INTELLIGENT ENVIRONMENTAL SENSING WITH AN UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEM IN A WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

This paper proposes a novel environmental monitoring mechanism to integrate recentlyestablished development of an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) with WSNs for remote monitoring. The high mobility of UASs can solve the limitations associated with using WSNs in hazardous areas. In this paper, the WSN node, the Wireless Environmental Monitoring Station (WEMS), is based on ZigBee protocol for long-duration monitoring. Furthermore, to ensure the integrity of collected environmental data, an algorithm is designed in WEMS for verification. Finally, a detailed analysis of packet transmission efficiency based on ranges of flight distance is proposed to examine the effect of environmental monitoring

Using CIPP model to evaluate “NTUE 2012 Nepal Snowland school” service-learning project

In 2012, the department of Education, National Taipei University of Education (NTUE), conducted an oversea service-learning project to Nepal. The project was tied with two courses, i.e., Service-Learning Theory and Practice as well as International Education research. There were 9 university students (volunteer teachers) and 4 professors in the NTUE delegation. They served the 150 students of Snowland Ranag Light of Education School at Kathmandu, Nepal. This study aimed to use the CIPP model to evaluate the context, input, process and product of the project. Classroom observations, interviews questionnaires and document analysis were used to collect data following the triangulation principle. The research findings were as follows. 1. The context of the NTUE Nepal service-learning project includes the impact of low birth rate to NTUE, the high demand of international education in Taiwan, and the enhancement of pre- and in-service teacher’s affective domain. 2. The inputs include internal and external human resources in Taiwan and Nepal, funds from government and university, donated supplies collected by students. 3. The process includes the five phases of service-learning, with preparation from October, 2011 to August, 2012; service in the first two weeks of September, 2012; series of celebration activities in mid September at Snowland and autumn at NTUE; while reflection and evaluation phases throughout the entire process. 4. The product was evaluated according to the three instructional objectives, i.e., (1) to learn about Nepali culture and education, (2) to be able to teach Nepali 4th to 9th grade students mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese culture in English, and (3) to demonstrate affection to Snowland or Nepal. Based on the findings, recommendations were made to future practice and research

r-Hint: A message-efficient random access response for mMTC in 5G networks

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) has attracted increasing attention due to the explosive growth of IoT devices. Random Access (RA) for a large number of mMTC devices is especially difficult since the high signaling overhead between User Equipments (UEs) and an eNB may overwhelm the available spectrum resources. To address this issue, we propose “respond by hint” (r-Hint), an ID-free handshaking protocol for contention-based RA in mMTC. The core idea of r-Hint is to avoid sequentially notifying contending UEs of their IDs by broadcasting a hint in the RA Response (RAR). To do so, we exploit the concept of prime factorization and hashing to encode the hint such that UEs can extract their required information accordingly. Our simulation results show that r-Hint reduces the RAR message size by 20%–40%. Such reduction can be translated to around 50% improvement of spectrum efficiency in LTE-M

On Scalable Service Function Chaining with O(1) Flowtable Entries

The emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables flexible and agile service function chaining in a Software Defined Network (SDN). While this virtualization technology efficiently offers customization capability, it however comes with a cost of consuming precious TCAM resources. Due to this, the number of service chains that an SDN can support is limited by the flowtable size of a switch. To break this limitation, this paper presents CRT-Chain, a service chain forwarding protocol that requires only constant flowtable entries, regardless of the number of service chain requests. The core of CRT-Chain is an encoding mechanism that leverages Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to compress the forwarding information into small labels. A switch does not need to insert forwarding rules for every service chain request, but only needs to conduct very simple modular arithmetic to extract the forwarding rules directly from CRT-Chain's labels attached in the header. We further incorporate prime reuse and path segmentation in CRT-Chain to reduce the header size and, hence, save bandwidth consumption. Our evaluation results show that, when a chain consists of no more than 5 functions, CRT-Chain actually generates a header smaller than the legacy 32-bit header defined in IETF. By enabling prime reuse and segmentation, CRT-Chain further reduces the total signaling overhead to a level lower than the conventional scheme, showing that CRT-Chain not only enables scalable flowtable-free chaining but also improves network efficiency

Towards a B2B E-Commerce Evaluation Management Model to Assess Organizational Drivers in Hospitals

