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Publications

Publications by CSE

2016

On the Cost of Safe Storage for Public Clouds: an Experimental Evaluation

Authors
Burihabwa, D; Pontes, R; Felber, P; Maia, F; Mercier, H; Oliveira, R; Paulo, J; Schiavoni, V;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF 2016 IEEE 35TH SYMPOSIUM ON RELIABLE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS (SRDS)

Abstract
Cloud-based storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are increasingly popular for storing enterprise data, and they have already become the de facto choice for cloud-based backup of hundreds of millions of regular users. Drawn by the wide range of services they provide, no upfront costs and 24/7 availability across all personal devices, customers are well-aware of the benefits that these solutions can bring. However, most users tend to forget-or worse ignore-some of the main drawbacks of such cloud-based services, namely in terms of privacy. Data entrusted to these providers can be leaked by hackers, disclosed upon request from a governmental agency's subpoena, or even accessed directly by the storage providers (e.g., for commercial benefits). While there exist solutions to prevent or alleviate these problems, they typically require direct intervention from the clients, like encrypting their data before storing it, and reduce the benefits provided such as easily sharing data between users. This practical experience report studies a wide range of security mechanisms that can be used atop standard cloud-based storage services. We present the details of our evaluation testbed and discuss the design choices that have driven its implementation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art techniques with varying security guarantees responding to user-assigned security and privacy criteria. Our results reveal the various trade-offs of the different techniques by means of representative workloads on top of industry-grade storage services.

2016

Does 3D 360 video enhance user's VR experience?: An Evaluation Study

Authors
Bessa, Maximino; Melo, Miguel; Narciso, David; Barbosa, Luis; Raposo, JoseVasconcelos;

Publication
Proceedings of the XVII International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Interacción 2016, Salamanca, Spain, September 13 - 16, 2016

Abstract
Technology for virtual reality has evolved at a fast pace and so is its affordability. Equipment such as head-mounted displays are now available for the average consumer at reasonable prices and this potentiates the use of contents such as video 360 in a more natural way. The purpose of this study was to measure the sense of presence and cybersickness comparing subjects by gender while experiencing a virtual reality application composed by type of VIDEO (360 video and 3D 360 video) using an head-mounted display. A Portuguese version of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) was used together with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). The results have revealed that there are no significant differences across 2D and 3D videos in the sense of presence or cybersickness. © 2016 ACM.

2016

Multiple robot operations for maritime search and rescue in euRathlon 2015 competition

Authors
Matos, A; Martins, A; Dias, A; Ferreira, B; Almeida, JM; Ferreira, H; Amaral, G; Figueiredo, A; Almeida, R; Silva, F;

Publication
OCEANS 2016 - SHANGHAI

Abstract
This paper presents results of the INESC TEC participation in the maritime environment (both at surface and underwater) integrated in the ICARUS team in the euRathlon 2015 robotics search and rescue competition. These relate to the marine robots from INESC TEC, surface (ROAZ USV) and underwater (MARES AUV) autonomous vehicles participation in multiple tasks such as situation assessment, underwater mapping, leak detection or victim localization. This participation was integrated in the ICARUS Team resulting of the EU funded project aimed to develop robotic tools for large scale disasters. The coordinated search and rescue missions were performed with an initial surface survey providing data for AUV mission planning and execution. A situation assessment bathymetry map, sidescan sonar imaging and location of structures, underwater leaks and victims were achieved, with the global ICARUS team (involving sea, air and land coordinated robots) participating in the final grand Challenge and achieving the second place.

2016

The Impact of Body Position on the Usability of Multisensory Virtual Environments: Case study of a virtual bicycle

Authors
Melo, Miguel; Rocha, Tania; Barbosa, Luis; Bessa, Maximino;

Publication
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion, DSAI 2016, Vila Real, Portugal, December 1-3, 2016

Abstract
There is a trend towards the use of Virtual Reality (VR) environments and its evolution has promoted new interaction approaches so there is a need for studying a number of factors that can have impact on its usability. This paper studies the impact of the body position on the usability of VR environments. For the effect, a case study was undertaken based on a bicycle ride that considers two body positions: riding the bicycle seated with the feet on the pedals and hands in the handlebar; and standing with the feet on the ground and the hands on the handlebar. On both cases they had control over the bicycle (steer and brakes). These two body positions were considered as they will allow studying in detail the impact of the different body positions: the first condition mimics the real body position of the depicted scenario while the second condition tests an alternate body position. Results regarding the system's effectiveness have shown an 100% success rate as all participants concluded the task successfully and there were no dropouts. The efficiency results have revealed that the more the participants used the VE the less the number of errors they made and that the completion time differences between the tested conditions were insignificant (> 0.5 seconds). As for satisfaction, participants reported a preference towards the standing position. Furthermore, results reveal that body position has impact on the users' performance but it does not necessarily affect their satisfaction over the virtual experience. © 2016 ACM.

2016

The impact of different exposure times to 360 degrees video experience on the sense of presence

Authors
Melo, M; Sampaio, S; Barbosa, L; Vasconcelos Raposo, J; Bessa, M;

Publication
2016 23RD PORTUGUESE MEETING ON COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND INTERACTION (EPCGI)

Abstract
Equipment such as head-mounted displays are now available for the average consumer at affordable prices. This promotes the usage of this equipment for content consumption and demonstrations, thus it becomes important to establish the best practices for using this technology, namely guidelines in what concerns the recommended exposure time. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to study the impact of the exposure time on the feeling of presence while watching 360 degrees video using an head-mounted display. The independent variables of the study are the exposure time to the stimuli and gender of participants. There were tested four different exposure times: 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes and 7 minutes. For measuring presence, it was a Portuguese version of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) which considers also 3 presence subscales: spatial presence, realism and involvement. The results have revealed that there are few statistically significant differences for the given exposure times at the level of the sense of presence, apart from spatial presence and realism subscales, which consistently increased with exposure time for male participants and slightly decreased for female ones. Men always needed longer exposure times (> 1 minute) to report the highest scores, while women had the opposite behaviour, frequently reporting maximum scores for the shortest experiences.

2016

GTE-Rank: A time-aware search engine to answer time-sensitive queries

Authors
Campos, R; Dias, G; Jorge, A; Nunes, C;

Publication
INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT

Abstract
In the web environment, most of the queries issued by users are implicit by nature. Inferring the different temporal intents of this type of query enhances the overall temporal part of the web search results. Previous works tackling this problem usually focused on news queries, where the retrieval of the most recent results related to the query are usually sufficient to meet the user's information needs. However, few works have studied the importance of time in queries such as "Philip Seymour Hoffman" where the results may require no recency at all. In this work, we focus on this type of queries named "time-sensitive queries" where the results are preferably from a diversified time span, not necessarily the most recent one. Unlike related work, we follow a content-based approach to identify the most important time periods of the query and integrate time into a re-ranking model to boost the retrieval of documents whose contents match the query time period. For that purpose, we define a linear combination of topical and temporal scores, which reflects the relevance of any web document both in the topical and temporal dimensions, thus contributing to improve the effectiveness of the ranked results across different types of queries. Our approach relies on a novel temporal similarity measure that is capable of determining the most important dates for a query, while filtering out the non-relevant ones. Through extensive experimental evaluation over web corpora, we show that our model offers promising results compared to baseline approaches. As a result of our investigation, we publicly provide a set of web services and a web search interface so that the system can be graphically explored by the research community.

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