collective social networks. Users share successful experiences of finding responders and achieve greater efficiency when seeking answers to everyday questions. Connet relies on similarity measures between historic and new questions asked, and the trust among mutual friends, to provide more timely question-answering mechanisms. Meanwhile, it also enables a new type of online interactions with the friends of friends.

Interactive 3D content on Internet has yet become popular due to its typically large volume and the limited network bandwidth. Progressive content transmission, or 3D streaming, thus is necessary to enable real-time content interactions. However, the heavy data and processing requirements of 3D streaming challenge the scalability of client-server delivery methods. We propose the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for 3D streaming, and argue that due to the non-linear access patterns of 3D content, P2P 3D streaming is a new class of applications apart from existing media streaming and requires new investigations. We also present FLoD, the first P2P 3D streaming framework that allows clients of 3D virtual globe or virtual environment (VE) applications to obtain relevant data from other clients while minimizing server resource usage. To demonstrate how FLoD applies to real-world scenarios, we build a prototype system that adapts JPEG 2000-based 3D mesh streaming for P2P delivery. Experiments show that server-side bandwidth usage can thus be reduced, while simulations indicate that P2P 3D streaming is fundamentally more scalable than client-server approaches.