Next Generation M2M Cellular Networks: Challenges and Practical Considerations

In this article, we present the major challenges of future machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular networks such as spectrum scarcity problem, support for low-power, low-cost, and numerous number of devices. As being an integral part of the future Internet-of-Things (IoT), the true vision of M2M communications cannot be reached with conventional solutions that are typically cost inefficient. Cognitive radio concept has emerged to significantly tackle the spectrum under-utilization or scarcity problem. Heterogeneous network model is another alternative to relax the number of covered users. To this extent, we present a complete fundamental understanding and engineering knowledge of cognitive radios, heterogeneous network model, and power and cost challenges in the context of future M2M cellular networks

Brain & Art: a ripple in the (cyber)space

In my text I refer to contemporary art practices, including my own artistic investigations and intuitions; questioning creative powers of the human brain-mind system in the world increasingly dependent on and transformed by Big Data. Currently, with the global revolution of knowledge, driven by scientific and technological progress, creativity and innovation acquire special economic and social values. Research on biochemical processes accompanying creative behaviour stimulates the synergy between artistic, scientific and engineering communities. The acquired knowledge is used in medicine, biotechnology and various types of therapies as well as in deep learning methods. Increasing the efficiency of artificial intelligence systems that quickly take control over all areas of our lives. Will the nascent Internet-of-all-Things transform itself into the Internet-of-all Minds? As an artist, I pose myself a question, which artistic practices may emerge from the marriage of biological and digital algorithms? The future has many scenarios and shades…In my text I refer to contemporary art practices, including my own artistic investigations and intuitions; questioning creative powers of the human brain-mind system in the world increasingly dependent on and transformed by Big Data. Currently, with the global revolution of knowledge, driven by scientific and technological progress, creativity and innovation acquire special economic and social values. Research on biochemical processes accompanying creative behaviour stimulates the synergy between artistic, scientific and engineering communities. The acquired knowledge is used in medicine, biotechnology and various types of therapies as well as in deep learning methods. Increasing the efficiency of artificial intelligence systems that quickly take control over all areas of our lives. Will the nascent Internet--of-all-Things transform itself into the Internet-of-all Minds? As an artist, I pose myself a question, which artistic practices may emerge from the marriage of biological and digital algorithms? The future has many scenarios and shades

Towards Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering for IoT-Supported Well-Being, Aging and Health

Ontologies serve as a one of the formal means to represent and model knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, system engineering and other related disciplines. Ontologies within requirements engineering may be used for formal representation of system requirements. In the Internet of Things, ontologies may be used to represent sensor knowledge and describe acquired data semantics. Designing an ontology comprehensive enough with an appropriate level of knowledge expressiveness, serving multiple purposes, from system requirements specifications to modeling knowledge based on data from IoT sensors, is one of the great challenges. This paper proposes an approach towards ontology-based requirements engineering for well-being, aging and health supported by the Internet of Things. Such an ontology design does not aim at creating a new ontology, but extending the appropriate one already existing, SAREF4EHAW, in order align with the well-being, aging and health concepts and structure the knowledge within the domain. Other contributions include a conceptual formulation for Well-Being, Aging and Health and a related taxonomy, as well as a concept of One Well-Being, Aging and Health. New attributes and relations have been proposed for the new ontology extension, along with the updated list of use cases and particular ontological requirements not covered by the original ontology. Future work envisions full specification of the new ontology extension, as well as structuring system requirements and sensor measurement parameters to follow description logic.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

A review of the lighting performance in buildings through energy efficiency

As developing countries including Malaysia, are now moving towards sustainable development is in line with the Ninth Malaysia Plan, 9th MP, the development should be built to meet current and future needs for achieving sustainability of economic development, social and environmental responsibility for the prosperity without compromising the future generations‘ needs. Over the past five years, there has been a move away from constructing new buildings to refurbishing older and historic ones. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the approach for the refurbishment of lighting as well as the existing energy efficiency policy and measures in Malaysian historical building for the energy efficiency improvement in the future. The paper takes the form of a review of literature. The main sources of this literature research are based on the articles, journals, and internet search. This study perhaps can add to the breadth of knowledge of lighting performance in the historical building from the perspective of energy efficiency. This study offers new and valuable insights to Malaysia in achieving optimum energy efficiency, saving in financial as well as reducing environmental impact.This paper has been presented at 2nd International Conference on Research in Science, Engineering and Technology (ICRSET’2014) March 21-22, 201

An investigation into the adoption of CDIO in distance learning

The Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate Initiative (CDIO) uses integrated learning to develop deep learning of the disciplinary knowledge base whilst simultaneously developing personal, interpersonal, product, process and system building skills. This is achieved through active and experiential learning methods that expose students to experiences engineers will encounter in their profession. These are incorporated not only in the design-build-test experiences that form a crucial part of a CDIO programme but also in discipline focused studies. Active and experiential learning methods are, of course, more difficult to incorporate into distance education. This paper investigates these difficulties and the implications in providing a programme that best achieves the goals of the CDIO approach through contemporary distance education methods. First, the key issues of adopting the CDIO approach in conventional oncampus courses are considered with reference to the development of the CDIO engineering programmes at the University of Liverpool. The different models of distance based delivery of engineering programmes provided by the Open University in the UK, and Deakin University and the University of Southern Queensland in Australia are then presented and issues that may present obstacles to the future adoption of the CDIO approach in these programmes are discussed. The effectiveness and suitability of various solutions to foreseen difficulties in delivering CDIO programmes through distance education are then considered. These include the further development, increased use and interinstitutional sharing of technology based facilities such as Internet facilitated access to laboratory facilities and computer aided learning (CAL) laboratory simulations, on campus workshops, and the development of a virtual engineering enterprise

