Data is the Fuel of Organizations: Opportunities and Challenges in Afghanistan

In this paper, the author at first briefly outlines the value of data in organizations and the opportunities and challenges in Afghanistan. Then the author takes the Kankor (National University Entrance Exam) data, particularly names of participants, locations, high schools and higher education institutions into account and explains how these data, that organizations in Afghanistan do not use for anything, can be useful in several cases and areas. The application of these data is shown through cases such as Auto filling missing values, identifying names of people, locations, and institutions from unstructured text, generating fake data to benchmark the database and web application performance and appearance, comparing and matching high school data with Kankor data, producing the top-n male and female names very common in Afghanistan or province-wise, and the data mining application in education and higher education institutions.Comment: This paper consists of 14 pages, and it includes 7 figure

Sparse l1 Regularisation of Matrix Valued Models for Acoustic Source Characterisation

We present a strategy for the recovery of a sparse solution of a common problem in acoustic engineering, which is the reconstruction of sound source levels and locations applying microphone array measurements. The considered task bears similarities to the basis pursuit formalism but also relies on additional model assumptions that are challenging from a mathematical point of view. Our approach reformulates the original task as a convex optimisation model. The sought solution shall be a matrix with a certain desired structure. We enforce this structure through additional constraints. By combining popular splitting algorithms and matrix differential theory in a novel framework we obtain a numerically efficient strategy. Besides a thorough theoretical consideration we also provide an experimental setup that certifies the usability of our strategy. Finally, we also address practical issues, such as the handling of inaccuracies in the measurement and corruption of the given data. We provide a post processing step that is capable of yielding an almost perfect solution in such circumstances.Comment: 30 pages, 15 Figure

Handover Necessity Estimation for 4G Heterogeneous Networks

One of the most challenges of 4G network is to have a unified network of heterogeneous wireless networks. To achieve seamless mobility in such a diverse environment, vertical hand off is still a challenging problem. In many situations handover failures and unnecessary handoffs are triggered causing degradation of services, reduction in throughput and increase the blocking probability and packet loss. In this paper a new vertical handoff decision algorithm handover necessity estimation (HNE), is proposed to minimize the number of handover failure and unnecessary handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. we have proposed a multi criteria vertical handoff decision algorithm based on two parts: traveling time estimation and time threshold calculation. Our proposed methods are compared against two other methods: (a) the fixed RSS threshold based method, in which handovers between the cellular network and the WLAN are initiated when the RSS from the WLAN reaches a fixed threshold, and (b) the hysteresis based method, in which a hysteresis is introduced to prevent the ping-pong effect. Simulation results show that, this method reduced the number of handover failures and unnecessary handovers up to 80% and 70%, respectively

Is Physician Education Effective in Promoting Antibiotic Stewardship?

Reviews current research on the effectiveness of interventions to reduce the amount of antibiotics physicians inappropriately prescribe. Recommends combining active education strategies that include physicians, patients, and communities

The Proposed Sticks Standard

This is version 1.0 of the Sticks Standard. Software has been written to interface this standard to plotters, a graphic Sticks editor, a Stick compactor and several simulators. The Standard appears adequate to describe cells for chip assemblers as well as Stick diagram editing and compaction systems. However, this version of the Sticks Standard cannot efficiently describe large chips because it lacks an array facility. This deficiency will be corrected in the next release of the Sticks Standard: This document consists of four parts: Sticks definition, Sticks Standard design considerations, the specification of the Sticks Standard, and an example of the Standard in use

Sensor and Sink Placement, Scheduling and Routing Algorithms for Connected Coverage of Wireless Sensor Networks

A sensor is a small electronic device which has the ability to sense, compute and communicate either with other sensors or directly with a base station (sink). In a wireless sensor network (WSN), the sensors monitor a region and transmit the collected data packets through routes to the sinks. In this study, we propose a mixed--integer linear programming (MILP) model to maximize the number of time periods that a WSN carries out the desired tasks with limited energy and budget. Our sink and sensor placement, scheduling, routing with connected coverage ($SPSRC$) model is the first in the literature that combines the decisions for the locations of sinks and sensors, activity schedules of the deployed sensors, and data flow routes from each active sensor to its assigned sink for connected coverage of the network over a finite planning horizon. The problem is NP--hard and difficult to solve even for small instances. Assuming that the sink locations are known, we develop heuristics which construct a feasible solution of the problem by gradually satisfying the constraints. Then, we introduce search heuristics to determine the locations of the sinks to maximize the network lifetime. Computational experiments reveal that our heuristic methods can find near optimal solutions in an acceptable amount of time compared to the commercial solver CPLEX 12.7.0.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figure, 7 table

