Economic-based Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing

Computational Grids, emerging as an infrastructure for next generation computing, enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. As the resources in the Grid are heterogeneous and geographically distributed with varying availability and a variety of usage and cost policies for diverse users at different times and, priorities as well as goals that vary with time. The management of resources and application scheduling in such a large and distributed environment is a complex task. This thesis proposes a distributed computational economy as an effective metaphor for the management of resources and application scheduling. It proposes an architectural framework that supports resource trading and quality of services based scheduling. It enables the regulation of supply and demand for resources and provides an incentive for resource owners for participating in the Grid and motives the users to trade-off between the deadline, budget, and the required level of quality of service. The thesis demonstrates the capability of economic-based systems for peer-to-peer distributed computing by developing users' quality-of-service requirements driven scheduling strategies and algorithms. It demonstrates their effectiveness by performing scheduling experiments on the World-Wide Grid for solving parameter sweep applications

Ionic Conductive Membranes for Fuel Cells

This book, titled “Ionic Conductive Membranes for Fuel Cells”, from the journal Membranes, discusses the state of the art and future developments in the field of polymer electrolyte membranes for fuel cells, an efficient and clean system for converting fuel into energy

Large-scale inference in the focally damaged human brain

Clinical outcomes in focal brain injury reflect the interactions between two distinct anatomically distributed patterns: the functional organisation of the brain and the structural distribution of injury. The challenge of understanding the functional architecture of the brain is familiar; that of understanding the lesion architecture is barely acknowledged. Yet, models of the functional consequences of focal injury are critically dependent on our knowledge of both. The studies described in this thesis seek to show how machine learning-enabled high-dimensional multivariate analysis powered by large-scale data can enhance our ability to model the relation between focal brain injury and clinical outcomes across an array of modelling applications. All studies are conducted on internationally the largest available set of MR imaging data of focal brain injury in the context of acute stroke (N=1333) and employ kernel machines at the principal modelling architecture. First, I examine lesion-deficit prediction, quantifying the ceiling on achievable predictive fidelity for high-dimensional and low-dimensional models, demonstrating the former to be substantially higher than the latter. Second, I determine the marginal value of adding unlabelled imaging data to predictive models within a semi-supervised framework, quantifying the benefit of assembling unlabelled collections of clinical imaging. Third, I compare high- and low-dimensional approaches to modelling response to therapy in two contexts: quantifying the effect of treatment at the population level (therapeutic inference) and predicting the optimal treatment in an individual patient (prescriptive inference). I demonstrate the superiority of the high-dimensional approach in both settings

Recommender systems for fossil community distribution modelling

We propose to leverage recommender systems from machine learning to build large-scale community distribution models for the mammalian fossil record. Recommender systems are behind most online life today, from shopping to news personalisation, online dating, or the selection of study programmes or fastest routes. Many recommender systems work by predicting user preferences from items that occur together in user profiles. Technically, this setting closely resembles co-occurrence of species in natural environments. Here we frame community distribution modelling as a recommender systems task, tailor existing recommender techniques for this purpose and propose optimisation criteria for fitting the models in the ecological context. The predictive power comes from species co-occurrences. We demonstrate the potential of this approach for analysing past ecosystems on a case study of Miocene fossil sites in Europe, where we use the proposed community distribution modelling for reconstructing companionships and relative abundances of large mammals. The proposed approach to community distribution modelling, although not climatically explicit, can help to reconstruct past ecosystems and analyse their structure and dynamics over time and space. It also allows, even coarsely, to predict relative abundances of fossil species from presence-absence data. More generally, the proposed perspective is a means for analysis of fossil communities and the relationships between their ecological contexts.Peer reviewe

The role of agriculture in Central and Eastern European rural development: engine of change or social buffer?

This volume of proceedings, available both as hard copy and pdf , is an edited compilation of selected contributions to the IAMO Forum 2004, which will be held in Halle (Saale), Germany, at the Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe from 4 to 6 November 2004. CONTENTS: The role of agriculture in Central and Eastern European rural development: an overview; Martin Petrick, Peter Weingarten. Subsistence Farming and Rural Unemployment - the Case of Slovakia; Gejza Blaas. Rural Development in Albania and the Role of Agriculture: a Case Study in the Prefecture of Elbasan; Vittorio Gallerani, Nada Krypa, Meri Raggi, Antonella Samoggia, Davide Viaggi. Agricultural Problems in Georgia and Strategic Policy Responses; Zurab Revishvili, Henry W. Kinnucan. The Role of Private Household Plots in Russian Rural Development; Galina Rodionova. Agriculture in Southeastern Poland - Main Problems of The Systemic Transformation Process; Janusz Zmija, Ewa Tyran. Factor Market Imperfections and Polarization of Agrarian Structures in Central and Eastern Europe; Alexander Sarris, Sara Savastano, Christian Tritten. Agricultural Credit Market in Poland - Experiences in the Market Economy; Alina Danilowska. Social Aspects of Agricultural Employment in the Czech Republic; Hana Horská, Daniela Spěšná, Jan Drlík, Radomír Koutný, Tomáš Ratinger. Lease as a Form of Land Consolidation in Moldavian Agriculture; Dragos Cimpoies, Grigore Baltag. Analysing Variation in Russian Dairy Farms, 1990-2001; Irina Bezlepkina, Ruud Huirne, Alfons Oude Lansink, Arie Oskam. The Role of Agriculture for Rural Development in a less favoured Rural Area: The Experience of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (Germany); Theodor Fock. Wine, Sand and Socialism: Some enduring Effects of Hungary's 'Flexible' Model of Collectivization; Chris Hann. Off-Farm Activities and Subsistence Farming in CEE Countries - A Statistical Approach; Franz Greif. Agricultural Productivity Growth: a Vehicle For Rural Poverty Reduction in Ukraine? Viktoriya Galushko, Stephan von Cramon-Taubadel. Institutional Factors Influencing Agricultural Sales of the Individual Farmers in Romania; Borbala Balint. Social Capital in Rural Areas of Latvia within the Context of Public Organisations; Modrite Pelše. The Effects of Social Capital on the Organization of Agricultural Enterprises and Rural Communities in Transition: the Case of Ukraine; Vladislav Valentinov, Tetyana Matsibora, Mykola Malik. Farm Tourism: Myth or Reality? Štefan Bojnec. Biomass Production as a Future Agricultural Development Factor in West Pomerania (Poland); Jaroslaw Senczyszyn, Agnieszka Brelik. Rural Implications of Foreign Direct Investments in the Food Industry of the Visegrad Countries; Csaba Jansik. The Impact of Information Society on Agriculture and Rural Areas Development; Anton Nedyalkov, Victoria Borisova. Agricultural Policy and Rural Development: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects; Heinz Ahrens. A Tailor-Made Common Agricultural Policy for the Accession Countries: Help or Harm for Agriculture in Eastern Europe? David Sedik. Evaluation of the Effects of Pre-Accession and Accession Instruments on the Development of the Northeast Region in Bulgaria; Plamen Mishev, Antoaneta Golemanova. Measures of Rural Development Policy in Russia; Alexander Petrikov. Priority Setting for Rural Development: an Interactive PC-Based Programming Approach; Dieter Kirschke, Astrid Häger, Kurt Jechlitschka, Stefan Wegener --