Ontology-Based Context-Aware Service Discovery for Pervasive Environments

Existing service discovery protocols use a service matching process in order to offer services of interest to the clients. Potentially, the context information of the services and client can be used to improve the quality of service matching. To make use of context information in service matching, service discovery needs to address certain challenges. Firstly, it is required that the context information should have unambiguous representation. Secondly, the mobile devices should be able to disseminate context information seamlessly in the fixed network. And thirdly, dynamic nature of the context information should be taken into account. The proposed Context Aware Service Discovery (CASD) architecture deals with these challenges by means of an ontological representation and processing of context information, a concept of nomadic mobile context source and a mechanism of persistent service discovery respectively. This paper discusses proposed CASD architecture, its implementation and suggests further enhancements

COMPARATIVE STUDY ON HYDROLYTIC ENZYMES PRODUCED BY DIFFERENT MORPHOLOGICAL FORMS OF CANDIDA ALBICANS

In recent years, the incidence of fungal infections has been rising all over the world. The ability of Candida albicans to switch from yeast to hyphal growth is essential for its virulence. The aim of this comparative study was to biotype and characterize phospholipase, proteinase, phosphatase and haemolytic activities of yeast and hyphal forms of Candida albicans. The hyphal form of Candida albicans secrets high quantity of hydrolytic enzymes than yeast form, which helps in its virulence. These results suggest that pathogenic fungi produce larger amount of inducible hydrolytic enzymes than non-pathogenic fungi. In this investigation, plate methods were used to determine the phospholipase, proteinase and haemolytic activities and spectrophotometric method was employed for testing acid phosphatase activity

Trust Model for Optimized Cloud Services

Cloud computing with its inherent advantages draws attention for business critical applications, but concurrently expects high level of trust in cloud service providers. Reputation-based trust is emerging as a good choice to model trust of cloud service providers based on available evidence. Many existing reputation based systems either ignore or give less importance to uncertainty linked with the evidence. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty model and define our approach to compute opinion for cloud service providers. Using subjective logic operators along with the computed opinion values, we propose mechanisms to calculate the reputation of cloud service providers. We evaluate and compare our proposed model with existing reputation models

Explicit Space-Time Codes Achieving The Diversity-Multiplexing Gain Tradeoff

A recent result of Zheng and Tse states that over a quasi-static channel, there exists a fundamental tradeoff, referred to as the diversity-multiplexing gain (D-MG) tradeoff, between the spatial multiplexing gain and the diversity gain that can be simultaneously achieved by a space-time (ST) block code. This tradeoff is precisely known in the case of i.i.d. Rayleigh-fading, for T>= n_t+n_r-1 where T is the number of time slots over which coding takes place and n_t,n_r are the number of transmit and receive antennas respectively. For T < n_t+n_r-1, only upper and lower bounds on the D-MG tradeoff are available. In this paper, we present a complete solution to the problem of explicitly constructing D-MG optimal ST codes, i.e., codes that achieve the D-MG tradeoff for any number of receive antennas. We do this by showing that for the square minimum-delay case when T=n_t=n, cyclic-division-algebra (CDA) based ST codes having the non-vanishing determinant property are D-MG optimal. While constructions of such codes were previously known for restricted values of n, we provide here a construction for such codes that is valid for all n. For the rectangular, T > n_t case, we present two general techniques for building D-MG-optimal rectangular ST codes from their square counterparts. A byproduct of our results establishes that the D-MG tradeoff for all T>= n_t is the same as that previously known to hold for T >= n_t + n_r -1.Comment: Revised submission to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Herbal haircare as revealed by people in Jalgaon district, Maharashtra, India

The paper deals with herbal hair consmetics used in tribal and rural areas of Jalgaon district (Maharashtra, India). The indigenous uses of 23 plant species belonging to 23 genera of 18 angiospermic families are presented. Each application is presented with its botanical name, vernacular name and family, their uses, methods of preparation of cosmetic product and mode of applications.&nbsp; Interestingly, 21 species out of 23 form additional reports for India. Scientific assessments of these applications are however desirable

Standardization in ayurvedic medicine: still a far cry

Plants are known to the common people by their indigenous system of nomenclature.&nbsp; Sanskrit is one such rich language.&nbsp; Sanskrit plant names convey all-pervasive information about Indian culture. The plant names in Sanskrit is one way of determining plant species and thereby a drug used in Ayurvedic system. About 20 Sanskrit plant names are explained etymologically and their help in identifying the taxon under consideration. These help decipher the taxa/drugs adequately. There are also instances wherein it is helpless as they point out different sources of the Ayurvedic drugs. Standardisation of a drug is a must and one has to go not simply by literature but by plant material in hand.&nbsp; Attempts to identify the Ayurvedic drugs are far from the main goal of standardization which is the crying need of the hour.&nbsp;&nbsp