From Dumb Wireless Sensors to Smart Networks using Network Coding

The vision of wireless sensor networks is one of a smart collection of tiny, dumb devices. These motes may be individually cheap, unintelligent, imprecise, and unreliable. Yet they are able to derive strength from numbers, rendering the whole to be strong, reliable and robust. Our approach is to adopt a distributed and randomized mindset and rely on in network processing and network coding. Our general abstraction is that nodes should act only locally and independently, and the desired global behavior should arise as a collective property of the network. We summarize our work and present how these ideas can be applied for communication and storage in sensor networks.Comment: To be presented at the Inaugural Workshop of the Center for Information Theory and Its Applications, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla, CA, February 6 - 10, 200

Patient-based mobile alerting systems- requirements and expectations

Patients with chronic conditions are not well supported by technical systems in managing their conditions. However, such systems could help patients to self-reliantly comply with their treatment. This help could be rendered in the form of alerting patients about condition-relevant issues, transmitting relevant parameters to healthcare providers and analysing these parameters according to guidelines specified by both patients and healthcare staff. If necessary, this analysis of condition parameters triggers the alerting of patients and healthcare providers about actions to be taken. In this paper, we present the results of a survey we have undertaken to verify and extend requirements we have identified for the design of a Mobile Alerting System for patients with chronic conditions. First of all, the results show that a Mobile Alerting System is desired by patients. Moreover, due to the inter- and intra-user variance of patients and healthcare staff, the system has to work in a context-aware manner and allow for personalised parameters in order to be adaptable to every user’s needs

Study of the modifications needed for effective operation NASTRAN on IBM virtual storage computers

The necessary modifications were determined to make NASTRAN operational under virtual storage operating systems (VS1 and VS2). Suggested changes are presented which will make NASTRAN operate more efficiently under these systems. Estimates of the cost and time involved in design, coding, and implementation of all suggested modifications are included