Effective utilization of business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce) in hospitals may lead to many benefits such as increased accessibility to healthcare providers, improved process efficiency, enhanced quality of healthcare services, increased responses to changes, decreased scheduling conflicts, and reduction in administrative costs. However, many hospitals have found that they have not yet fully reaped the expected benefits from their B2B e-commerce investments. Despite this, there has not been much discussion in the literature with respect to the relationship between the organizational drivers on B2B e-commerce benefits for hospitals. Hence, a mixed-method of case study and survey was conducted to examine the relationships between B2B e-commerce benefits, IT evaluation resources allocation, IT investment evaluation methodologies, IT maturity, and user information requirements determination process. A B2B e-commerce evaluation management model was developed to test these relationships. The results provided empirical evidence in support of our proposed model and revealed that hospitals’ IT evaluation resources allocation practices mediated the relationship of IT investment evaluation methodologies, IT maturity, and user information requirements determination process with B2B e-commerce benefits. The results also showed that the level of IT maturity had a significant impact on the adoption of IT investment evaluation methodologies

Supramolecular Aptamers on Graphene Oxide for Efficient Inhibition of Thrombin Activity

Graphene oxide (GO), a two-dimensional material with a high aspect ratio and polar functional groups, can physically adsorb single-strand DNA through different types of interactions, such as hydrogen bonding and π-π stacking, making it an attractive nanocarrier for nucleic acids. In this work, we demonstrate a strategy to target exosites I and II of thrombin simultaneously by using programmed hybrid-aptamers for enhanced anticoagulation efficiency and stability. The targeting ligand is denoted as Supra-TBA15/29 (supramolecular TBA15/29), containing TBA15 (a 15-base nucleotide, targeting exosite I of thrombin) and TBA29 (a 29-base nucleotide, targeting exosite II of thrombin), and it is designed to allow consecutive hybridization of TBA15 and TBA29 to form a network of TBAs (i.e., supra-TBA15/29). The programmed hybrid-aptamers (Supra-TBA15/29) were self-assembled on GO to further boost anticoagulation activity by inhibiting thrombin activity, and thus suppress the thrombin-induced fibrin formation from fibrinogen. The Supra-TBA15/29-GO composite was formed mainly through multivalent interaction between poly(adenine) from Supra-TBA15/29 and GO. We controlled the assembly of Supra-TBA15/29 on GO by regulating the preparation temperature and the concentration ratio of Supra-TBA15/29 to GO to optimize the distance between TBA15 and TBA29 units, aptamer density, and aptamer orientation on the GO surfaces. The dose-dependent thrombin clotting time (TCT) delay caused by Supra-TBA15/29-GO was >10 times longer than that of common anticoagulant drugs including heparin, argatroban, hirudin, and warfarin. Supra-TBA15/29-GO exhibits high biocompatibility, which has been proved by in vitro cytotoxicity and hemolysis assays. In addition, the thromboelastography of whole-blood coagulation and rat-tail bleeding assays indicate the anticoagulation ability of Supra-TBA15/29-GO is superior to the most widely used anticoagulant (heparin). Our highly biocompatible Supra-TBA15/29-GO with strong multivalent interaction with thrombin [dissociation constant (Kd) = 1.9 × 10−11 M] shows great potential as an effective direct thrombin inhibitor for the treatment of hemostatic disorders

CPEB4-Dependent Neonate-Born Granule Cells Are Required for Olfactory Discrimination

The rodent olfactory bulb (OB) contains two distinct populations of postnatally born interneurons, mainly granule cells (GCs), to support local circuits throughout life. During the early postnatal period (i.e., 2 weeks after birth), GCs are mostly produced locally from progenitor cells in the OB with a proportion of them deriving from proliferating cells in the rostral migratory stream (RMS). Afterward, the replenishment of GCs involves differentiated neuroblasts from the subventricular zone (SVZ) in a process known as adult neurogenesis. Although numerous studies have addressed the role of SVZ-born GCs in olfactory behaviors, the function of GCs produced early postnatally in the OB remains elusive. Our previous study demonstrated that the translational regulator, cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein 4 (CPEB4), is a survival factor exclusively for neonate-born but not SVZ/adult-derived GCs, so CPEB4-knockout (KO) mice provide unique leverage to study early postnatal-born GC-regulated olfactory functions. CPEB4-KO mice with hypoplastic OBs showed normal olfactory sensitivity and short-term memory, but impaired ability to spontaneously discriminate two odors. Such olfactory dysfunction was recapitulated in specific ablation of Cpeb4 gene in inhibitory interneurons but not in excitatory projection neurons or SVZ-derived interneurons. The continuous supply of GCs from adult neurogenesis eventually restored the OB size but not the discrimination function in 6-month-old KO mice. Hence, in the early postnatal OB, whose function cannot be replaced by adult-born GCs, construct critical circuits for odor discrimination