Knowledge Engineering in Search Engines

With large amounts of information being exchanged on the Internet, search engines have become the most popular tools for helping users to search and filter this information. However, keyword-based search engines sometimes obtain information, which does not meet user’ needs. Some of them are even irrelevant to what the user queries. When the users get query results, they have to read and organize them by themselves. It is not easy for users to handle information when a search engine returns several million results. This project uses a granular computing approach to find knowledge structures of a search engine. The project focuses on knowledge engineering components of a search engine. Based on the earlier work of Dr. Lin and his former student [1], it represents concepts in the Web by simplicial complexes. We found that to represent simplicial complexes adequately, we only need the maximal simplexes. Therefore, this project focuses on building maximal simplexes. Since it is too costly to analyze all Web pages or documents, the project uses the sampling method to get sampling documents. The project constructs simplexes of documents and uses the simplexes to find maximal simplexes. These maximal simplexes are regarded as primitive concepts that can represent Web pages or documents. The maximal simplexes can be used to build an index of a search engine in the future

Detection of Fog Network Data Telemetry Using Data Plane Programming

Fog computing has been introduced to deliver Cloud-based services to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It locates geographically closer to IoT devices than Cloud networks and aims at offering latency-critical computation and storage to end-user applications. To leverage Fog computing for computational offloading from end-users, it is important to optimize resources in the Fog nodes dynamically. Provisioning requires knowledge of the current network state, thus, monitoring mechanisms play a significant role to conduct resource management in the network. To keep track of the state of devices, we use P4, a data-plane programming language, to describe data-plane abstraction of Fog network devices and collect telemetry without the intervention of the control plane or adding a big amount of overhead. In this paper, we propose a software-defined architecture with a programmable data plane for data telemetry detection that can be integrated into Fog network resource management. After the implementation of detecting data telemetry based on In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) within a Mininet simulation, we show the available features and preliminary Fog resource management based on the collected data telemetry and future telemetry-based traffic engineering possibilities

'Create the future': an environment for excellence in teaching future-oriented Industrial Design Engineering

In 2001, the University of Twente started a new course on Industrial Design Engineering. This paper describes the insights that have been employed in developing the curriculum, and in developing the environment in which the educational activities are facilitated. The University of Twente has a broad experience with project-oriented education [1], and because one of the goals of the curriculum is to get the students acquainted with working methods as employed in e.g. design bureaus, this project-oriented approach has been used as the basis for the new course. In everyday practice, this implies a number of prerequisites to be imposed on the learning environment: instead of focusing on the sheer transfer of information, this environment must allow the students to imbibe the knowledge and competences that make them better designers. Consequently, a much more flexible environment has to be created, in which working as a team becomes habitual, and where cutting-edge technologies are available to facilitate the process. This can be realized because every student owns a laptop, with all relevant software and a full-grown course management system within reach. Moreover, the learning environment provides the fastest possible wireless network and Internet access available [2]. This obviously has its repercussions on the way the education is organized. On the one hand, e.g. virtual reality tools, CAD software and 3D printing are addressed in the curriculum, whereas on the other hand more traditional techniques (like sketching and model making) are conveyed explicitly as well. Together with a sound footing in basic disciplines ranging from mathematics to design history, this course offers the students a profound education in Industrial Design Engineering. The paper describes in more detail the curriculum and the education environment, based on which it is assessed if the course on Industrial Design Engineering can live up to its motto: ‘Create the future’, and what can be done to further enable the students to acquire the full denotation of that motto

Secure and Economically Viable Internet Architecture

poster abstractThe evolution of the Internet is one of the most intriguing and magnificent engineering feats in the history of technological innovations. The Internet mirrors and enhances all aspects of our lives, by creating unprecedented opportunities for advancing knowledge in all fields of human activities. However, the 21st century society's needs may not be met by the current trajectory of incremental changes to the current Internet. Furthermore, the continued success of the Internet is increasingly threatened by increased and sophisticated security attacks and by the lack of performance reliability of Internet services. Therefore, the research community worldwide is engaged in exploring new architectures and solutions for the future Internet. We are working to design a new Internet architecture. Our larger team includes multidisciplinary expertise of researchers, from institutions such as Washington University in Saint Louis, Purdue University, and Seikei University in Tokyo Japan. Our research in this field focuses on various major requirements of the future Internet, including security, resilience, mobility, better manageability, economic viability and suitability for the needs of society. The Internet suffers by a number of serious security vulnerabilities, including weak defenses against attacks on hosts, communications, on availability (Denial of Service attacks), and privacy. Furthermore, the existing Internet architecture not only does not provide sufficient security, but worst, it empowers the attacking activities. We are exploring ways make Internet trustworthy, which includes properties such as security, reliability, privacy, and usability. Our multidisciplinary approach is based on the interplay among technical, psychology and legal aspects of system trustworthiness. We propose drastic changes, starting with strong authentication, various layers of security, and evaluation of trust, that will make the Internet a much more trustworthy and resilient system. The future Internet will be composed mostly of mobile nodes such as cell phones, PDAs, various types of sensors, and so on. Unfortunately, today's Internet is not support mobility. We are exploring solutions that provide mobility service based on the interplay among technical, security and economic factors. Our mobility architecture uses cloud computing and explores the tradeoffs among Quality of Service, security, privacy and economic viability of mobility service. This project is currently partially funded by NSF. We are looking forward to expand our collaborations and partnership in this research field