Exploring Packaging Strategies of Nano-embedded Thermoelectric Generators

Embedding nanostructures within a bulk matrix is an important practical approach towards the electronic engineering of high performance thermoelectric systems. For power generation applications, it ideally combines the efficiency benefit offered by low dimensional systems along with the high power output advantage offered by bulk systems. In this work, we uncover a few crucial details about how to embed nanowires and nanoflakes in a bulk matrix so that an overall advantage over pure bulk may be achieved. First and foremost, we point out that a performance degradation with respect to bulk is inevitable as the nanostructure transitions to being multi moded. It is then shown that a nano embedded system of suitable cross-section offers a power density advantage over a wide range of efficiencies at higher packing fractions, and this range gradually narrows down to the high efficiency regime, as the packing fraction is reduced. Finally, we introduce a metric - \emph{the advantage factor}, to elucidate quantitatively, the enhancement in the power density offered via nano-embedding at a given efficiency. In the end, we explore the maximum effective width of nano-embedding which serves as a reference in designing generators in the efficiency range of interest.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Blockchain Technology and its Applications Across Multiple Domains: A Survey

Blockchain technology has become an active area of research and a technological option for many businesses and industrial communities. With its distributed, decentralized, and trustless nature, blockchain can provide businesses with new opportunities and benefits through increased efficiency, reduced costs, enhanced integrity and transparency, better security, and improved traceability. Although blockchain’s largest applications have been in the finance and banking sector, we now see experiments and proposed applications in different fields. This paper provides an overview of blockchain technology; it brings together all the key design features, characteristics, and benefits of blockchain that make it a superior and unique technology, and it presents the popular consensus protocols and taxonomy of blockchain systems. Additionally, the paper surveys blockchain-based applications across multiple domains such as in finance, insurance, supply chain management, energy, advertising and media, real estate and healthcare. It aims at examining the industries’ key issues, blockchain solutions and use cases. The paper highlights three broad limitations that blockchain technology presents: scalability, security, and regulation, and shows how these challenges could impact blockchain application and adoption

Challenges in Enterprise Adoption of Agile Methods - A Survey

Agile methods are a departure from plan-driven traditional approaches, where the focus is on generating early releases of working software using collaborative techniques, code refactoring, and on-site customer involvement. Research and surveys have shown that agile methodologies are an efficient way of producing software with significant advantages in production costs, time-to-market, complexity, and quality improvement over heavy-weight traditional methodologies. Even with such apparent advantages the information technology industry has not seen large-scale adoption of agile methods. In this survey paper, the major challenges in adopting agile practices by enterprises are addressed. Drawing information from the literature issues like framework for agile organizational change and adoption strategies are examined. Inputs from the industry suggest that most organizations are best suited in adopting a combination of traditional and agile method. There is no agile methodology that can be universally applied and have to be tailored to integrate into existing processes

Measurement, modeling, and analysis of the file hosting ecosystem

Bibliography: p. 176-192The Web has recently witnessed the emergence of file hosting services. These services provide users with a Web interface to upload, manage, and share files in the cloud. We present a comprehensive, longitudinal characterization study of the file hosting ecosystem. We perform detailed multi-level analysis of the usage behavior, infrastructure properties, content characteristics, and user-perceived performance of several top file hosting services. We instrument a measurement infrastructure that captures the characteristics of the ecosystem from multiple viewpoints across multiple layers. Our study utilizes multiple datasets collected over extended periods of time from passive measurements at an edge network, active measurement of an index site, as well as data collected through third-party Web analytics sources. Our two primary datasets are HTTP transaction and connection summaries of all Internet traffic collected at a large campus edge network over a one-year period. We carefully devised methods to identify user clickstreams in the HTTP transaction summary trace, including the identification of free and premium user instances, as well as the identification of content that is split into multiple pieces and downloaded using multiple transactions. We utilized the connection summary trace to understand and model salient flow-level and host-level properties of file hosting traffic. We augment our analysis with measurements from third-party analytics sources of global file hosting dynamics, as well as crawling file hosting links on an index site. Throughout this characterization, we compare and contrast these services with each other as well as with peer-to-peer file sharing and other media sharing services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest characterization study of the file hosting ecosystem. Our results have implications on caching, network management, content placement, and data center provisioning, and are likely to be relevant for both researchers and network administrators

Characterising usage of the AirUC WLAN

Bibliography: p. 105-10

Locality Characteristics of Web Streams Revisited

Abstract — This paper studies locality of reference properties of Web streams using a recently proposed Aggregation-Disaggregation-Filtering framework. Two primary research questions are addressed: 1) What impact does locality of reference have on caching performance? and 2) What are the locality characteristics of streams that result from aggregation of filtered streams? Trace-driven simulations are used to answer these questions. The simulation results show which caching policies are adept at exploiting locality characteristics. The results also illustrate the locality properties of the resulting filtered streams. I