Analysing the effects of cultural dimensions on the quality of library websites

The study attempts to assess the effect of the cultural dimensions on library website designing and also tries to establish its connection with library website quality. Content analysis method was adopted to accumulate the data from 85 university libraries. Further, statistical tools were employed to analyse the data. The study has revealed that there is a significant association between cultural dimensions and web site design. The study also established that all the culturally effected web designs [Power Distance Index (PDI), Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Individualism (IDV), Masculinity (MAS), Long Term Orientation (LTO)] are strongly correlated with the website quality. Subsequently, a regression model has been projected to calculate the level of impact of cultural dimensions on website quality. In addition, the checkpoints used in the study can act as guidelines in any similar kind of research

Wireless Servo Motor Control using RF and MCU

Servo motors or stepper motors are very common in day to day gadgets. Almost every bidirectional rotating mechanism is based on servo motor. These servo motors are controlled either via wired system or via wireless system. This technology is used everywhere for example the wiper system of automobiles. Also the analogue speedometers were based on this technology. Home automation is a very important sector in 21st century. Countless home automation projects can be done using this servo motor control technique. Feedback control system is the backbone of IOT (Internet Of Things) or IOE (Internet Of Everything) as coined by CISCO. The servo basically works on feedback control system. The operation of feedback in servo can be designed in MATLAB but on an industrial level. This paper deals with a very general extremely low cost method for the wireless control of servo

Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

Inclusion of the economically backward students: Scope and tenet of Indian school libraries

The study aims to find out how far a school library can contribute in the issue of inclusion of the economically backward class students. Meanwhile the author has opined three major issues: Economical, Psychological and Societal as the reasons behind the school dropouts in India; while theoretical analyses have unveiled that the school library has enough scope and potential to reduce the dropout rate by offering several innovative approaches. Further, the author has investigated the reality and forwarded ten unique approaches (broadly classified into Library beyond school, Increase the reading habit and Empowerment of the student) which could be fruitful to impede the dropout rates in school education and also framed a flowchart to describe the steps of the process. The study shows that the approaches are well construct and self-explanatory and proper implications of those ideas can uplift the literacy rate. Later, two cases are being cited in the study to understand the applicability of those initiatives. The result shows that through the appropriate application of the ideas the dropout rates have decreased in both the cases

Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

Integrating diverse knowledge bases for empowering local farmers in India

The dissemination of agricultural information process to the farmers of Baruipur, a community development block in West Bengal, India is studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 129 farmers and two government officials. The study reveals that among the available wide range of information sources and learning forms, farmers primarily value local knowledge as it is mainly experience-driven, practical and can be shared or transmitted informally among the farmers. But, informal local knowledge gradually gets influenced by extraneous factors, constructing an alternative pathway that resist the flow of information from reaching to the grass-root level. Limitation of genuine and accurate agricultural information impeded the empowerment of farmers at the micro level which demands for a superior integration among diverse knowledge systems with informal local knowledge. Here, the study identifies a more practical approach for knowledge integration, aiming to secure local preference, dynamisms and internal cohesiveness among participants from different domain. Further, this paper forwards a participatory approach based informal communication model, facilitating two ways communication for better and effective flow of need based, value added, accurate information towards holistic empowerment of the farmers at the ground level

Approximate Caching for Efficiently Serving Diffusion Models

Text-to-image generation using diffusion models has seen explosive popularity owing to their ability in producing high quality images adhering to text prompts. However, production-grade diffusion model serving is a resource intensive task that not only require high-end GPUs which are expensive but also incurs considerable latency. In this paper, we introduce a technique called approximate-caching that can reduce such iterative denoising steps for an image generation based on a prompt by reusing intermediate noise states created during a prior image generation for similar prompts. Based on this idea, we present an end to end text-to-image system, Nirvana, that uses the approximate-caching with a novel cache management-policy Least Computationally Beneficial and Frequently Used (LCBFU) to provide % GPU compute savings, 19.8% end-to-end latency reduction and 19% dollar savings, on average, on two real production workloads. We further present an extensive characterization of real production text-to-image prompts from the perspective of caching, popularity and reuse of intermediate states in a large production environment.Comment: Accepted at NSDI'2

Outage-Watch: Early Prediction of Outages using Extreme Event Regularizer

Cloud services are omnipresent and critical cloud service failure is a fact of life. In order to retain customers and prevent revenue loss, it is important to provide high reliability guarantees for these services. One way to do this is by predicting outages in advance, which can help in reducing the severity as well as time to recovery. It is difficult to forecast critical failures due to the rarity of these events. Moreover, critical failures are ill-defined in terms of observable data. Our proposed method, Outage-Watch, defines critical service outages as deteriorations in the Quality of Service (QoS) captured by a set of metrics. Outage-Watch detects such outages in advance by using current system state to predict whether the QoS metrics will cross a threshold and initiate an extreme event. A mixture of Gaussian is used to model the distribution of the QoS metrics for flexibility and an extreme event regularizer helps in improving learning in tail of the distribution. An outage is predicted if the probability of any one of the QoS metrics crossing threshold changes significantly. Our evaluation on a real-world SaaS company dataset shows that Outage-Watch significantly outperforms traditional methods with an average AUC of 0.98. Additionally, Outage-Watch detects all the outages exhibiting a change in service metrics and reduces the Mean Time To Detection (MTTD) of outages by up to 88% when deployed in an enterprise cloud-service system, demonstrating efficacy of our proposed method.Comment: Accepted to ESEC/FSE 202

ESRO: Experience Assisted Service Reliability against Outages

Modern cloud services are prone to failures due to their complex architecture, making diagnosis a critical process. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) spend hours leveraging multiple sources of data, including the alerts, error logs, and domain expertise through past experiences to locate the root cause(s). These experiences are documented as natural language text in outage reports for previous outages. However, utilizing the raw yet rich semi-structured information in the reports systematically is time-consuming. Structured information, on the other hand, such as alerts that are often used during fault diagnosis, is voluminous and requires expert knowledge to discern. Several strategies have been proposed to use each source of data separately for root cause analysis. In this work, we build a diagnostic service called ESRO that recommends root causes and remediation for failures by utilizing structured as well as semi-structured sources of data systematically. ESRO constructs a causal graph using alerts and a knowledge graph using outage reports, and merges them in a novel way to form a unified graph during training. A retrieval-based mechanism is then used to search the unified graph and rank the likely root causes and remediation techniques based on the alerts fired during an outage at inference time. Not only the individual alerts, but their respective importance in predicting an outage group is taken into account during recommendation. We evaluated our model on several cloud service outages of a large SaaS enterprise over the course of ~2 years, and obtained an average improvement of 27% in rouge scores after comparing the likely root causes against the ground truth over state-of-the-art baselines. We further establish the effectiveness of ESRO through qualitative analysis on multiple real outage examples.Comment: Accepted to 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023