Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target

Field test of multi-hop image sensing network prototype on a city-wide scale

Open Access funded by Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommuniocations Under a Creative Commons license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Wireless multimedia sensor network drastically stretches the horizon of traditional monitoring and surveillance systems, of which most existing research have utilised Zigbee or WiFi as the communication technology. Both technologies use ultra high frequencies (mainly 2.4 GHz) and suffer from relatively short transmission range (i.e. 100 m line-of-sight). The objective of this paper is to assess the feasibility and potential of transmitting image information using RF modules with lower frequencies (e.g. 433 MHz) in order to achieve a larger scale deployment such as a city scenario. Arduino platform is used for its low cost and simplicity. The details of hardware properties are elaborated in the article, followed by an investigation of optimum configurations for the system. Upon an initial range testing outcome of over 2000 m line-of-sight transmission distance, the prototype network has been installed in a real life city plot for further examination of performance. A range of suitable applications has been proposed along with suggestions for future research.Peer reviewe

Analyzing covert social network foundation behind terrorism disaster

This paper addresses a method to analyze the covert social network foundation hidden behind the terrorism disaster. It is to solve a node discovery problem, which means to discover a node, which functions relevantly in a social network, but escaped from monitoring on the presence and mutual relationship of nodes. The method aims at integrating the expert investigator's prior understanding, insight on the terrorists' social network nature derived from the complex graph theory, and computational data processing. The social network responsible for the 9/11 attack in 2001 is used to execute simulation experiment to evaluate the performance of the method.Comment: 17pages, 10 figures, submitted to Int. J. Services Science

A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Surveys, Astrometric Follow-up & Population Statistics

Asteroid surveys are the backbone of asteroid science, and with this in mind we begin with a broad review of the impact of asteroid surveys on our field. We then provide a brief history of asteroid discoveries so as to place contemporary and future surveys in perspective. Surveys in the United States have discovered the vast majority of the asteroids and this dominance has been consolidated since the publication of Asteroids III. Our descriptions of the asteroid surveys that have been operational since that time are focussed upon those that have contributed the vast majority of asteroid observations and discoveries. We also provide some insight into upcoming next-generation surveys that are sure to alter our understanding of the small bodies in the inner solar system and provide evidence to untangle their complicated dynamical and physical histories. The Minor Planet Center, the nerve center of the asteroid discovery effort, has improved its operations significantly in the past decade so that it can manage the increasing discovery rate, and ensure that it is well-placed to handle the data rates expected in the next decade. We also consider the difficulties associated with astrometric follow-up of newly identified objects. It seems clear that both of these efforts must operate in new modes in order to keep pace with expected discovery rates of next-generation ground- and space-based surveys.Comment: Chapter to appear in the book ASTEROIDS IV, (University of Arizona Press) Space Science Series, edited by P. Michel, F. DeMeo and W. Bottk