Application Development Using Microservice Architecture

Application development has always been a complex process. An application, once developed, also needs to be maintained and enhanced to add new requirements. Traditionally the application has been a monolithic entity. Different components in the application are tightly coupled and making a change has always been challenging. Microservice architecture breaks away from this monolithic approach and arranges the different functionalities as services. In a microservice architecture, individual services are developed to perform one function only. This report demonstrates the application development process using the Microservice architecture. It explains the design, development, and deployment of a Microservice-based application. Market Place is an e-commerce application that consists of a collection of microservices working together to provide a buyer and seller platform to individuals. This application will allow sellers to showcase their products on this platform. The application consists of the following microservices: Product Microservice, Order Microservice, UI Microservice, and database Microservice. Similarly, the buyers can connect with the sellers directly in this application. This application is developed using the Spring Microservice framework, the services are hosted in Kubernetes. Docker is used for the containerization of services

Mutation in Genes FBN1, AKT1, and LMNA: Marfan Syndrome, Proteus Syndrome, and Progeria Share Common Systemic Involvement

Genetic mutations are becoming more deleterious day by day. Mutations of Genes named FBN1, AKT1, LMNA result specific protein malfunction that in turn commonly cause Marfan syndrome, Proteus syndrome, and Progeria, respectively. Articles about these conditions have been reviewed in PubMed and Google scholar with a view to finding relevant clinical features. Precise keywords have been used in search for systemic involvement of FBN1, AKT1, and LMNA gene mutations. It has been found that Marfan syndrome, Proteus syndrome, and Progeria commonly affected musculo-skeletal system, cardiovascular system, eye, and nervous system. Not only all of them shared identical systemic involvement, but also caused several very specific anomalies in various parts of the body. In spite of having some individual signs and symptoms, the mutual manifestations were worth mentioning. Moreover, all the features of the mutations of all three responsible genes had been co-related and systemically mentioned in this review. There can be some mutual properties of the genes FBN1, AKT1, and LMNA or in their corresponding proteins that result in the same presentations. This study may progress vision of knowledge regarding risk factors, patho-physiology, and management of these conditions, and relation to other mutations

Assessment of vulnerability to climate change: theoretical and methodological developments with applications to infrastructure and built environment

Assessing vulnerability to climate change can help policymakers in incorporating climate futures in planning and in better allocating adaptation resources. Indicator Based Vulnerability Assessment (IBVA) has been widely used because it is relatively simple to design, implement and communicate. However, this approach faces significant difficulties from conceptual, theoretical and methodological points of view. A number of assumptions are typically made in methods used for aggregation of indicators—a linear, monotonic relationship between indicator and vulnerability; complete compensation between indicators; precise knowledge of vulnerable systems by stakeholders who provide input data for the assessment exercise—none of which usually hold in reality. Following a meta-analysis of the IBVA literature, the thesis proposes a) a general mathematical framework for vulnerability assessment that better identifies sources of uncertainty and non-linearity; b) a new IBVA assessment methodology, and associated computer tool, based on a pair-wise outranking approach borrowed from decision science; the methodology can represent various sources of uncertainty, different degree of compensation between indicators and different types of non-linearity in the relationship between indicators and vulnerability and; c) a system dynamics model, integrated in the above framework, for studying vulnerability of infrastructure systems and better representing the mechanistic interdependency of their components. These methods are applied to a real-life assessment of the vulnerability to sea-level rise of communities and infrastructure systems in Shoalhaven, south of Sydney, at local scale. The assessment is conducted in collaboration with the Shoalhaven council and includes an analysis of the sensitivity of vulnerability rankings to community preferences. In addition, the effect of using an outranking framework on the way vulnerability is conceptualized by stakeholders is critically appraised

Environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce dust emission and salt use in the sand and stone production industry

Abstract. This study investigated environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce dust emissions and salt use in the sand and stone production industry to mitigate groundwater contamination. A qualitative research methodology was employed, utilizing online questionnaires and focused group interviews to gather insights from industry experts, focusing on the current status of dust control in the aggregate industry, groundwater monitoring practices, and opinions on new environmental approaches. The survey findings revealed that salt mixed with water was the most commonly used method for dust control, followed by salt application and water spraying. Challenges identified included obtaining environmental permits, concerns over groundwater contamination, water shortage, and limited knowledge about alternative options. Regional variations were observed in the permitting processes; however, restrictions on the use of salt in the processes were common. Experts expressed concerns about nitrates, petroleum products, and heavy metals. Compliance with regulatory agencies and prompt actions in the event of groundwater contamination were emphasized. Water was widely acknowledged as an environmentally friendly component in dust control. The sand and stone production industry showed receptiveness to exploring environmentally friendly alternatives for dust control. Future research recommendations include evaluating the effects of salt usage, exploring environmentally beneficial alternatives, and improving high-pressure water-spreading systems in quarries

Assessment of vulnerability to climate change: theoretical and methodological developments with applications to infrastructure and built environment

