Advances in base- and mobile-station aided cooperative wireless communications : An overview

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of research interest in cooperative wireless communications in both academia and industry. This article presents a simple overview of the pivotal topics in both mobile station (MS)- and base station (BS)- assisted cooperation in the context of cellular radio systems. Owing to the ever-increasing amount of literature in this particular field, this article is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to serve as a roadmap by assembling a representative sample of recent results and to stimulate further research. The emphasis is initially on relay-base cooperation, relying on network coding, followed by the design of cross-layer cooperative protocols conceived for MS cooperation and the concept of coalition network element (CNE)-assisted BS cooperation. Then, a range of complexity and backhaul traffic reduction techniques that have been proposed for BS cooperation are reviewed. A more detailed discussion is provided in the context of MS cooperation concerning the pros and cons of dispensing with high-complexity, power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, generalized design guidelines, conceived for cooperative wireless communications, are presented.

Online intra-task device scheduling for hard real-time systems

A large part of power dissipation in a system is generated by I/O devices. Increasingly these devices provide power saving mechanisms, inter alia to enhance battery life. While I/O device scheduling has been studied in the past for realtime systems, the use of energy resources by these scheduling algorithms may be improved. These approaches are crafted considering a very large overhead of device transitions. Technology enhancements have allowed the hardware vendors to reduce the device transition overhead and energy consumption. We propose an intra-task device scheduling algorithm for real time systems that allows to shut-down devices while ensuring system schedulability. Our results show an energy gain of up to 90% when compared to the techniques proposed in the state-of-the-art.

SPARTS: simulator for power aware and real-time systems

Real-time systems demand guaranteed and predictable run-time behaviour in order to ensure that no task has missed its deadline. Over the years we are witnessing an ever increasing demand for functionality enhancements in the embedded real-time systems. Along with the functionalities, the design itself grows more complex. Posed constraints, such as energy consumption, time, and space bounds, also require attention and proper handling. Additionally, efficient scheduling algorithms, as proven through analyses and simulations, often impose requirements that have significant run-time cost, specially in the context of multi-core systems. In order to further investigate the behaviour of such systems to quantify and compare these overheads involved, we have developed the SPARTS, a simulator of a generic embedded real- time device. The tasks in the simulator are described by externally visible parameters (e.g. minimum inter-arrival, sporadicity, WCET, BCET, etc.), rather than the code of the tasks. While our current implementation is primarily focused on our immediate needs in the area of power-aware scheduling, it is designed to be extensible to accommodate different task properties, scheduling algorithms and/or hardware models for the application in wide variety of simulations. The source code of the SPARTS is available for download at [1].

Race-to-halt energy saving strategies

Energy consumption is one of the major issues for modern embedded systems. Early, power saving approaches mainly focused on dynamic power dissipation, while neglecting the static (leakage) energy consumption. However, technology improvements resulted in a case where static power dissipation increasingly dominates. Addressing this issue, hardware vendors have equipped modern processors with several sleep states. We propose a set of leakage-aware energy management approaches that reduce the energy consumption of embedded real-time systems while respecting the real-time constraints. Our algorithms are based on the race-to-halt strategy that tends to run the system at top speed with an aim to create long idle intervals, which are used to deploy a sleep state. The effectiveness of our algorithms is illustrated with an extensive set of simulations that show an improvement of up to 8% reduction in energy consumption over existing work at high utilization. The complexity of our algorithms is smaller when compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. We also eliminate assumptions made in the related work that restrict the practical application of the respective algorithms. Moreover, a novel study about the relation between the use of sleep intervals and the number of pre-emptions is also presented utilizing a large set of simulation results, where our algorithms reduce the experienced number of pre-emptions in all cases. Our results show that sleep states in general can save up to 30% of the overall number of pre-emptions when compared to the sleep-agnostic earliest-deadline-first algorithm.

Energy-aware task mapping onto heterogeneous platforms using DVFS and sleep states

Heterogeneous multicore platforms are becoming an interesting alternative for embedded computing systems with limited power supply as they can execute specific tasks in an efficient manner. Nonetheless, one of the main challenges of such platforms consists of optimising the energy consumption in the presence of temporal constraints. This paper addresses the problem of task-to-core allocation onto heterogeneous multicore platforms such that the overall energy consumption of the system is minimised. To this end, we propose a two-phase approach that considers both dynamic and leakage energy consumption: (i) the first phase allocates tasks to the cores such that the dynamic energy consumption is reduced; (ii) the second phase refines the allocation performed in the first phase in order to achieve better sleep states by trading off the dynamic energy consumption with the reduction in leakage energy consumption. This hybrid approach considers core frequency set-points, tasks energy consumption and sleep states of the cores to reduce the energy consumption of the system. Major value has been placed on a realistic power model which increases the practical relevance of the proposed approach. Finally, extensive simulations have been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In the best-case, savings up to 18% of energy are reached over the first fit algorithm, which has shown, in previous works, to perform better than other bin-packing heuristics for the target heterogeneous multicore platform.

