6,251 research outputs found
On the feasibility of collaborative green data center ecosystems
The increasing awareness of the impact of the IT sector on the environment, together with economic factors, have fueled many research efforts to reduce the energy expenditure of data centers. Recent work proposes to achieve additional energy savings by exploiting, in concert with customers, service workloads and to reduce data centers’ carbon footprints by adopting demand-response mechanisms between data centers and their energy providers. In this paper, we debate about the incentives that customers and data centers can have to adopt such measures and propose a new service type and pricing scheme that is economically attractive and technically realizable. Simulation results based on real measurements confirm that our scheme can achieve additional energy savings while preserving service performance and the interests of data centers and customers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Financial Services to the Unbanked: The Case of the Mzansi Intervention in South Africa
The Mzansi intervention is a major initiative designed to provide banking services to the unbanked South African population. This study investigates the underlying variables that define the choice of a Mzansi account from a consumer perspective. Unlike previous studies, we do not assume that demand for financial services is a given but instead that it is underlain by perceptions and attitudes. Financial attitudes and perceptions are found to exert significant effects on financial choices. In particular, aspirations and forward-looking values are instrumental in facilitating access to finance
Personal Volunteer Computing
We propose personal volunteer computing, a novel paradigm to encourage
technical solutions that leverage personal devices, such as smartphones and
laptops, for personal applications that require significant computations, such
as animation rendering and image processing. The paradigm requires no
investment in additional hardware, relying instead on devices that are already
owned by users and their community, and favours simple tools that can be
implemented part-time by a single developer. We show that samples of personal
devices of today are competitive with a top-of-the-line laptop from two years
ago. We also propose new directions to extend the paradigm
Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions
The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last
decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space,
but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider
data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing
cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple
providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers.
These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing
architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These
architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and
devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems.
Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for
realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201
Can Integrity Replace Institutions? Theory and Evidence
Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts preceding the transactions, and show that any one of (1) institutions, (2) trust, or (3) integrity, foster economic growth. We construct data of economic performance of social groups in Lebanon, measure integrity and other values of these groups, and use this data and data from Kenya to support one of the model’s predictions. Policy implications are discussed.economic development, institutions, integrity, Lebanon, social norms, trust
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