Edge AI-IoT Pivot Irrigation, Plant Diseases and Pests Identification

peer reviewedIn a growing population context with less soil and water resources, the irrigated agriculture allows to increase the yield and the production of several crops in order to meet the increase of the food and fibers demands. To be efficient, an irrigation system must correctly evaluate amount of water and moments to which to apply the irrigation doses. Monitoring systems are crucial in areas of the planet where water is scarce and in environmental harsh conditions to ensure an efficient crop growth. Moreover, plant diseases and pests impact the yields of crops, an early detection allows to treat the disease or pest quickly and reduce the impact of these latter. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach which optimize the water use, the supply of fertilizers, the treatment of plant diseases and pests with a center-pivot equiped with camera by means of IoT and AI algorithms

Virtual Machine Image Management for Elastic Resource Usage in Grid Computing

Grid Computing has evolved from an academic concept to a powerful paradigm in the area of high performance computing (HPC). Over the last few years, powerful Grid computing solutions were developed that allow the execution of computational tasks on distributed computing resources. Grid computing has recently attracted many commercial customers. To enable commercial customers to be able to execute sensitive data in the Grid, strong security mechanisms must be put in place to secure the customers' data. In contrast, the development of Cloud Computing, which entered the scene in 2006, was driven by industry: it was designed with respect to security from the beginning. Virtualization technology is used to separate the users e.g., by putting the different users of a system inside a virtual machine, which prevents them from accessing other users' data. The use of virtualization in the context of Grid computing has been examined early and was found to be a promising approach to counter the security threats that have appeared with commercial customers. One main part of the work presented in this thesis is the Image Creation Station (ICS), a component which allows users to administer their virtual execution environments (virtual machines) themselves and which is responsible for managing and distributing the virtual machines in the entire system. In contrast to Cloud computing, which was designed to allow even inexperienced users to execute their computational tasks in the Cloud easily, Grid computing is much more complex to use. The ICS makes it easier to use the Grid by overcoming traditional limitations like installing needed software on the compute nodes that users use to execute the computational tasks. This allows users to bring commercial software to the Grid for the first time, without the need for local administrators to install the software to computing nodes that are accessible by all users. Moreover, the administrative burden is shifted from the local Grid site's administrator to the users or experienced software providers that allow the provision of individually tailored virtual machines to each user. But the ICS is not only responsible for enabling users to manage their virtual machines themselves, it also ensures that the virtual machines are available on every site that is part of the distributed Grid system. A second aspect of the presented solution focuses on the elasticity of the system by automatically acquiring free external resources depending on the system's current workload. In contrast to existing systems, the presented approach allows the system's administrator to add or remove resource sets during runtime without needing to restart the entire system. Moreover, the presented solution allows users to not only use existing Grid resources but allows them to scale out to Cloud resources and use these resources on-demand. By ensuring that unused resources are shut down as soon as possible, the computational costs of a given task are minimized. In addition, the presented solution allows each user to specify which resources can be used to execute a particular job. This is useful when a job processes sensitive data e.g., that is not allowed to leave the company. To obtain a comparable function in today's systems, a user must submit her computational task to a particular resource set, losing the ability to automatically schedule if more than one set of resources can be used. In addition, the proposed solution prioritizes each set of resources by taking different metrics into account (e.g. the level of trust or computational costs) and tries to schedule the job to resources with the highest priority first. It is notable that the priority often mimics the physical distance from the resources to the user: a locally available Cluster usually has a higher priority due to the high level of trust and the computational costs, that are usually lower than the costs of using Cloud resources. Therefore, this scheduling strategy minimizes the costs of job execution by improving security at the same time since data is not necessarily transferred to remote resources and the probability of attacks by malicious external users is minimized. Bringing both components together results in a system that adapts automatically to the current workload by using external (e.g., Cloud) resources together with existing locally available resources or Grid sites and provides individually tailored virtual execution environments to the system's users

