Cooperative Profit Sharing in Coalition-Based Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

We consider a network in which several service providers offer wireless access to their respective subscribed customers through potentially multihop routes. If providers cooperate by jointly deploying and pooling their resources, such as spectrum and infrastructure (e.g., base stations) and agree to serve each others' customers, their aggregate payoffs, and individual shares, may substantially increase through opportunistic utilization of resources. The potential of such cooperation can, however, be realized only if each provider intelligently determines with whom it would cooperate, when it would cooperate, and how it would deploy and share its resources during such cooperation. Also, developing a rational basis for sharing the aggregate payoffs is imperative for the stability of the coalitions. We model such cooperation using the theory of transferable payoff coalitional games. We show that the optimum cooperation strategy, which involves the acquisition, deployment, and allocation of the channels and base stations (to customers), can be computed as the solution of a concave or an integer optimization. We next show that the grand coalition is stable in many different settings, i.e., if all providers cooperate, there is always an operating point that maximizes the providers' aggregate payoff, while offering each a share that removes any incentive to split from the coalition. The optimal cooperation strategy and the stabilizing payoff shares can be obtained in polynomial time by respectively solving the primals and the duals of the above optimizations, using distributed computations and limited exchange of confidential information among the providers. Numerical evaluations reveal that cooperation substantially enhances individual providers' payoffs under the optimal cooperation strategy and several different payoff sharing rules.

Low cost calibrated mechanical noisemaker for hearing screening of neonates in resource constrained settings

Background & objectives: There is a need to develop an affordable and reliable tool for hearing screening of neonates in resource constrained, medically underserved areas of developing nations. This study valuates a strategy of health worker based screening of neonates using a low cost mechanical calibrated noisemaker followed up with parental monitoring of age appropriate auditory milestones for detecting severe-profound hearing impairment in infants by 6 months of age. Methods: A trained health worker under the supervision of a qualified audiologist screened 425 neonates of whom 20 had confirmed severe-profound hearing impairment. Mechanical calibrated noisemakers of 50, 60, 70 and 80 dB (A) were used to elicit the behavioural responses. The parents of screened neonates were instructed to monitor the normal language and auditory milestones till 6 months of age. This strategy was validated against the reference standard consisting of a battery of tests - namely, auditory brain stem response (ABR), otoacoustic emissions (OAE) and behavioural assessment at 2 years of age. Bayesian prevalence weighted measures of screening were calculated. Results: The sensitivity and specificity was high with least false positive referrals for. 70 and 80 dB (A) noisemakers. All the noisemakers had 100 per cent negative predictive value. 70 and 80 dB (A) noisemakers had high positive likelihood ratios of 19 and 34, respectively. The probability differences for pre- and post- test positive was 43 and 58 for 70 and 80 dB (A) noisemakers, respectively. Interpretation & conclusions: In a controlled setting, health workers with primary education can be trained to use a mechanical calibrated noisemaker made of locally available material to reliably screen for severe-profound hearing loss in neonates. The monitoring of auditory responses could be done by informed parents. Multi-centre field trials of this strategy need to be carried out to examine the feasibility of community health care workers using it in resource constrained settings of developing nations to implement an effective national neonatal hearing screening programme.

Rural electrification: Optimising the choice between decentralised renewable energy sources and grid extension

The study presents an analysis aimed at choosing between off-grid solar photovoltaic, biomass gasifier based power generation and conventional grid extension for remote village electrification. The model provides a relation between renewable energy systems and the economical distance limit (EDL) from the existing grid point, based on life cycle cost (LCC) analysis, where the LCC of energy for renewable energy systems and grid extension will match. The LCC of energy feed to the village is arrived at by considering grid availability and operating hours of the renewable energy systems. The EDL for the biomass gasifier system of 25 kW capacities is 10.5 km with 6 h of daily operation and grid availability. However, the EDL for a similar 25 kW capacity photovoltaic system is 35 km for the same number of hours of operation and grid availability. The analysis shows that for villages having low load demand situated far away from the existing grid line, biomass gasification based systems are more cost competitive than photovoltaic systems or even compared to grid extension. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Molecules Adsorbed on Carbon-Doped TiO2 Obtained from Titanium Carbide: A Visible-Light-Assisted Renewable Substrate

Titanium carbide (TiC) is an electrically conducting material with favorable electrochemical properties. In the present studies, carbon-doped TiO2 (C-TiO2) has been synthesized from TiC particles, as well as TiC films coated on stainless steel substrate via thermal annealing under various conditions. Several C-TiO2 substrates are synthesized by varying experimental, conditions and characterized by UV-visible spectroscopy, photoluminescence, X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic techniques. C-TiO2 in the dry state (in powder form as well as in film form) is subsequently used as a substrate for enhancing Raman signals corresponding to 4-mercaptobenzoic acid and 4-nitrothiophenol by utilizing chemical enhancement based on charge-transfer interactions. Carbon, a nonmetal dopant in TiO2, improves the intensities of Raman signals, compared, to undoped TiO2. Significant dependence of Raman intensity on carbon doping is observed. Ameliorated performance obtained using C-TiO2 is attributed to the presence of surface defects that originate due to carbon as a dopant, which, in turn,, triggers charge transfer between TiO2 and analyte. The C-TiO2 substrates are subsequently regenerated for repetitive use by illuminating an analyte-adsorbed substrate with visible light for a period of 5 h.

