Why Energy Matters? Profiling Energy Consumption of Mobile Crowdsensing Data Collection Frameworks

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged in the last years and has become one of the most prominent paradigms for urban sensing. The citizens actively participate in the sensing process by contributing data with their mobile devices. To produce data, citizens sustain costs, i.e., the energy consumed for sensing and reporting operations. Hence, devising energy efficient data collection frameworks (DCF) is essential to foster participation. In this work, we investigate from an energy-perspective the performance of different DCFs. Our methodology is as follows: (i) we developed an Android application that implements the DCFs, (ii) we profiled the energy and network performance with a power monitor and Wireshark, (iii) we included the obtained traces into CrowdSenSim simulator for large-scale evaluations in city-wide scenarios such as Luxembourg, Turin and Washington DC. The amount of collected data, energy consumption and fairness are the performance indexes evaluated. The results unveil that DCFs with continuous data reporting are more energy-efficient and fair than DCFs with probabilistic reporting. The latter exhibit high variability of energy consumption, i.e., to produce the same amount of data, the associated energy cost of different users can vary significantly

Profiling Energy Efficiency of Mobile Crowdsensing Data Collection Frameworks for Smart City Applications

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged in the last years and has become one of the most prominent paradigms for urban sensing. In MCS, citizens actively participate in the sensing process by contributing data with their smartphones, tablets, wearables and other mobile devices to a collector. As citizens sustain costs while contributing data, i.e., the energy spent from the batteries for sensing and reporting, devising energy efficient data collection frameworks (DCFs) is essential. In this work, we compare the energy efficiency of several DCFs through CrowdSenSim, which allows to perform large-scale simulation experiments in realistic urban environments. Specifically, the DCFs under analysis differ one with each other by the data reporting mechanism implemented and the signaling between users and the collector needed for sensing and reporting decisions. Results reveal that the key criterion differentiating DCFs' energy consumption is the data reporting mechanism. In principle, continuous reporting to the collector should be more energy consuming than probabilistic reporting. However, DCFs with continuous reporting that implement mechanisms to block sensing and data delivery after a certain amount of contribution are more effective in harvesting data from the crowd

CrowdSenSim: a Simulation Platform for Mobile Crowdsensing in Realistic Urban Environments

Smart cities take advantage of recent ICT developments to provide added value to existing public services and improve quality of life for the citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the Internet more pervasive where objects equipped with computing, storage and sensing capabilities are interconnected with communication technologies. Because of the widespread diffusion of IoT devices, applying the IoT paradigm to smart cities is an excellent solution to build sustainable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platforms. Having citizens involved in the process through mobile crowdsensing (MCS) techniques augments capabilities of these ICT platforms without additional costs. For proper operation, MCS systems require the contribution from a large number of participants. Simulations are therefore a candidate tool to assess the performance of MCS systems. In this paper, we illustrate the design of CrowdSenSim, a simulator for mobile crowdsensing. CrowdSenSim is designed specifically for realistic urban environments and smart cities services. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrowdSenSim for the most popular MCS sensing paradigms (participatory and opportunistic) and we present its applicability using a smart public street lighting scenario

Common variants in the regulative regions of GRIA1 and GRIA3 receptor genes are associated with migraine susceptibility

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Glutamate is the principal excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system which acts by the activation of either ionotropic (AMPA, NMDA and kainate receptors) or G-protein coupled metabotropic receptors. Glutamate is widely accepted to play a major role in the path physiology of migraine as implicated by data from animal and human studies. Genes involved in synthesis, metabolism and regulation of both glutamate and its receptors could be, therefore, considered as potential candidates for causing/predisposing to migraine when mutated.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The association of polymorphic variants of <it>GRIA1</it>-<it>GRIA4 </it>genes which encode for the four subunits (GluR1-GluR4) of the alpha-amino-3- hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole-propionic acid (AMPA) receptor for glutamate was tested in migraineurs with and without aura (MA and MO) and healthy controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two variants in the regulative regions of <it>GRIA1 </it>(rs2195450) and <it>GRIA3 </it>(rs3761555) genes resulted strongly associated with MA (P = 0.00002 and P = 0.0001, respectively), but not associated with MO, suggesting their role in cortical spreading depression. Whereas the rs548294 variant in <it>GRIA1 </it>gene showed association primarily with MO phenotype, supporting the hypothesis that MA and MO phenotypes could be genetically related. These variants modify binding sites for transcription factors altering the expression of <it>GRIA1 </it>and <it>GRIA3 </it>genes in different conditions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study represents the first genetic evidence of a link between glutamate receptors and migraine.</p

