Attitudes to telecare among older people, professional care workers and informal carers: a preventative strategy or crisis management?

This paper reports findings from an attitudinal survey towards telecare that emerged from twenty-two focus groups comprising ninety-two older people, fifty-five professional stakeholders and thirty-nine carers. These were convened in three different regions of England as a precursor to telecare service development. The results from this study suggest that informants’ views were shaped by prior knowledge of conventional health and social care delivery in their locality and the implication is that expectations and requirements in respect of telecare services in general are likely to be informed by wider perceptions about the extent to which community care should operate as a preventative strategy or as a mechanism for crisis management

funcX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science

Exploding data volumes and velocities, new computational methods and platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity demand new approaches to computation in the sciences. These new approaches must enable computation to be mobile, so that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g., arrival of new data), be offloaded to specialized accelerators, or run remotely where resources are available. They also require new design approaches in which monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in turn be executed separately and on the most suitable resources. To address these needs we present funcX---a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. funcX's endpoint software can transform existing clouds, clusters, and supercomputers into function serving systems, while funcX's cloud-hosted service provides transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across a federated ecosystem of endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX with several scientific case studies, present our prototype design and implementation, show optimizations that deliver throughput in excess of 1 million functions per second, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than more than 130000 concurrent workers.Comment: Accepted to ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.0490

Spartan Daily, October 31, 1990

Volume 95, Issue 44https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8043/thumbnail.jp

Partnerships for Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (P4S) Phase II: 2019 annual report

First annual report of P4

Satellite versus ground-based estimates of burned area: a comparison between MODIS based burned area and fire agency reports over North America in 2007

North American wildfire management teams routinely assess burned area on site during firefighting campaigns; meanwhile, satellite observations provide systematic and global burned-area data. Here we compare satellite and ground-based daily burned area for wildfire events for selected large fires across North America in 2007 on daily timescales. In a sample of 26 fires across North America, we found the Global Fire Emissions Database Version 4 (GFED4) estimated about 80% of the burned area logged in ground-based Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) over 8-day analysis windows. Linear regression analysis found a slope between GFED and ICS-209 of 0.67 (with R = 0.96). The agreement between these data sets was found to degrade at short timescales (from R = 0.81 for 4-day to R = 0.55 for 2-day). Furthermore, during large burning days (> 3000 ha) GFED4 typically estimates half of the burned area logged in the ICS-209 estimates

Reactivity on the Web

Reactivity, the ability to detect simple and composite events and respond in a timely manner, is an essential requirement in many present-day information systems. With the emergence of new, dynamic Web applications, reactivity on the Web is receiving increasing attention. Reactive Web-based systems need to detect and react not only to simple events but also to complex, real-life situations. This paper introduces XChange, a language for programming reactive behaviour on the Web, emphasising the querying of event data and detection of composite events

The agricultural impact of the 2015–2016 floods in Ireland as mapped through Sentinel 1 satellite imagery

peer-reviewedIrish Journal of Agricultural and Food Research | Volume 58: Issue 1 The agricultural impact of the 2015–2016 floods in Ireland as mapped through Sentinel 1 satellite imagery R. O’Haraemail , S. Green and T. McCarthy DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ijafr-2019-0006 | Published online: 11 Oct 2019 PDF Abstract Article PDF References Recommendations Abstract The capability of Sentinel 1 C-band (5 cm wavelength) synthetic aperture radio detection and ranging (RADAR) (abbreviated as SAR) for flood mapping is demonstrated, and this approach is used to map the extent of the extensive floods that occurred throughout the Republic of Ireland in the winter of 2015–2016. Thirty-three Sentinel 1 images were used to map the area and duration of floods over a 6-mo period from November 2015 to April 2016. Flood maps for 11 separate dates charted the development and persistence of floods nationally. The maximum flood extent during this period was estimated to be ~24,356 ha. The depth of rainfall influenced the magnitude of flood in the preceding 5 d and over more extended periods to a lesser degree. Reduced photosynthetic activity on farms affected by flooding was observed in Landsat 8 vegetation index difference images compared to the previous spring. The accuracy of the flood map was assessed against reports of flooding from affected farms, as well as other satellite-derived maps from Copernicus Emergency Management Service and Sentinel 2. Monte Carlo simulated elevation data (20 m resolution, 2.5 m root mean square error [RMSE]) were used to estimate the flood’s depth and volume. Although the modelled flood height showed a strong correlation with the measured river heights, differences of several metres were observed. Future mapping strategies are discussed, which include high–temporal-resolution soil moisture data, as part of an integrated multisensor approach to flood response over a range of spatial scales

Addressing the Challenges in Federating Edge Resources

This book chapter considers how Edge deployments can be brought to bear in a global context by federating them across multiple geographic regions to create a global Edge-based fabric that decentralizes data center computation. This is currently impractical, not only because of technical challenges, but is also shrouded by social, legal and geopolitical issues. In this chapter, we discuss two key challenges - networking and management in federating Edge deployments. Additionally, we consider resource and modeling challenges that will need to be addressed for a federated Edge.Comment: Book Chapter accepted to the Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms; Editors Buyya, Sriram