Service Allocation in a Mobile Fog Infrastructure under Availability and QoS Constraints

The next generation of mobile networks, namely 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have brought a large number of delay sensitive services. In this context Cloud services are migrating to the edge of the networks to reduce latency. The notion of Fog computing, where the edge plays an active role in the execution of services, comes to meet the need for the stringent requirements. Thus, it becomes of a high importance to elegantly formulate and optimize this problem of mapping demand to supply. This work does exactly that, taking into account two key aspects of a service allocation problem in the Fog, namely modeling cost of executing a given set of services, and the randomness of resources availability, which may come from pre-existing load or server mobility. We introduce an integer optimization formulation to minimize the total cost under a guarantee of service execution despite the uncertainty of resources availability.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Dynamic Assessment in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory: Origins and Main Concepts

Language assessment is the significant component of foreign language learning/ teaching. An aim of language assessment is to find about how much the process of education improves learners’ knowledge of the target language. One alternative to standardized testing, Dynamic Assessment derived from Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory offers a new insight into the field of assessment through integrating instruction and assessment. Dynamic assessment is a method of conducting a language testing to investigate and highlight the individual learner's possessed skills and potential development. The present study is going to display an overview of the importance of dynamic assessment in L2 learning, emphasizing the origins and principal concepts involved in the process. The study highlights the derivation of dynamic assessment from Vygotsky’s prominent sociocultural theory. Then it brings about an introduction to zone of proximal development the concept of which learner's cognitive development results through the application of dynamic assessment. Later the study discusses dynamic assessment in detail and introduces its differences with the traditional testing formats as well as introducing forms of dynamic assessment

Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and extracting subjective information from text. Despite the advances to employ cross-lingual approaches in an automatic way, the implementation and evaluation of sentiment analysis systems require language-specific data to consider various sociocultural and linguistic peculiarities. In this paper, the collection and annotation of a dataset are described for sentiment analysis of Central Kurdish. We explore a few classical machine learning and neural network-based techniques for this task. Additionally, we employ an approach in transfer learning to leverage pretrained models for data augmentation. We demonstrate that data augmentation achieves a high F$_1$ score and accuracy despite the difficulty of the task.Comment: 14 pages - under review at ACM TALLI

Use Of Earnings Information For Stock Pricing In Different Market Cycles: The Effect Of Discretionary Accruals

This study examines the association between stock prices and discretionary accruals in different stock market cycles and presents evidence about the discrepancy in prior research that investors were able to identify earnings management in some cases, but not in some other cases. We argue that investors’ reaction to the true nature of EPS changes may be different in different market cycles. We suggests that investors pay less attention to the nature of EPS changes in an optimistic cycle, and are more critical in neutral and pessimistic cycles. Therefore, investors are more likely to detect and count for any earnings management in a neutral or pessimistic cycle than in an optimistic cycle. Using the U.S. quarterly data from July 01, 1997 to June 29, 2001, three market cycles were identified: optimistic, neutral and pessimistic. The test results indicated that the association between discretionary accruals and abnormal stock returns were insignificant in the neutral market cycle, significant and positive in the optimistic cycle and significant and negative in the pessimistic cycle. These findings indicate that investors tend to ignore the income-increasing effect of discretionary accruals on EPS changes in an optimistic market. The finding suggests that a more delegate and technical analysis of EPS changes is required when earnings information is used for stock pricing. It also suggests that a consideration of market cycle effect on investors’ use of EPS could improve the earnings-based ratio analysis. The findings propose that researchers interested in investigating the association between stock prices and earnings management should control for the effect of the market cycle during which their samples are drawn

Comparison of sexual function in infertile women with polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis: A cross-sectional study

Background: Infertility is one of the issues affecting sexual function (SF). Infertility is also one of the complications of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis. Objective: This research seeks to assess and compare SF and the prevalence of sexual dysfunction in infertile women with PCOS and endometriosis. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out with a sample of 630 (210 infertile women with endometriosis, 210 infertile women with PCOS, and 210 healthy women of childbearing age as the control group). SF was assessed by the female sexual function index (FSFI). Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The primary outcome measured was FSFI score. Secondary outcome was hospital anxiety and depression scale score. Results: The results showed that the mean score of the total FSFI in the 2 groups of PCOS and endometriosis was lower than the control group (p < 0.001). In addition, women with higher education (university education) had a higher total FSFI. Conclusion: Sexual dysfunction rates are high in infertile women with endometriosis and PCOS. Infertility service providers in infertility centers need to pay attention to this issue. Key words: Polycystic ovarian syndrome, Endometriosis, Infertility, Sexual dysfunction

Earnings Management Effect In Different Stock Market Cycles

This study examines the association between stock prices and discretionary accruals in different stock market cycles. The study presents evidence for a discrepancy in prior research and shows that investors are able to identify earnings management only in some cases. We argue that investors’ reaction to the true nature of EPS varies in different market cycles. We suggests that investors pay less attention to the nature of EPS changes in an optimistic cycles, and are more critical in neutral or pessimistic cycles. Therefore, investors are more likely to detect and count for any earnings management in the neutral or pessimistic cycle than in the optimistic cycle. The test results indicated that the association between discretionary accruals and abnormal stock returns were insignificant in the neutral market cycle, significant and positive in the optimistic cycle and significant and negative in the pessimistic cycle. These findings indicate that investors tend to ignore the income-increasing effect of discretionary accruals on EPS changes in an optimistic market. The findings suggest that researchers investigating the association between stock prices and earnings management should control for the type of the market cycle from which their samples are drawn

Performance Enhancement Mechanism of IEEE 802.11AH Machine Communication System

As the Internet gets more populated and the number of devices increase dramatically, demanding connectivity anytime, anywhere and for everything, the urge for a novel concept is raised. Consequently, Internet of Things (IoT) is introduced to shed a light on the vision of the future Internet with tremendous amount of "things" interconnected to each other while utilizing various technologies for different applications. As a wide range of wireless technologies are developed and are extensively used worldwide, IEEE 802.11 working group for WLAN standards is developing a new amendment referred as IEEE 802.11AH targeting mainly the IoT based applications. The new amendment has inherited many characteristics from the legacy IEEE 802.11 while benefiting from new enhanced features defined specifically for IoT and Machine to Machine communications (M2M) systems. Ultimately, IEEE 802.11AH which has been defined to operate in sub-1 GHz band, is expected to support high number of simultaneous connections up to 6000 devices for a 1 km coverage range. This thesis implements some of the enhanced features for IEEE 802.11AH and conducts the corresponding evaluation based on a developed simulator. The aforementioned simulator has been compared to a Markov chain based analytical model, developed in this research. The results have shown that the developed system level simulator is following the results from the modeled network with high accuracy. The developed system level simulator has been used in performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11AH main features like the restricted access window (RAW) and sectorization schemes in the case of single and multiple APs deployments scenarios. It is concluded that the implementation of these features, help to improve IEEE 802.11AH overall performance. The performance measures considered in this evaluation are throughput, energy efficiency and average delay in sending successful packets, respectively. Moreover, for resolving the coverage requirements there is a trade-off in using single AP or multi AP configuration. Implementing more APs results in more network capacity while causing additional interference to the network. The RAW and sectorization mechanisms can fortunately reduce this interference by minimizing the hidden node probability and mitigating against the overlapping BSS resulting problems