Parodies satiriques et documentaires expressionnistes : la représentation critique de la célébrité dans l'œuvre cinématographique de William Klein

Thèse de doctorat effectuée en cotutelle au Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques, Faculté des arts et des sciences, Université de Montréal et à l’Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l'audiovisuel (IRCAV), Arts et Médias, ED 267, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

The Evolution of Media Coverage of Historical Sports Controversies

This thesis will cover sports controversies throughout the 20th Century in the context of the media’s newspaper coverage of the events. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal, the debate over American participation in the 1936 Olympics, and Muhammad Ali’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, standing as a notorious public figure, and conscientious objection to the Vietnam War will represent the three sports controversies. The media’s adherence to cultural norms is clear in all three cases. The consistent devotion to the cultural and racial atmosphere of their respective eras was constant and helped to perpetuate accepted, mainstream cultural attitudes. Cultural and racial norms were followed in the coverage of the three discussed controversies. The anti-Semitism and racially intolerant sentiments in America during great waves of immigration in the early 1900s allowed for journalists to freely vilify Jews as corrupters of baseball and the ballplayers who were rumored to have thrown the 1919 World Series. The white ballplayers were supported in the press, who protected their own and blamed outsiders. Jim Crow and the Americanization movement forced African American and Jewish newspapers to limit their journalistic bias on both sides of the debate over American participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The white, mainstream press was void of bias as the spirit of isolationism in America triumphed over journalist’s leanings in the Olympic debate. The racial tension created by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s created an atmosphere that allowed mainstream journalists to heap endless criticism on Muhammad Ali as he gained fame. By portraying him as a villain of society as both a religious radical and traitor to America, journalists created a common enemy in the minds of white America. In all three cases, a pattern of journalists expressing the state of cultural and racial norms of the era is present and significant.

Hikayat Raja Kulawandu : manuscript, 1838

Title from f. 1r.

Hikayat Darma Taʻsia : manuscript, 1838

According to the colophon (f. 68r), copy completed in Dhū al-Ḥijjah 1253 [February 1838] in the hand of Muhammad Ali bin Abdul Latif Munsyi.

Original papers relative to Tanjore, containing all the letters which passed, and the conferences which were held, between his Highness the Habob of Arcot and Lord Pigot on the subject of the restoration of Tanjore. Together with the material part of Lord Pigot's last dispatch to the East India Company. The whole connected by a narrative and illustrated with notes and observations.

Mode of access: Internet.

Acoustic and device feature fusion for load recognition

Appliance-specific Load Monitoring (LM) provides a possible solution to the problem of energy conservation which is becoming increasingly challenging, due to growing energy demands within offices and residential spaces. It is essential to perform automatic appliance recognition and monitoring for optimal resource utilization. In this paper, we study the use of non-intrusive LM methods that rely on steady-state appliance signatures for classifying most commonly used office appliances, while demonstrating their limitation in terms of accurately discerning the low-power devices due to overlapping load signatures. We propose a multi-layer decision architecture that makes use of audio features derived from device sounds and fuse it with load signatures acquired from energy meter. For the recognition of device sounds, we perform feature set selection by evaluating the combination of time-domain and FFT-based audio features on the state of the art machine learning algorithms. Further, we demonstrate that our proposed feature set which is a concatenation of device audio feature and load signature significantly improves the device recognition accuracy in comparison to the use of steady-state load signatures only.

Characterization and identification of phenol degrading bacteria isolated from industrial waste

Phenol is a toxic organic pollutant to living cells and its biodegradation is considered the best method due to its environment friendly nature and cost effectiveness. In this study, eight bacterial strains were isolated through enrichment on mineral salt media supplemented with 300 mgL -1 phenol. The isolated strains were identified by 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis and belonged to genera: Rhodococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Lysinibacillus, Comamonas, Microbacterium, Pseudomonas and Halomonas. The results of phenol biodegradation experiments (conducted at pH 7 and 30°C temperature) showed that the strains could degrade 750 mg L -1 phenol within 40 to 96 hours. The average phenol degradation rate by the strains was 12.5 to 34.8 mgL -1 h-1. The most rapid phenol degradation was observed for Rhodococcus sp. NCCP-309 and Rhodococcus sp. NCCP-312, whereas, Stenotrophomonas sp. NCCP-311, Lysinibacillus sp. NCCP-313, Comamonas sp. NCCP-314 and Microbacterium sp. NCCP-351 took longer time in phenol degradation. The results of our study suggested that these strains are efficient in phenol biodegradation and can be used for the bioremediation of waste water containing phenol.

Molecular identification and characterization of Pseudomonas sp. NCCP-407 for phenol degradation isolated from industrial waste

Phenol is a toxic pollutant found in effluent of numerous industries and its elimination is a foremost challenge. The utilization of bacteria plays a crucial role in phenol bioremediation. For isolation of phenol degrading bacteria, sample was collected from industrial waste and enriched in mineral salt medium (MSM) contained 300 mg/L phenol. The strain was identified based on 16S rRNA gene analysis as Pseudomonas species and the phylogenetic analysis affiliated the strain with Pseudomonas monteilii (AF064458) as the most closely related species. Phenol tolerance of the strain in MSM supplemented with various concentrations of phenol indicates that the strain NCCP-407 can grow best at 750 mg L-1 phenol. The strain showed complete degradation of 750 mg L-1 phenol in 56 hours when supplement as a sole source of carbon and energy with the average degradation rate of 28 mg L-1h-1. The doubling time was recorded approximately as 12.49 h-1. The present study suggests that this strain is efficient in phenol degradation and can be used in treatment of wastewater containing phenol.