Systems Biology in ELIXIR: modelling in the spotlight

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Systems Biology in ELIXIR: modelling in the spotlight

In this white paper, we describe the founding of a new ELIXIR Community - the Systems Biology Community - and its proposed future contributions to both ELIXIR and the broader community of systems biologists in Europe and worldwide. The Community believes that the infrastructure aspects of systems biology - databases, (modelling) tools and standards development, as well as training and access to cloud infrastructure - are not only appropriate components of the ELIXIR infrastructure, but will prove key components of ELIXIR\u27s future support of advanced biological applications and personalised medicine. By way of a series of meetings, the Community identified seven key areas for its future activities, reflecting both future needs and previous and current activities within ELIXIR Platforms and Communities. These are: overcoming barriers to the wider uptake of systems biology; linking new and existing data to systems biology models; interoperability of systems biology resources; further development and embedding of systems medicine; provisioning of modelling as a service; building and coordinating capacity building and training resources; and supporting industrial embedding of systems biology. A set of objectives for the Community has been identified under four main headline areas: Standardisation and Interoperability, Technology, Capacity Building and Training, and Industrial Embedding. These are grouped into short-term (3-year), mid-term (6-year) and long-term (10-year) objectives

Open Science for a Global Transformation

This is the final version. Available on open access via the DOI in this recordEuropean CommissionAlan Turing Institut

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022 is a creative-commons ebook that provides a unique 360 degrees overview of quantum technologies from science and technology to geopolitical and societal issues. It covers quantum physics history, quantum physics 101, gate-based quantum computing, quantum computing engineering (including quantum error corrections and quantum computing energetics), quantum computing hardware (all qubit types, including quantum annealing and quantum simulation paradigms, history, science, research, implementation and vendors), quantum enabling technologies (cryogenics, control electronics, photonics, components fabs, raw materials), quantum computing algorithms, software development tools and use cases, unconventional computing (potential alternatives to quantum and classical computing), quantum telecommunications and cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum technologies around the world, quantum technologies societal impact and even quantum fake sciences. The main audience are computer science engineers, developers and IT specialists as well as quantum scientists and students who want to acquire a global view of how quantum technologies work, and particularly quantum computing. This version is an extensive update to the 2021 edition published in October 2021.Comment: 1132 pages, 920 figures, Letter forma

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Usage Determinants in Enterprises

The thesis focuses on the research question, what the determinants of Infrastructure-as-a-Service usage of enterprises are. A wide range of IaaS determinants is collected for an IaaS adoption model of enterprises, which is evaluated in a Web survey. As the economical determinants are especially important, they are separately investigated using a cost-optimizing decision support model. This decision support model is then applied to a potential IaaS use case of a large automobile manufacturer

Quantum Simulation for High Energy Physics

It is for the first time that Quantum Simulation for High Energy Physics (HEP) is studied in the U.S. decadal particle-physics community planning, and in fact until recently, this was not considered a mainstream topic in the community. This fact speaks of a remarkable rate of growth of this subfield over the past few years, stimulated by the impressive advancements in Quantum Information Sciences (QIS) and associated technologies over the past decade, and the significant investment in this area by the government and private sectors in the U.S. and other countries. High-energy physicists have quickly identified problems of importance to our understanding of nature at the most fundamental level, from tiniest distances to cosmological extents, that are intractable with classical computers but may benefit from quantum advantage. They have initiated, and continue to carry out, a vigorous program in theory, algorithm, and hardware co-design for simulations of relevance to the HEP mission. This community whitepaper is an attempt to bring this exciting and yet challenging area of research to the spotlight, and to elaborate on what the promises, requirements, challenges, and potential solutions are over the next decade and beyond.Comment: This is a whitepaper prepared for the topical groups CompF6 (Quantum computing), TF05 (Lattice Gauge Theory), and TF10 (Quantum Information Science) within the Computational Frontier and Theory Frontier of the U.S. Community Study on the Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2021). 103 pages and 1 figur