Until now, emulation of legacy architectures has mostly been seen as a tool for hobbyists and as technical nostalgia. However, in a world in which research and development is producing almost entirely digital artifacts, new and efficient concepts for preservation and re-use are required. Furthermore, a significant amount of today's cultural work is purely digital. Hence, emulation technology appeals to a wider, non-technical, user-group since many of our digital objects cannot be re-used properly without a suitable runtime environment. This article presents a scalable and cost-effective Cloud-based Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) architecture, enabling a wide range of non-technical users to access emulation technology in order to re-enact their digital belongings. Together with a distributed storage and data management model we present an implementation from the domain of digital art to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed EaaS architecture.

Mobile telephony and mobile communication are both crucial and critical infrastructures for today's society and contribute to its security and safety. In contrast to landline telephony with its physically protectable medium, mobile telephony utilizes air and electromagnetic waves as communication medium, which cannot be easily protected. Due to the specific design and the openly shared medium, mobile communication infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to threats linked to a wide range of security issues and failures caused by overload and blocking. Especially in critical situations like human stampede or natural disasters, the network could break down while remaining physically intact. That is contrary to the desired behavior in catastrophe scenarios, as the infrastructure is meant to provide emergency call functionality and communication for the rescue teams. While traditional usage scenarios even for major events are well researched, there is a lack of knowledge on how to make mobile telephony networks more resilient to unpredictable load in disaster events. We propose a test environment to analyze such scenarios using the example of GSM mobile telephony networks. Furthermore, we identify relevant network parameters and discuss their impact on network resilience. The resulting test bed is based on real hardware and open-source software in order to create a realistic and defined environment which includes all aspects of the air interface in mobile telephony networks and is capable of simulating an overload situation in a defined and fully controlled environment.

Browsing video on mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs requires new interface designs and interaction concepts because of their small screen sizes. In this paper, we present four different interfaces which enable users to skim video at different replay speed levels: An interface supporting flicking similar to text browsing on an iPhone™, an elastic slider, and two variations which also allow for interactive speed manipulation. Based on a heuristic evaluation with all four designs, revised versions of the two most promising ones have been implemented. A comparative user study proved the usefulness of the proposed designs. Both interfaces showed the same performance (measured in time needed to solve typical browsing tasks) but achieved different results in subjective user assessments.

Small screen sizes and limited interaction possibilities appear to be the main challenges when developing video browsing interfaces for mobile devices, such as smartphones and PDAs. In this demo, we present several pen-based designs for interactive video browsing on a PDA. Each implementation enables users to skim a video along the timeline at different speeds and granularity levels. Using the whole touch-sensitive screen as input area, different pen movements are mapped to different browsing behaviors, offering more functionality and creating a better user experience.