Simulated water resource impacts and livelihood implications of stakeholder-developed scenarios in the Jaldhaka Basin, India

This paper shows how multidisciplinary research can help policy makers develop policies for sustainable agricultural water management interventions by supporting a dialogue between government departments that are in charge of different aspects of agricultural development. In the Jaldhaka Basin in West Bengal, India, a stakeholder dialogue helped identify potential water resource impacts and livelihood implications of an agricultural water management rural electrification scenario. Hydrologic modelling demonstrated that the expansion of irrigation is possible with only a localized effect on groundwater levels, but cascading effects such as declining soil fertility and negative impacts from agrochemicals will need to be addressed.

HSPIR: a manually annotated heat shock protein information resource

Heat shock protein information resource (HSPIR) is a concerted database of six major heat shock proteins (HSPs), namely, Hsp70, Hsp40, Hsp60, Hsp90, Hsp100 and small HSP. The HSPs are essential for the survival of all living organisms, as they protect the conformations of proteins on exposure to various stress conditions. They are a highly conserved group of proteins involved in diverse physiological functions, including de novo folding, disaggregation and protein trafficking. Moreover, their critical role in the control of disease progression made them a prime target of research. Presently, limited information is available on HSPs in reference to their identification and structural classification across genera. To that extent, HSPIR provides manually curated information on sequence, structure, classification, ontology, domain organization, localization and possible biological functions extracted from UniProt, GenBank, Protein Data Bank and the literature. The database offers interactive search with incorporated tools, which enhances the analysis. HSPIR is a reliable resource for researchers exploring structure, function and evolution of HSPs.

Resource Usage Monitoring in Clouds

Monitoring of infrastructural resources in clouds plays a crucial role in providing application guarantees like performance, availability, and security. Monitoring is crucial from two perspectives - the cloud-user and the service provider. The cloud user’s interest is in doing an analysis to arrive at appropriate Service-level agreement (SLA) demands and the cloud provider’s interest is to assess if the demand can be met. To support this, a monitoring framework is necessary particularly since cloud hosts are subject to varying load conditions. To illustrate the importance of such a framework, we choose the example of performance being the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement and show how inappropriate provisioning of resources may lead to unexpected performance bottlenecks. We evaluate existing monitoring frameworks to bring out the motivation for building much more powerful monitoring frameworks. We then propose a distributed monitoring framework, which enables fine grained monitoring for applications and demonstrate with a prototype system implementation for typical use cases.

Power generation using wind energy in northwest Karnataka, India

On the backdrop of climate change scenario, there is emphasis on controlling emission of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Major thrust being seen worldwide as well as in India is for generation of electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind. Chitradurga area of Karnataka is identified as a suitable location for the production of electricity from wind turbines because of high wind-energy resource. The power generated and the performance of 18 wind turbines located in this region are studied based on the actual field data collected over the past seven years. Our study shows a good prospect for expansion of power production using wind turbines.

Sex and physiological state influence the rate of resource acquisition and monopolisation in urban free-ranging dogs, Canis familiaris

In animal populations, the constraints of energy and time can cause intraspecific variation in foraging behaviour. The proximate developmental mediators of such variation are often the mechanisms underlying perception and associative learning. Here, experience-dependent changes in foraging behaviour and their consequences were investigated in an urban population of free-ranging dogs, Canis familiaris by continually challenging them with the task of food extraction from specially crafted packets. Typically, males and pregnant/lactating (PL) females extracted food using the sophisticated `gap widening' technique, whereas non-pregnant/non-lactating (NPNL) females, the relatively underdeveloped `rip opening' technique. In contrast to most males and PL females (and a few NPNL females) that repeatedly used the gap widening technique and improved their performance in food extraction with experience, most NPNL females (and a few males and PL females) non-preferentially used the two extraction techniques and did not improve over successive trials. Furthermore, the ability of dogs to sophisticatedly extract food was positively related to their ability to improve their performance with experience. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that factors such as sex and physiological state can cause differences among individuals in the likelihood of learning new information and hence, in the rate of resource acquisition and monopolization.

Threats and trade-fffs in resource critical crowdsourcing tasks over networks

In recent times, crowdsourcing over social networks has emerged as an active tool for complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem faced by a planner to incen-tivize agents in the network to execute a task and also help in recruiting other agents for this purpose. We study this mecha-nism design problem under two natural resource optimization settings: (1) cost critical tasks, where the planner’s goal is to minimize the total cost, and (2) time critical tasks, where the goal is to minimize the total time elapsed before the task is executed. We define a set of fairness properties that should beideally satisfied by a crowdsourcing mechanism. We prove that no mechanism can satisfy all these properties simultane-ously. We relax some of these properties and define their ap-proximate counterparts. Under appropriate approximate fair-ness criteria, we obtain a non-trivial family of payment mech-anisms. Moreover, we provide precise characterizations of cost critical and time critical mechanisms.

