Humanizing E-Mail Processing for Personal Information Management with Semantic Web and Speech Act Theory

With the rapid progress of information technology, Internet and people’s lives are combining closely with versatile communication ways now. Among these ways, the most popular one for knowledge workers is e-mail. People use it to deal with business affairs or receiving information in daily life. That gradually induces every knowledge worker has to handle many grueling e-mails every day. As a result, knowledge workers may be stuck most of their time with the e-mail distention problem. Although there are growing e-mail management systems, most of them are still short of freeing user to set, reply or retrieve related information with customized personal dexterity. That is, the data or information in the e-mail system is still obstinate for most of the knowledge workers. To mitigate this problem, we rethink the spirit of an e-mail system from the perspectives of speech act theory, and use the six ethics of heart to construct the kernel of the social network with data provenance to help users reduce the gap between current e-mail routine process and their own personal information management. Together with the customized Semantic Web construction, our approach hopefully helps knowledge workers establish a more efficient e-mail processing model with humanity consideration

Using a Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm for Solving Signal Transmission Station Location and Allocation Problem with Different Regional Communication Quality Restriction

This study aims to investigate the signal transmission station location-allocation problems with the various restricted regional constraints. In each constraint, the types of signal transmission stations and the corresponding numbers and locations are to be decided at the same time. Inappropriate set up of stations is not only causing the unnecessary cost but also making the poor service quality. In this study, we proposed a hybrid evolutionary approach integrating the immune algorithm with particle swarm optimization (IAPSO) to solve this problem where each of the regions is with different maximum failure rate restrictions. We compared the performance of the proposed method with commercial optimization software LINGO®. According to the experimental results, solutions obtained by our IAPSO are better than or as well as the best solutions obtained by LINGO®. It is expected that our research can provide the telecommunication enterprise the optimal/near-optimal strategies for the setup of signal transmission stations

Is Contract Farming More Profitable and Efficient Than Non-Contract Farming-A Survey Study of Rice Farms In Taiwan

Trade liberalization and globalization has modernized the food retail sector in Taiwan, affecting consumers, producers and trade patterns. These changes have placed significant pressures on farmers and processors including more stringent quality control and product varieties. The government has launched a rice production-marketing contract program in 2005 to assist rice farmers and the agro-business sector to work together as partners. The minimum scale for each contract is 50 hectares of adjacent rice paddies with 50 participants including rice farmers, seedling providers, millers and marketing agents. In order to evaluate the outcome of this program, a survey is conducted in the summer of 2005 after the first (spring) crop is harvested. Information of price and value of output and major variable and fixed inputs are collected along with characteristics of the farmers and farms. The survey results show that the average revenue of a contract farm is about 11 percent higher than an average non-contract farm. The per hectare cost of production in a contract farm is about 13 percent lower and as a result the average profit margin under contract is more than 50 percent above those without contract. A swtiching regression profit frontier model is adopted to further investigate their efficiency performance. The result indicates that an average contract farms is 20 percent more efficient than an average non-contract farm in a comparable operating environment. The result also suggests that although contract farming has potential to improve the profit of smallholders, it is not a sufficient condition for such improvement.Land Economics/Use,

Multi-Slot Allocation Protocols for Massive IoT Devices with Small-Size Uploading Data

The emergence of Internet of Things applications introduces new challenges such as massive connectivity and small data transmission. In traditional data transmission protocols, an ID (i.e., IP address or MAC address) is usually included in a packet so that its receiver is able to know who sent the packet. However, this introduces the big head-small body problem for light payload. To address this problem, the Hint protocols have been proposed. The main idea is to 'encode' information in a tiny broadcast Hint message that allows devices to 'decode' their transmission slots. Thus, it can significantly reduce transmission and contention overheads. In this letter, we extend eHint to support multi-slot data transmissions. Several efficient protocols are proposed. Our simulation results validate that the protocols can significantly increase the number of successfully transmitted devices, channel utilization, and payload of transmitted devices compared with eHint

How to Reduce Unexpected eMBMS Session Disconnection: Design and Performance Analysis

In 3GPP eMBMS, sometimes sessions will be disconnected unexpectedly due to the miss of session keys. Although rekeying can prevent old users from getting multicast data, it also causes authorized users to miss subsequent data if they miss the key update messages. Thus, re-authentication is needed to obtain lost keys from KMM. We point out this problem in our previous work 1. In this paper, we further propose a new KeySet algorithm, which can pre-issue a number of keys to users when they join eMBMS. The advantage is that a user can still decode multicast data even if it misses some key updates tentatively. However, the cost is that allowing some old users to freely enjoying multicast for some time. In this paper, we quantify the tradeoff and derive the optimal case

eHint: An Efficient Protocol for Uploading Small-Size IoT Data

IoT (Internet of Things) has attracted a lot of attention recently. IoT devices need to report their data or status to base stations at various frequencies. The IoT communications observed by a base station normally exhibit the following characteristics: (1) massively connected, (2) lightly loaded per packet, and (3) periodical or at least mostly predictable. The current design principals of communication networks, when applied to IoT scenarios, however, do not fit well to these requirements. When a large number of devices contend to send small packets, the signaling overhead is not cost-effective. To address this problem, our previous work [1] proposes the Hint protocol, which is slot-based and schedule- oriented for uploading IoT devices' data. In this work, we extend [1] to support data transmissions for multiple resource blocks. We assume that the uplink payloads from IoT devices are small, each taking very few slots (or resource blocks), but devices are massive. The main idea is to "encode" information in a tiny broadcast that allows each device to "decode" its transmission slots, thus significantly reducing transmission overheads and contention overheads. Our simulation results verify that the protocol can significantly increase channel utilization compared with traditional schemes