Design of a graphical user interface for home energy monitoring system

Excellent graphics are the instruments used for representing quantitative information. Graphics help people to understand complex things easily. Hence the user interfaces developed should be clear, illustrative and designed from the user point of view with respect to their applications. The thesis work deals with the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) developed for a home energy monitoring system. Design methodologies like user centric design and empathic design are followed while creating the user interface and also the effect of various colors on human perception is studied. Hence the final design of user interface provides the end-users a visualization of the energy produced and consumed in a monitored environment. The monitoring devices are connected to ThereGate system (data logger) via the M-Bus communication protocol. The ThereGate platform uses an Open Source Linux system as the operating language. The other communication platform used over the ThereGate platform is an oBIX bridge, a web based service interface rich in XML support for transferring the data. The interface has been programmed by using Visual basics 2008 and VB.NET, developed by Microsoft. The work progresses with an initial explanation on the availability of various home energy monitoring systems on the market and their comparison. The other units discuss the architecture of the ThereGate system, give a brief overview of the M-bus system, and discuss the development of graphical user interface (GUI) from a user centric design perspective using Microsoft's Visual Basics and VB.NET and configuration of M-Bus. The last unit contains a discussion of the goals achieved at the end of the design and the future developments that can be made to have more user interactions with the user interface

COMPARATIVE PHARMACOGNOSTICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF SELECTED SPECIES OF OCIMUM

In traditional systems of medicine, different parts of Ocimum have been recommended for the treatment of bronchitis, bronchial asthma, malaria, diarrhoea, dysentery, skin diseases, arthritis, chronic fever and insect bite. Morphological and anatomical characters play a vital role in crude drug identification and standardization. In the present study, comparative Pharmacognostical evaluation was performed for the dried leaves powder of selected species of Ocimum such as O. gratissimum, O. sanctum and O. canum. The result from macroscopical, microscopical and powder characters are used for the identification of O. gratissimum, O. sanctum and O. canum. The results throw immense light on the botanical identity of various species of Ocimum which furnish a basis of judging the authenticity of the plant and also to differentiate the drug from its allied species and detect adulterants. Keywords: Ocimum gratissimum, Ocimum sanctum, Ocimum canum, Comparative, Pharmacognostical characterization

Electronic structure of Pr2MnNiO6 from x-ray photoemission, absorption and density functional theory

The electronic structure of double perovskite Pr2MnNiO6 is studied using core x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and x-ray absorption spectroscopy. The 2p x-ray absorption spectra show that Mn and Ni are in 2+ and 4+ states respectively. Using charge transfer multiplet analysis of Ni and Mn 2p XPS spectra, we find charge transfer energies {\Delta} of 3.5 and 2.5 eV for Ni and Mn respectively. The ground state of Ni2+ and Mn4+ reveal a higher d electron count of 8.21 and 3.38 respectively as compared to the atomic values of 8.00 and 3.00 respectively thereby indicating the covalent nature of the system. The O 1s edge absorption spectra reveal a band gap of 0.9 eV which is comparable to the value obtained from first principle calculations for U-J >= 2 eV. The density of states clearly reveal a strong p-d type charge transfer character of the system, with band gap proportional to average charge transfer energy of Ni2+ and Mn4+ ions.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

BlogHarvest: Blog mining and search framework

Beyond serving as online diaries, weblogs have evolved into complex social structures. Blogging software allows users to publish opinions on any topic without any constraints on the predefined schema. Analysis of linkage between blogs has indicated that community forming in blogosphere is not a random process but is a result of shared interests binding bloggers together. Learning, analysis and usage of the user's interest and social linkage from the blog is therefore necessary to provide useful search faculty on the blogosphere to bloggers and revenue generation opportunities like advertising to the blog service providers. In this paper, we demonstrate BlogHarvest which is a blog mining and search framework that extracts the interests of the blogger, finds and recommends blogs with similar topics and provides blog oriented search functionality. BlogHarvest uses classification, linkage & topic similarity based clustering and POS tagging based opinion mining for providing these features. Novel search interface is built to provide related blogs for queries along with the usual result ranking. Association rules found from POS tags are used to get the context of search for providing query expansion to get targeted results. By crawling the blogosphere and extract & index blog posts and linkage metadata; we have analyzed around 50000 blogs to tune our algorithms

Matters of the desert: A perspective on achieving food and nutrition security through plants of the (semi) arid regions

The semi- and arid agro-climatic zones of India harbor numerous plants, many occurring as wild and neglected inhabitants of the desert landscape, that bear edible fruits. They are capable of growing in extreme temperatures, on marginal lands and water-scarce conditions. These also represent sustainable food sources for the future. The benefits that they confer to the ecosystems and communities can be manifold: (a) as influencers of agricultural productivity for other crops (like cereals) in agroforestry systems; (b) as balanced functional foods by way of providing high quality protein, macro- and micronutrients to target protein-calorie malnutrition; (c) as sources of antioxidants, nutraceuticals and bioactive leads to target the ever-increasing burden of non-communicable diseases like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disorders. A few representative examples of the promising desert plants include: Prosopis cineraria, Acacia senegal, Cyamopsis tetragonoloba (cluster bean), Capparis decidua, Ziziphus mauritiana (Indian jujube), Cordia dichotoma, Leptadenia pyrotechnica, Calligonum polygonoides, and millets. Even though the potential of such plants has been recognized by food and agricultural scientists, research gaps like low yield, disease vulnerability, presence of anti-nutrients, unavailable genomic sequence information, exclusion from the formal food value chain, and poor marketing strategies, prevent the realization of their full potential. The current perspective looks at the promise afforded by underutilized plants of the Indian desert regions in ensuring food and nutrition security as well as the possibility of developing value-added agri-food products from them. The complementary role that food processing technologies can play in achieving the desired goals would also be highlighted so as to transform the desert plants from traditional to ‘climate-smart’ future foods

A new public-domain simulator for power electronic circuits

A new public-domain simulator (SEQUEL) for power electronic circuits is described. The organization of the simulator is briefly discussed. The most important feature of the simulator is that the user can define new elements in a flexible manner. The differences between the new simulator and other simulators are enumerated. Some simulation examples are discussed to demonstrate the applications of the simulator. It is pointed out that the new simulator is particularly attractive for engineering institutes in developing countries where access to expensive commercial packages with similar capabilities may be difficult.IEE