Trajectory Optimization for Completion Time Minimization in UAV-Enabled Multicasting

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multicasting system, where a UAV is dispatched to disseminate a common file to a number of geographically distributed ground terminals (GTs). Our objective is to design the UAV trajectory to minimize its mission completion time, while ensuring that each GT is able to successfully recover the file with a high probability required. We consider the use of practical random linear network coding (RLNC) for UAV multicasting, so that each GT is able to recover the file as long as it receives a sufficiently large number of coded packets. However, the formulated UAV trajectory optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to be directly solved. To tackle this issue, we first derive an analytical lower bound for the success probability of each GT's file recovery. Based on this result, we then reformulate the problem into a more tractable form, where the UAV trajectory only needs to be designed to meet a set of constraints each on the minimum connection time with a GT, during which their distance is below a designed threshold. We show that the optimal UAV trajectory only needs to constitute connected line segments, thus it can be obtained by determining first the optimal set of waypoints and then UAV speed along the lines connecting the waypoints. We propose practical schemes for the waypoints design based on a novel concept of virtual base station (VBS) placement and by applying convex optimization techniques. Furthermore, for given set of waypoints, we obtain the optimal UAV speed over the resulting path efficiently by solving a linear programming (LP) problem. Numerical results show that the proposed UAV-enabled multicasting with optimized trajectory design achieves significant performance gains as compared to benchmark schemes.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted for possible journal publication

Reverse logistics and space allocation for recovery management in new urban settlements

This paper presents the authors’ vision about the planning foundation for the new residential areas from the large cities outskirts, in a sustainable development framework. One considers the great generation potential of the high and very high income population in case of the used products with remained reuse value, or new and undesired products, available in the residential places. We propose a space allocation model with a hexagonal hierarchical structure for the centralized return centers in a reverse logistics. The space allocation model for the recovery centers implementation takes into consideration: the recovery habits, environmental care and sustainable development education, “moral” compensations, centralized recovery centers facilities, walking willingness of the average inhabitant of the considered area, decision makings involvement at the local Public Authority level, and local community. One reveals the importance of the data collecting stage for the potential and availability of the exhausted products (having reuse value) in a specific area with high and very high income populationreverse logistics; centralized return centres; recovery potential; space allocation

Behavior of Wireless Body-to-Body Networks Routing Strategies for Public Protection and Disaster Relief

Critical and public safety operations require real-time data transfer from the incident area(s) to the distant operations command center going through the evacuation and medical support areas. Any delay in communication may cause significant loss. In some cases, it is anticipated that the existing communication infrastructures can be damaged or out-of-service. It is thus required to deploy tactical ad-hoc networks to cover the operation zones. Routing data over the deployed network is a significant challenge with consideration to the operations conditions. In this paper we evaluate the performance of mutli-hop routing protocols while using different wireless technologies in an urban critical and emergency scenario. Using a realistic mobility model, Mobile Ad hoc, geographic based and data-centric routing protocols are evaluated with different communication technologies (i.e. WiFi IEEE 802.11; WSN IEEE 802.15.4; WBAN IEEE 802.15.6). It is concluded that, WiFi IEEE 802.11 is the best wireless technology with consideration to the packet reception rate and the energy consumption. Whereas, in terms of delay, WBAN IEEE 802.15.6 is the most efficient. With regards to the routing protocols, assuming that the location information is available, geographical based routing protocol with WiFi IEEE 802.11 performed much better compared to the others routing protocols. In case where the location information is unavailable, gradient based routing protocol with WBAN IEEE 802.15.6 seems the best combination.Comment: WiMob, Oct 2015, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirate

Cooperative Interference Mitigation and Handover Management for Heterogeneous Cloud Small Cell Networks

Heterogeneous small cell network has attracted much attention to satisfy users' explosive data traffic requirements. Heterogeneous cloud small cell network (HCSNet), which combines cloud computing and heterogeneous small cell network, will likely play an important role in 5G mobile communication networks. However, with massive deployment of small cells, co-channel interference and handover management are two important problems in HCSNet, especially for cell edge users. In this article, we examine the problems of cooperative interference mitigation and handover management in HCSNet. A network architecture is described to combine cloud radio access network with small cells. An effective coordinated multi-point (CoMP) clustering scheme using affinity propagation is adopted to mitigate cell edge users' interference. A low complexity handover management scheme is presented, and its signaling procedure is analyzed in HCSNet. Numerical results show that the proposed network architecture, CoMP clustering scheme and handover management scheme can significantly increase the capacity of HCSNet while maintaining users' quality of service.Comment: to appear in IEEE Wireless Communication