An electro-mechanical contact formulation for DRY/WET electrode-scalp interfaces in an EEG headset

The process of generating an initial prototype for a new dry electrode wearable EEG headset system design can be time and resource intensive. The ability to predict the mechanical and electrical characteristics of this recording device could lead to major cost savings in this process. Since the skin surface roughness has a deep impact on the decrease of brain electric contact conductance (or the increase of the contact impedance) when electrode with bristles contact scalp skin, the estimation of electric conductance across rough dry and wet boundaries is a challenging task in the designing optimization of the wearable EEG headset system. In this contribution, the contact mechanism to predict the electrical impedance of scalp skin pressed against the electrode is considered as the electrical connection by the mechanical contact. With this, we have extended the Pohrt and Popov model by including the effects of conductive gel. An experiment is developed and carried-out to validate the interfacial contact impedance model

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

A grid-enabled Web Map server

Today Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide several tools for studying and analyzing varied human and natural phenomena, therefore GIS and geospatial data has grown so much in both public and private organizations. A Challenge is the integration of these data to get innovative and exhaustive knowledge about topics of interest. In this paper we describe the design of a Web Map Service (WMS) OGC-compliant, through the use of grid computing technology and demonstrate how this approach can improve, w.r.t. security, performance, efficiency and scalability, the integration of geospatial multi-source data. End users, with a single sign-on, securely and transparently, gets maps whose data are distributed on heterogeneous data sources belonging to one o more Virtual Organizations via distributed queries in a grid computing environment

The COMQUAD Component Container Architecture and Contract Negotiation

Component-based applications require runtime support to be able to guarantee non-functional properties. This report proposes an architecture for a real-time-capable, component-based runtime environment, which allows to separate non-functional and functional concerns in component-based software development. The architecture is presented with particular focus on three key issues: the conceptual architecture, an approach including implementation issues for splitting the runtime environment into a real-time-capable and a real-time-incapable part, and details of contract negotiation. The latter includes selecting component implementations for instantiantion based on their non-functional properties

Context Aware Middleware Architectures: Survey and Challenges

Abstract: Context aware applications, which can adapt their behaviors to changing environments, are attracting more and more attention. To simplify the complexity of developing applications, context aware middleware, which introduces context awareness into the traditional middleware, is highlighted to provide a homogeneous interface involving generic context management solutions. This paper provides a survey of state-of-the-art context aware middleware architectures proposed during the period from 2009 through 2015. First, a preliminary background, such as the principles of context, context awareness, context modelling, and context reasoning, is provided for a comprehensive understanding of context aware middleware. On this basis, an overview of eleven carefully selected middleware architectures is presented and their main features explained. Then, thorough comparisons and analysis of the presented middleware architectures are performed based on technical parameters including architectural style, context abstraction, context reasoning, scalability, fault tolerance, interoperability, service discovery, storage, security & privacy, context awareness level, and cloud-based big data analytics. The analysis shows that there is actually no context aware middleware architecture that complies with all requirements. Finally, challenges are pointed out as open issues for future work

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor