Inferring Energy Bounds via Static Program Analysis and Evolutionary Modeling of Basic Blocks

The ever increasing number and complexity of energy-bound devices (such as the ones used in Internet of Things applications, smart phones, and mission critical systems) pose an important challenge on techniques to optimize their energy consumption and to verify that they will perform their function within the available energy budget. In this work we address this challenge from the software point of view and propose a novel parametric approach to estimating tight bounds on the energy consumed by program executions that are practical for their application to energy verification and optimization. Our approach divides a program into basic (branchless) blocks and estimates the maximal and minimal energy consumption for each block using an evolutionary algorithm. Then it combines the obtained values according to the program control flow, using static analysis, to infer functions that give both upper and lower bounds on the energy consumption of the whole program and its procedures as functions on input data sizes. We have tested our approach on (C-like) embedded programs running on the XMOS hardware platform. However, our method is general enough to be applied to other microprocessor architectures and programming languages. The bounds obtained by our prototype implementation can be tight while remaining on the safe side of budgets in practice, as shown by our experimental evaluation.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854). Improved version of the one presented at the HIP3ES 2016 workshop (v1): more experimental results (added benchmark to Table 1, added figure for new benchmark, added Table 3), improved Fig. 1, added Fig.

Mobile Banking for Empowerment Muslim Women Entrepreneur: Evidence From Asia (Indonesia and Bangladesh)

Objective - Women entrepreneurs have positive contribution to the household economy in particular, and the sustainable economic development in general. Nevertheless, there are limitations in mobility for women entrepreneurs, especially in Muslim countries to conduct their business activities outside the home, which was due to concern, to take care of their children, and the values or customs, which is embraced by the local community, so that limited mobility of women entrepreneurs, not because of the Islamic religiosity. Therefore, is requires form of technology solutions for women entrepreneurs, which can reduce, the limitations.Methods - literature reviewResults - the role of mobile banking as well as branchless banking for women entrepreneurs has been shown to have a very important role to connect their access to financial services. The role of education for women, is also an important factor to improve the knowledge and ability to use technology, including mobile banking services. In addition to the phenomenon of the increasing number of women entrepreneurs and the growing literacy of women in developing countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh, it will have an impact on increasing the professionalism of women entrepreneurs, and the demand for technology-based financial services such as mobile banking.Conclusions - Implementation of this program must have the support of all stakeholders, including the cooperation between the banks with microfinance institutions to expand the reach of the benefits of this technology

Corruption Begets Corruption In Developing Countries - How The Use Of Technology Could Change The Landscape

This paper investigates the role technology can play in fostering good business practices that would deter economic corruption and extortion in developing countries.  This paper first provides a problem statement with a brief description of corruption in form of bribery and extortion based on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and its provisions.  Second, we propose a definition of bribery and extortion.  Our definitions indicate that, contrary to what is often claimed, many of the kinds of payments forbidden by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are not instances of bribery, but rather extortion.  Third, we present an economic analysis of bribery and extortion and explain why they are thought to be undesirable practices from an economic point of view.  Fourth, we present two case studies to support the use of technology to mitigate and facilitate business in developing countries that should improve economic and business practices

ANALISIS LOYALITAS NASABAH BERBASIS ELEKTRONIK PADA BANK NEGARA PENYELENGGARA LAKU PANDAI DI DKI JAKARTA DAN JAWA BARAT

Dedy Ansari Harahap (1602659) “Analisis Loyalitas Nasabah Berbasis Elektronik Pada Bank Negara Penyelenggara Laku Pandai di DKI Jakarta dan Jawa Barat”. Disertasi Doktor Ilmu Manajemen Sekolah Pascasarjana Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, dibawah bimbingan Prof. Dr. Hj. Ratih Hurriyati, M.P., Prof. Dr. H. Disman, M.S., Dr. Vanessa Gaffar, SE, Ak., MBA. Persaingan jasa perbankan seperti halnya branchless banking, penggunaan sarana teknologi dan/atau melibatkan jasa pihak ketiga terutama untuk melayani masyarakat yang belum terlayani jasa keuangan/unbanked, memiliki potensi besar untuk memperluas distribusi layanan keuangan kepada masyarakat. Model pemasaran jasa (service marketing), pemasaran relasional (relationship marketing) dan pemasaran digital (digital marketing) perlu dilakukan kajian secara bersamaan melalui pendekatan manajemen pemasaran jasa perbankan untuk mendapatkan e-loyalty. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mendapatkan model e-loyalty nasabah pada bank negara penyelenggara branchless banking sebagai strategi pemasaran jasa perbankan khususnya branchless banking di DKI Jakarta dan Jawa Barat. Desain penelitian menggunakan pendekatan explanatory survey. Survey dilakukan pada nasabah pada bank negara penyelenggara branchless banking di DKI Jakarta dan Jawa Barat. Jumlah responden sebanyak 406 orang nasabah yang diambil dengan multistage random sampling. Analisis data dilakukan dengan pendekatan structural equation modeling (SEM) dan program LISREL. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa model e-loyalty nasabah pada bank negara penyelenggara branchless banking perlu mempertimbangkan berbagai faktor secara keseluruhan dalam pemasaran jasa dalam pengelolaan bank pada bank negara penyelenggara branchless banking dalam konteks pemasaran jasa (service marketing) dengan meningkatkan citra bank (corporate image), menciptakan hubungan yang lebih luas melalui pemasaran relasional (relationship marketing), meningkatkan e-satisfaction yang berdampak pada e-wom serta pemasaran digital (digital marketing) dengan penggunaan internet dan penggunaan teknologi interaktif yang melibatkan penerapan teknologi digital yaitu ; web, e-mail, database, mobile/wireless dan lainnya. Hal ini dapat meningkatkan e-service quality, e-trust, e-satisfaction, e-wom dan terciptanya e-loyalty bagi nasabah secara konsisten dan terus menerus dengan mengembangkan model e-loyalty. Secara umum bagi perbankan dan khususnya pada bank penyelenggara branchless banking diharapkan mampu melaksanakan strategi kompetitif dan inovatif menjawab tantangan era digitalisasi, di mana globalisasi dan evolusi cepat teknologi digital revolusi industri 4.0. Kata Kunci : e-service quality, corporate image, e-trust, e-wom, e-satisfaction, e-loyalty, branchless banking

Change That Matters: Learning from Our Partnerships

Released in 2014, this report synthesizes key lessons from research and evaluation of The MasterCard Foundation's programs in education and financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report shows that through Foundations programs savings groups are helping to build assets, mobile technology is reaching the excluded and new models are emerging for reaching smallholder farmers

pocl: A Performance-Portable OpenCL Implementation

OpenCL is a standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. The benefits of a common programming standard are clear; multiple vendors can provide support for application descriptions written according to the standard, thus reducing the program porting effort. While the standard brings the obvious benefits of platform portability, the performance portability aspects are largely left to the programmer. The situation is made worse due to multiple proprietary vendor implementations with different characteristics, and, thus, required optimization strategies. In this paper, we propose an OpenCL implementation that is both portable and performance portable. At its core is a kernel compiler that can be used to exploit the data parallelism of OpenCL programs on multiple platforms with different parallel hardware styles. The kernel compiler is modularized to perform target-independent parallel region formation separately from the target-specific parallel mapping of the regions to enable support for various styles of fine-grained parallel resources such as subword SIMD extensions, SIMD datapaths and static multi-issue. Unlike previous similar techniques that work on the source level, the parallel region formation retains the information of the data parallelism using the LLVM IR and its metadata infrastructure. This data can be exploited by the later generic compiler passes for efficient parallelization. The proposed open source implementation of OpenCL is also platform portable, enabling OpenCL on a wide range of architectures, both already commercialized and on those that are still under research. The paper describes how the portability of the implementation is achieved. Our results show that most of the benchmarked applications when compiled using pocl were faster or close to as fast as the best proprietary OpenCL implementation for the platform at hand.Comment: This article was published in 2015; it is now openly accessible via arxi

Fast multi-core based multimodal registration of 2D cross-sections and 3D datasets

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Solving bioinformatics tasks often requires extensive computational power. Recent trends in processor architecture combine multiple cores into a single chip to improve overall performance. The Cell Broadband Engine (CBE), a heterogeneous multi-core processor, provides power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance computing. One application area is image analysis and visualisation, in particular registration of 2D cross-sections into 3D image datasets. Such techniques can be used to put different image modalities into spatial correspondence, for example, 2D images of histological cuts into morphological 3D frameworks.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We evaluate the CBE-driven PlayStation 3 as a high performance, cost-effective computing platform by adapting a multimodal alignment procedure to several characteristic hardware properties. The optimisations are based on partitioning, vectorisation, branch reducing and loop unrolling techniques with special attention to 32-bit multiplies and limited local storage on the computing units. We show how a typical image analysis and visualisation problem, the multimodal registration of 2D cross-sections and 3D datasets, benefits from the multi-core based implementation of the alignment algorithm. We discuss several CBE-based optimisation methods and compare our results to standard solutions. More information and the source code are available from <url>http://cbe.ipk-gatersleben.de</url>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results demonstrate that the CBE processor in a PlayStation 3 accelerates computational intensive multimodal registration, which is of great importance in biological/medical image processing. The PlayStation 3 as a low cost CBE-based platform offers an efficient option to conventional hardware to solve computational problems in image processing and bioinformatics.</p

ICTs and Entrepreneurial Development: A Critical Review Through the Livelihood Lens

Whilst the concept of sustainable livelihoods is increasingly central to the debate about rural development, poverty reduction and environmental management, developing economies may not be able to fully utilise the potential of ICTs for entrepreneurial development in its agricultural economies and resource-based industries. The paper reviews the ICT literature through the livelihood lens and seeks to understand how the framework is useful for informal micro-enterprises in contributing to entrepreneurial development as a route to poverty alleviation. Analysing the literature through the framework, the paper highlights that ICTs offer a strategy to achieve sustainable livelihoods by increasing access to a range of livelihood resources, structures and provide institutional linkages, while reducing vulnerabilities and dependence on physical/ natural resources. However, certain organisational, physical and human constraints may restrict the achievement of livelihoods outcomes within a specific context. To conclude, central to the framework, the author proposes how the framework may be extended through the capabilities vision to maximise the benefits that accrue from using ICTs in the informal economic sector

Mobile financial services at the base of the pyramid : a systemic view for cross-sector governance and embedded innovation

Mobile financial services is one of the uprising movements to bank the unbanked by integrating philanthropic and business approaches for financial inclusion. In this paper, we address how a systemic view help integrate the Philanthropic Initiatives (PI) and the Commercial Initiatives (CI) to get a sustainable impact on the unbanked micro-entrepreneurs. However, each approach has pros and cons as they go along the stages of design, deployment, and sustainability. Using the soft system thinking we theorise the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) as a business system to mix-up the relatively high start-up capabilities of the PI with the relatively sustainable impact of CI. Our mobile money case shows that donors, local private enterprises, and multinational corporations follow the BoP strategy to develop an online grid that offers a reconciled balanced scorecard for economic returns, social benefits and local impact. Such a strategy guarantees flexible, long-term investments and facilitate developing innovative financial services