Interactive whiteboard technologies (IWBs) are becoming pervasive in the school instruction in many parts of the world. The use of single screen based IWB environments are typically used by the teachers to attract interests of students and to interact with them. However, the available display space in such environments is a problematic issue for effective instruction. The research presented in this study looks into the use of IWB with an additional screen in order to extend the display space with the aim to increase the interests of students and interactions between teachers and students. Two investigations were undertaken to analyze the experiences of the teachers in the use of IWB. Based on the findings, this study presents a teaching assistance tool and suggests two teaching scenarios for teachers to support their teaching activities in a dual screen environment using IWBs.

Intelligent home appliances and friendly human-machine interface design can provide a more comfortable living space for residents in smart home. However, excessive home automation sometimes may lose the sense of reality on operating home appliances. Virtual objects in smart home are not real home furnishings, and equipments, but it has the ability of actual home appliances or equipment to provide relevant home services through ubiquitous computing, virtual human-machine interface. That is, virtual objects retain the original features of appliance operation without losing high-technical and home-automation utilization on it. In this paper, we design a virtual object being friendly human-machine interaction to control the music playback service in smart home. The virtual object is called virtual compact disc (CD) album, virtual-CD. The residents can take a virtual-CD, and do some operating gestures and entity movements on it, and then the music will be played, paused, and stopped according to various operations of virtual object in smart home. By the way, the resident can easily enjoy high-technical home service without losing traditional appliance operation in smart home.

This paper presents our efforts on implementing an all-lPv6 SOHO (small office and home office) router for network users to connect all-IPv6 networks easily. Our proposed SOHO router is developed on embedded Linux system, which model is ADM 5120 using Linux-kernel 2.4.18 that supports IPv6 and produced by Infineon-ADMTek Inc., it can satisfy the four basic demands of a generic SOHO router, such as auto-configuration for network setting, packet routing for network traffic, packet filtering for network security, and small-sized and low-priced demands.

Describes a novel framework, which supports scalable and efficient multicast transmission for distributed multimedia applications, referred to as SEMA. SEMA has two key features: scalable and efficient multicasting, and information classification. In the proposed SEMA, the scalable and efficient multicast mechanism takes time constraints of multimedia transmission into account. Hence, it is suitable for multimedia transmission having the real-time properties. Simulations are performed to justify the scalability and efficiency features. Additionally, information classification can encourage multimedia servers to decompose original multimedia streams into several layered sub-streams such that each sub-stream has part of the presentation capability and can be transmitted to media clients on a chosen multicast group. Media clients then can choose what sub-streams to receive according to their playback capability.

Complete verification of communication protocols is usually very hard to achieve due to the combinatorial state space explosion problem. Probability based partial verification provides an alternative solution to solve this problem. We adopt a Timed Communicating State Machine (TCSM), which belongs to the Extended Communicating Finite State Machine (ECFSM) model, to formally specify protocols that incorporate timed properties as part of their specifications. Based on the TCSM model, we propose a probabilistic timed verification scheme that is based on the occurrence rates of communicating entities' transitions and occurrence probabilities of channel entities' transitions. Using our probabilistic partial timed protocol verification scheme, an Estelle based Probabilistic Partial Timed Protocol verification system, which is called PTPVS, is developed on SUN SPARC workstations. In this way, protocol designers can use PTPVS to design and partially verify Estelle based protocol specifications with time properties.

We propose a Timed Communicating State Machine (TCSM), which belongs to the extended state transition model, to formally specify protocols that incorporate timed properties as part of their specifications. Based on the TCSM model we also propose (1) a timed global state reachability analysis that takes time bounds and predicates into consideration, and (2) a probabilistic timed verification scheme that is based on the occurrence rates of communicating entities' transitions and the occurrence probabilities of channel entities' transitions. In this way, probability-based partial timed verification can be achieved for extended-state-transition-specified timed protocols.

Protocol verification is an activity to assure the correctness of communication protocols. Global state reachability analysis is one of the most straightforward and easily automated protocol verification methods. This paper proposes an incremental protocol verification method for the Extended Communicating Finite State Machine (ECFSM) model. Incremental protocol verification allows protocols to be modified at the rune time of global state reachability analysis. Then, instead of re-exploring the modified protocols from scratch, global state reachability analysis is continued incrementally at the modification point. To enhance the efficiency, the proposed method incorporates the dead and live variables concept that is used in Chu and Liu's global state reduction technique (Chu and Liu, 1989). Using the proposed incremental protocol verification method, incremental protocol design environments are achievable for ECFSM-based Formal Description Techniques (FDTs), e.g. ISO's Estelle. Our application of the proposed method to Estelle is also briefly introduced in this paper.

Formal description techniques (FDTs) provide formal and abstract ways to specify what protocols have to do and what the features of the protocols need. Protocol verification is a process for detecting logical errors, such as deadlock, unspecified receptions, and channel overflow errors, in communication protocols. Estelle is a FDT defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for protocol specifications. The authors present an incremental protocol verification technique and an Estelle interpreter which accepts Estelle protocol specifications for incremental protocol verification.>