Renewable Energy via Photocatalysis

The generation of renewable energy through photocatalysis is an attractive option to utilize the abundantly available solar radiation for a sustainable future. Photocatalysis refers to charge-carrier, i.e. electron and hole, mediated reactions occurring on a semiconductor surface in presence of ultraviolet or visible light radiation. Photocatalysis is a well established advanced oxidation technique for the decontamination of toxic organic pollutants to CO2 and H2O. However, the generation of energy in the form of hydrogen, hydrocarbon fuels and electricity via photocatalysis is an upcoming field with great many technical challenges towards practical implementation. This review will describe the fundamental reaction mechanism of (i) photocatalytic water splitting, (ii) photocatalytic H-2 generation in presence of different sacrificial agents, (iii) H-2 and electricity generation in a photofuel cell, (iv) photocatalytic reduction of CO2 to hydrocarbons and useful chemicals, and (v) photocatalytic water-gas shift reaction. A historic and recent perspective of the above conversion techniques, especially with regard to the development of TiO2-based and non-TiO2 materials is provided. The activity of different materials for the above reactions based on quantifiers like reaction rate, quantum yield and incident-photon-to-current efficiency is compared, and key design considerations of the ``best'' photocatalyst or photoelectrode is outlined. An overall assessment of the research area indicates that the presently achieved quantum efficiencies for the above reactions are rather moderate in the visible region, and the goal is to develop a catalyst that absorbs visible radiation, provides good charge-carrier separation, and exhibits high stability for long periods of usage.

Resource usage monitoring for KVM based virtual machines

Realization of cloud computing has been possible due to availability of virtualization technologies on commodity platforms. Measuring resource usage on the virtualized servers is difficult because of the fact that the performance counters used for resource accounting are not virtualized. Hence, many of the prevalent virtualization technologies like Xen, VMware, KVM etc., use host specific CPU usage monitoring, which is coarse grained. In this paper, we present a performance monitoring tool for KVM based virtualized machines, which measures the CPU overhead incurred by the hypervisor on behalf of the virtual machine along-with the CPU usage of virtual machine itself. This fine-grained resource usage information, provided by the above tool, can be used for diverse situations like resource provisioning to support performance associated QoS requirements, identification of bottlenecks during VM placements, resource profiling of applications in cloud environments, etc. We demonstrate a use case of this tool by measuring the performance of web-servers hosted on a KVM based virtualized server.

Haemophilus influenzae Genome Database (HIGDB): A single point web resource for Haemophilus influenzae

Background: Haemophilus influenzae (H. Influenzae) is the causative agent of pneumonia, bacteraemia and meningitis. The organism is responsible for large number of deaths in both developed and developing countries. Even-though the first bacterial genome to be sequenced was that of H. Influenzae, there is no exclusive database dedicated for H. Influenzae. This prompted us to develop the Haemophilus influenzae Genome Database (HIGDB). Methods: All data of HIGDB are stored and managed in MySQL database. The HIGDB is hosted on Solaris server and developed using PERL modules. Ajax and JavaScript are used for the interface development. Results: The HIGDB contains detailed information on 42,741 proteins, 18,077 genes including 10 whole genome sequences and also 284 three dimensional structures of proteins of H. influenzae. In addition, the database provides ``Motif search'' and ``GBrowse''. The HIGDB is freely accessible through the URL:http://bioserverl.physicslisc.ernetin/HIGDB/. Discussion: The HIGDB will be a single point access for bacteriological, clinical, genomic and proteomic information of H. influenzae. The database can also be used to identify DNA motifs within H. influenzae genomes and to compare gene or protein sequences of a particular strain with other strains of H. influenzae. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Benchmarking sustainability of Indian electricity system: An indicator approach

India needs to significantly increase its electricity consumption levels, in a sustainable manner, if it has to ensure rapid economic development, a goal that remains the most potent tool for delivering adaptation capacity to its poor who will suffer the worst consequences of climate change. Resource/supply constraints faced by conventional energy sources, techno-economic constraints faced by renewable energy sources, and the bounds imposed by climate change on fossil fuel use are likely to undermine India's quest for having a robust electricity system that can effectively contribute to achieving accelerated, sustainable and inclusive economic growth. One possible way out could be transitioning into a sustainable electricity system, which is a trade-off solution having taken into account the economic, social and environmental concerns. As a first step toward understanding this transition, we contribute an indicator based hierarchical multidimensional framework as an analytical tool for sustainability assessment of electricity systems, and validate it for India's national electricity system. We evaluate Indian electricity system using this framework by comparing it with a hypothetical benchmark sustainable electrical system, which was created using best indicator values realized across national electricity systems in the world. This framework, we believe, can be used to examine the social, economic and environmental implications of the current Indian electricity system as well as setting targets for future development. The analysis with the indicator framework provides a deeper understanding of the system, identify and quantify the prevailing sustainability gaps and generate specific targets for interventions. We use this framework to compute national electricity system sustainability index (NESSI) for India. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.