Financial Modeling and Prediction as a Service

© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media DordrechtThis paper describes our proposal for Quality of Service (QoS) for Financial Modeling and Prediction as a Service (FMPaaS), since a majority of papers does not focus on SaaS level. We focus on two factors for delivering successful QoS, which are performance and accuracy for FMPaaS. The design process, theories and models behind the FMPaaS service have been explained. To support our FMPaaS service, two APIs have been developed to improve on performance and accuracy. Two major experiments have been illustrated and results show that each API processing can be completed in 2.12 seconds and 100,000 simulations can be completed in an acceptable period of time. Accuracy tests have been performed while using Facebook as an example. Three points of comparisons between actual and predicted prices have been undertaken. Results support accuracy since results are between 93.72 % and 99.63 % for Facebook. Three case studies have been used and results can support the accuracy and validity of the high level of accuracy offered by FMPaaS

Analysis of the Chemical Components Found in The Volatile Oils of Thymus vulgaris and Lavandula angustifolia and Their Antiviral Properties: A Case Study of Russia

Herbal medicines are natural remedies derived from plants or plant extracts. They have been used for thousands of years in traditional medicine and are still widely used today as alternative treatments for various health conditions. In this study, the antiviral effects of the volatile oils of Thymus vulgaris and Lavandula angustifolia were examined separately after identifying the constituents of the volatile oils of these two plants. Two plants, Thymus vulgaris and Lavandula angustifolia, grown in the open air, were collected from the surrounding plains of Mirny and Ust-Ilimsk cities in Russia, respectively. Using a Clevenger apparatus, the oil was independently extracted from each plant by distillation with water. By using gas chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS), the obtained volatile oil was examined. The antiviral effects of these two plants' essential oils were then studied independently on herpes simplex virus (HSV-1). These viruses can quickly multiply on HeLa or HEp-2 cancer cells and produce effects that specifically cause cytopathic effect. In the essential oil of the Lavandula angustifolia, 24 compounds including thymol, carvacrol, p-Cymene and caryophyllene were identified. In the essential oil of Thymus vulgaris, 27 substances including terpenin-4-L, p-cymene, γ-terpinene and sabinene were identified. Also, the antiviral effects of the volatile oil of these two plants were investigated separately with a concentration of 10-4 on HeLa cells infected with HSV-1, and the result was negative

Right Scaling for Right Pricing: A Case Study on Total Cost of Ownership Measurement for Cloud Migration

Cloud computing promises traditional enterprises and independent software vendors a myriad of advantages over on-premise installations including cost, operational and organizational efficiencies. The decision to migrate software configured for on-premise delivery to the cloud requires careful technical consideration and planning. In this chapter, we discuss the impact of right-scaling on the cost modelling for migration decision making and price setting of software for commercial resale. An integrated process is presented for measuring total cost of ownership, taking in to account IaaS/PaaS resource consumption based on forecast SaaS usage levels. The process is illustrated with a real world case study

Social Internet of Things and New Generation Computing -- A Survey

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) tries to overcome the challenges of Internet of Things (IoT) such as scalability, trust and discovery of resources, by inspiration from social computing. This survey aims to investigate the research done on SIoT from two perspectives including application domain and the integration to the new computing models. For this, a two-dimensional framework is proposed and the projects are investigated, accordingly. The first dimension considers and classifies available research from the application domain perspective and the second dimension performs the same from the integration to new computing models standpoint. The aim is to technically describe SIoT, to classify related research, to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art, and to discuss open research directions in this field.Comment: IoT, Social computing, Surve

Pricing of reusable resources under ambiguous distributions of demand and service time with emerging applications

Monopolistic pricing models for revenue management are widely used in practice to set prices of multiple products with uncertain demand arrivals. The literature often assumes deterministic time of serving each demand and that the distribution of uncertainty is fully known. In this paper, we consider a new class of revenue management problems inspired by emerging applications such as cloud computing and city parking, where we dynamically determine prices for multiple products sharing limited resource and aim to maximize the expected revenue over a finite horizon. Random demand of each product arrives in each period, modeled by a function of the arrival time, product type, and price. Unlike the traditional monopolistic pricing, here each demand stays in the system for uncertain time. Both demand and service time follow ambiguous distributions, and we formulate robust deterministic approximation models to construct efficient heuristic fixed-price pricing policies. We conduct numerical studies by testing cloud computing service pricing instances based on data published by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for managing revenue and risk under various distributions of demand and service time

Structural/mechanistic insights into the efficacy of non-classical β-lactamase inhibitors against extensively drug resistant Stenotrophomonas maltophilia clinical isolates

Clavulanic acid and avibactam are clinically deployed serine β-lactamase inhibitors, important as a defence against antibacterial resistance. Bicyclic boronates are recently discovered inhibitors of serine and some metallo β-lactamases. Here we show that avibactam and a bicyclic boronate inhibit L2 (serine β-lactamase) but not L1 (metallo β-lactamase) from the extensively drug resistant human pathogen Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. X-ray crystallography revealed that both inhibitors bind L2 by covalent attachment to the nucleophilic serine. Both inhibitors reverse ceftazidime resistance in S. maltophilia because, unlike clavulanic acid, they do not induce L1 production. Ceftazidime/inhibitor resistant mutants hyper-produce L1, but retain aztreonam/inhibitor susceptibility because aztreonam is not an L1 substrate. Importantly, avibactam, but not the bicyclic boronate is deactivated by L1 at a low rate; the utility of avibactam might be compromised by mutations that increase this deactivation rate. These data rationalize the observed clinical efficacy of ceftazidime/avibactam plus aztreonam as combination therapy for S. maltophilia infections and confirm that aztreonam-like β-lactams plus non-classical β-lactamase inhibitors, particularly avibactam-like and bicyclic boronate compounds, have potential for treating infections caused by this most intractable of drug resistant pathogens

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

Pedagogers uppfattningar om flerspråkiga barns språkutveckling i förskolan

Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka hur pedagoger i förskolan resonerar kring flerspråkiga barns språkutveckling och lärande samt att undersöka miljöns betydelse i detta sammanhang. Mina teoretiska utgångspunkter baserar sig på Vygotskijs sociokulturella teori om barns lärande. Förutom Vygotskij har jag också hämtat resonemang från Bråten (1998), Lindqvist (1999), Strandberg (2006), Säljö (2000) och andra forskare. Uppsatsens empiriska underlag grundar sig på ostrukturerade intervjuer med fyra förskollärare i tre förskolor. Samtliga förskolor ligger i ett mångkulturellt område. Resultatet visar att pedagogerna ansåg att deras intresse för barns modersmål påverkar dessa barns intresse för inlärning av svenska. Resultatet visar också att pedagogerna tyckte att modersmålet är viktigt för flerspråkiga barns utveckling av det svenska språket. En annan sak som resultatet tydligt visar är att pedagogerna hade en uppfattning om att förskolan är viktig för de flerspråkiga barnens inlärning av det svenska språket. I diskussionen har det kommit fram att pedagogens roll och deras skapande av pedagogiska miljöer är avgörande för dessa barns språkutveckling