Soggiorno di tre mesi come Visiting Researcher

Novembre 2010

We propose a combination of technologies for information encoding and for multimedia annotation to enrich interaction with paper documents and object labels, both in desktop and mobile settings. We argue that combining immediate access to online information from physical support with creation and retrieval of annotations, while keeping in focus the context of their creation, would increase awareness about products, processes and situations, and provide new ways of interaction based on tangible objects. Spatial structures, due to their homogeneity, are well suited to the definition of parallel programs. The Movie-based Programming Framework allows users to specify both computations on regular networks of processors and visualizations of the computation progress as processors in nodes are activated. Computations over spatial structures are specified by composing independent views on propagation of control flows and formulae defining local computations: a mask specified by a shape pattern indicates which nodes have to be active during a specific phase of the computation; a visit pattern defines the propagation law for actual processor activation. By combining these types of patterns, it is possible to achieve complicated forms of mask specification. Dedicated languages and the corresponding environments have been defined to allow users to generate masks and laws, to which there corresponds the automatic generation of executable code, and to observe the evolution of the resulting computational processes. The paper demonstrates some principles and examples of shape and visit patterns construction.