eLeadership: il digitale sfida i manager

Il digitale non è semplicemente un altro strumento, un altro ambiente competitivo, una nuova classe di aziende. Potremmo considerarlo la «madre» di tutte le nuove tecnologie, il protagonista principale della trasformazione della società. Ciò dipende dal fatto che è una tecnologia orizzontale, con tasso di crescita esponenziale e sostanzialmente “infestante”: infatti si sviluppa e si diffonde a ritmi vorticosi. Si accoppia e si ibrida con qualsiasi cosa con cui viene a contatto. Entra sia nei prodotti che nei processi (produttivi, commerciali e di governo dell’impresa) ed è protagonista sia del business che dell’immaginario giovanile. Per questi motivi, l’adozione di pratiche efficaci nell’uso del digitale – soprattutto per i manager – dipende da molti fattori, molto più articolati e sofisticati di quelli affrontati della banale alfabetizzazione. Non basta, dunque, aggiungere una “e” davanti a leadership, dando qualche spolverata digitale ai manager e lasciando che continuino a fare quello che hanno sempre fatto: occorre rileggere la leadership con la lente del digitale e – sempre più frequentemente – incominciare a ripensarla. E bisogna anche sperimentare: sperimentare sia le nuove pratiche di lavoro sia i nuovi modelli organizzativi che il digitale e la Rete hanno reso possibile. La sfida del digitale non è addestrativa, ma educativa. L’alfabetizzazione punta a insegnare l’ABC (i rudimenti e il funzionamento) degli strumenti digitali più utilizzati, mentre bisogna costruire comprensione, sensibilità e senso critico nei confronti del fenomeno nel suo complesso. Per questo motivo bisogna reintrodurre il pensiero critico soprattutto nei confronti del digitale e sfatare i suoi luoghi comuni, sempre più diffusi e consolidati tra i non esperti, grazie anche allo zampino interessato dei fornitori di soluzioni digitali e del mondo dei giornalisti, divulgatori, champion, che gli ruota attorno.  Pertanto anche la conoscenza dei lati oscuri gioca un ruolo educativo fondamentale. Anzi, volendo parafrasare il celebre incipit di Anna Karenina: tutte le applicazioni utili del digitale sono simili fra loro; ogni lato oscuro del digitale, invece, è problematico a modo suo

Limit theorems and stochastic models for dependence and contagion in financial markets

We analyse the effect of dependence between financial assets in the setting of the variance risk premium and the Brownian semistationary process. The variance risk premium (VRP) refers to the premium demanded for holding assets whose variance is exposed to stochastic shocks. This thesis identifies a new modelling framework for equity indices and presents for the first time explicit analytical formulas for their VRP in a multivariate stochastic volatility setting, which includes multivariate non-Gaussian Ornstein Uhlenbeck processes and Wishart processes. Moreover, we propose to incorporate contagion within the equity index via a multivariate Hawkes process and find that the resulting dynamics of the VRP represent a convincing alternative to the models studied in the literature up to date. The Brownian semistationary process (BSS) is in general not a semimartingale and its univariate asymptotic limit theory outside the semimartingale framework has been developed over recent years, due to the increasing number of its applications in finance and also in the modelling of turbulence. We expand the reach of the theory by proving new probabilistic limit theorems for the 2-dimensional version of the process, using techniques from Malliavin calculus.Open Acces