Web interactive non intrusive load disaggregation system for active demand in smart grids

A Smart Grid combines the use of traditional technology with innovative digital solutions, making the management of the electricity grid more flexible. It allows for monitoring, analysis, control and communication within the supply chain to improve efficiency, reduce the energy consumption and cost, and maximize the transparency and reliability of the energy supply chain. The optimization of energy consumption in Smart Grids is possible by using an innovative system based on Non Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (NIALM) algorithms, in which individual appliance power consumption information is disaggregated from single-point measurements, that provide a feedback in such a way to make energy more visible and more amenable to understanding and control. We contribute with an approach for monitoring consumption of electric power in households based on both a NILM algorithm, that uses a simple load signatures, and a web interactive systems that allows an active role played by users

Virtual Home Environment for Multimedia Services in 3rd Generation Networks

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A LAHC-based Job Scheduling Strategy to Improve Big Data Processing in Geo-distributed Contexts

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Designing a Human Computation Framework to Enhance Citizen-Government Interaction

Human computation or Human-based computation (HBC) is a paradigm that considers the design and analysis of information processing systems in which humans participate as computational agents performing small tasks and being orchestrated by a computer system. In particular, humans perform small pieces of work and a computer system is in charge of orchestrating their results. In this work, we want to exploit this potential to improve the take-up of e-service United States of Americage by citizens interacting with governments. To that end, we propose Citizenpedia, a human computation framework aimed at fostering citizen's involvement in the public administration. Citizenpedia is presented as a web application with two main components: the Question Answering Engine, where citizens and civil servants can post and solve doubts about e-services and public administration, and the Collaborative Procedure Designer, where citizens can collaborate with civil servants in the definition and improvement of new administrative procedures and e-services. In this work, we present the design and prototype of Citizenpedia and two evaluation studies conducted: the first one, a set of on-line surveys about the component's design, and the second one, a face-to-face user evaluation of the prototype. These evaluations showed us that the participants of the tests found the platform attractive, and pointed out several improvement suggestions regarding user experience of e-services

To treat or not to treat: comparison of different criteria used to determine whether weight loss is to be recommended

Background: Excess body fat is a major risk factor for disease primarily due to its endocrine activity. In recent years several criteria have been introduced to evaluate this factor. Nevertheless, treatment need is currently assessed only on the basis of an individual's Body Mass Index (BMI), calculated as body weight (in kg) divided by height in m2. The aim of our study was to determine whether application of the BMI, compared to adiposity-based criteria, results in underestimation of the number of subjects needing lifestyle intervention. Methods: We compared treatment need based on BMI classification with four adiposity-based criteria: percentage body fat (%BF), considered both alone and in relation to metabolic syndrome risk (MS), waist circumference (WC), as an index of abdominal fat, and Body Fat Mass Index (BFMI, calculated as fat mass in kg divided by height in m2) in 63 volunteers (23 men and 40 women, aged 20 – 65 years). Results: According to the classification based on BMI, 6.3% of subjects were underweight, 52.4% were normal weight, 30.2% were overweight, and 11.1% were obese. Agreement between the BMI categories and the other classification criteria categories varied; the most notable discrepancy emerged in the underweight and overweight categories. BMI compared to almost all of the other adiposity-based criteria, identified a lower percentage of subjects for whom treatment would be recommended. In particular, the proportion of subjects for whom clinicians would strongly recommend weight loss on the basis of their BMI (11.1%) was significantly lower than those identified according to WC (25.4%, p = 0.004), %BF (28.6%, p = 0.003), and MS (33.9%, p = 0.002). Conclusion: The use of the BMI alone, as opposed to an assessment based on body composition, to identify individuals needing lifestyle intervention may lead to unfortunate misclassifications. Population-specific data on the relationships between body composition, morbidity, and mortality are needed to improve the diagnosis and treatment of at-risk individual

Advanced Network Management Functionalities through the use of Mobile Software Agents

. Computing power and storage space are more and more distributed over the network. Consequently, management strategies are becoming of crucial importance in order to guarantee an effective control of the system, both in terms of performance and reliability. Mobile agents represent a challenging approach to provide advanced network management functionalities, due to the possibility to easily implement a decentralized and active monitoring of the system. In this paper we discuss how to take advantage of this technology and describe a prototype implementation based on our mobile agent platform called MAP. Keywords: network management, mobile agents, SNMP, Java. 1 Introduction The growing complexity of computer networks requires the use of sophisticated management techniques. Monitoring, properly detecting and controlling the behaviour of system resources represent the main functionalities a network management system should provide. In the approaches currently adopted by the m..

Using Mobile Agents to implement flexible Network Management strategies

Due to their intrinsic complexity, computer and communication systems require increasingly more sophisticated management starategies to be adopted in order to guarantee adequate levels of performance and reliability. The centralized paradigm adopted by the SNMP is appropriate in several network management applications, but the quick expansion of networks has posed the problem of its scalability, as well as for any other centralized model. Mobile agents represent a challenging approach to provide advanced network management functionalities, due to the possibility to easily implement a decentralized and active monitoring of the system. In this paper we discuss how to take advantage of this technology and identify some reference scenario where mobile agents represent a very promising approach. We also describe a prototype implementation based on our mobile agent platform called MAP and show how it is possible to take advantages from using the features it provides. Keywords: net..

Active Monitoring In Grid Environments Using Mobile Agent Technology

Monitoring distributed computational resources e#ectively is a crucial factor for high-performance distributed computation. Performance analysis and tuning, scheduling strategies, fault detection, are only some of the activities that require monitoring facilities. In this paper we present a mobile agent-based monitoring architecture. After explaining the reasons why this technology is adequate to cope with Grid systems' heterogeneity, a description of the basic components of the system designed is provided. We also present some considerations on the high degree of flexibility that can be reached with the proposed approach. Keywords: Grid, Mobile agents, Monitoring, Java, Distributed Management. 1. INTRODUCTION Grid environments have recently emerged as integrating infrastructure for distributed high-performance scientific applications [2]. Several scientific applications of di#erent domains such as high energy physics, earth sciences, biology, require a large amount of computing and..

MAP: Design and Implementation of a Mobile Agents Platform

The recent development of telecommunication networks has contributed to the success of applications such as information retrieval and electronic commerce, as well as all the services that take advantage of communication in distributed systems. In this area, the emerging technology of mobile agents aroused considerable interest. Mobile agents are applications that can move through the network for carrying out a given task on behalf of the user. In this work we present a platform (called MAP (Mobile Agents Platform)) for the development and the management of mobile agents. The language used both for developing the platform and for carrying out the agents is Java. The platform gives the user all the basic tools needed for creating some applications based on the use of agents. It enables us to create, run, suspend, resume, deactivate, reactivate local agents, to stop their execution, to make them communicate each other and migrate. Keywords: mobile agents, distributed computing, Java, net..