Assessing vulnerability to climate change can help policymakers in incorporating climate futures in planning and in better allocating adaptation resources. Indicator Based Vulnerability Assessment (IBVA) has been widely used because it is relatively simple to design, implement and communicate. However, this approach faces significant difficulties from conceptual, theoretical and methodological points of view. A number of assumptions are typically made in methods used for aggregation of indicators—a linear, monotonic relationship between indicator and vulnerability; complete compensation between indicators; precise knowledge of vulnerable systems by stakeholders who provide input data for the assessment exercise—none of which usually hold in reality. Following a meta-analysis of the IBVA literature, the thesis proposes a) a general mathematical framework for vulnerability assessment that better identifies sources of uncertainty and non-linearity; b) a new IBVA assessment methodology, and associated computer tool, based on a pair-wise outranking approach borrowed from decision science; the methodology can represent various sources of uncertainty, different degree of compensation between indicators and different types of non-linearity in the relationship between indicators and vulnerability and; c) a system dynamics model, integrated in the above framework, for studying vulnerability of infrastructure systems and better representing the mechanistic interdependency of their components. These methods are applied to a real-life assessment of the vulnerability to sea-level rise of communities and infrastructure systems in Shoalhaven, south of Sydney, at local scale. The assessment is conducted in collaboration with the Shoalhaven council and includes an analysis of the sensitivity of vulnerability rankings to community preferences. In addition, the effect of using an outranking framework on the way vulnerability is conceptualized by stakeholders is critically appraised

A study of contagion in global and local banking industries

This thesis investigates contagion risk for the global and local banking environment using three different distance to risk measures (distance to default - DD, distance to capital – DC and distance to inefficiency- DI). In order to achieve this goal, the research has been divided into three parts (each will have its own chapter) to study the contagion effect in the global and local market. In the first part (chapter 4), the thesis investigates the contagion effect among the top 20 countries of the world. The sample consists of 91 banks from 20 countries across the globe including all G8 and BRICS countries. A list of all these countries and their corresponding banks is included later. The sample also includes all the GSIB (Global systematically important banks) banks excluding Group BPCE of France (given that Group BPCE originated in year 2009 by merging Caisse nationale des caisses d'épargne and Banque fédérale des banques populaires). In the second part (chapter 5), the thesis examines the local contagion by studying the spill over among top 15 US states. The sample consist of four of the largest banks from each of the sample 15 US state. A list of these banks is attached in the sample description. In chapter 6, the thesis performs a spill over analysis using DD, DI and DC. In order to do so, the thesis has measured the systemic risk using distance to default, distance to inefficiency and distance to capital, which are introduced by the option pricing theory (Merton, 1976). These distance to risk methods are defined as the theoretical difference between the entity’s current and breakeven risk position (Distance to default is the difference between the current and default position; Distance to inefficiency is the difference between the current and inefficient position and distance to capital is the difference between the current and default capital threshold position). Any position lower then this distance to risk measures is considered undesirable for the entity. The study has calculated 2606 daily observations for each of the different distance to risk measures for each bank in the sample for approximately 10 financial years from 2006 to 2015. Then the thesis compute the probability of experiencing extreme shocks in these distance measures of contagion risk using extreme value threshold. This research categorizes these extreme shocks into sub groups for the first two parts and keep the extreme shock unchanged for the last part and examine the contagion risk ascending from the movement of these extreme systemic shocks all through the US and global baking environment using multinomial logistic regression model (MLM). Finally, in chapter 7, the thesis discussed a possible risk management framework based on findings of the previous chapters. It has taken all the banks and divided them into 4 tiers based on their spill over impact. The study suggests that any bank in the 1st tier of the short term or long-term contagion capacity table should be referred to a high degree of regulatory control to enforce not only better capital governance or liquidity requirement but to also enforce overall financial governance as they have a huge impact on the other financial institutions. For the banks in the second and third tier, the authority may adopt a more gradually enforceable governance control in lieu with the current practice and the last tier can do their business in the current regulation, as they pose no real threat to the other peers. At the end, the study also suggests a new generic risk management framework for financial institutions

Topic-Level Bayesian Surprise and Serendipity for Recommender Systems

A recommender system that optimizes its recommendations solely to fit a user's history of ratings for consumed items can create a filter bubble, wherein the user does not get to experience items from novel, unseen categories. One approach to mitigate this undesired behavior is to recommend items with high potential for serendipity, namely surprising items that are likely to be highly rated. In this paper, we propose a content-based formulation of serendipity that is rooted in Bayesian surprise and use it to measure the serendipity of items after they are consumed and rated by the user. When coupled with a collaborative-filtering component that identifies similar users, this enables recommending items with high potential for serendipity. To facilitate the evaluation of topic-level models for surprise and serendipity, we introduce a dataset of book reading histories extracted from Goodreads, containing over 26 thousand users and close to 1.3 million books, where we manually annotate 449 books read by 4 users in terms of their time-dependent, topic-level surprise. Experimental evaluations show that models that use Bayesian surprise correlate much better with the manual annotations of topic-level surprise than distance-based heuristics, and also obtain better serendipitous item recommendation performance

ESSAYS ON THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY

My dissertation investigates the reasons behind the persistence of income among individuals and US counties. I look at the role of initial conditions in explaining current level of income. In my first essay, I look at how childhood neighborhood conditions affect income of a person. To study persistence, I model income as an autoregressive process where the coefficient on the lagged dependent variable heterogeneous across individuals. In my second essay, I derive a new way to measure chronic poverty, or long term poverty. Current measures of chronic poverty cannot be used to compare improvements of poverty rates over time. Using my measure, one can compare to see if chronic poverty rates changed over time. My third essay looks at the historical reasons behind differences in income between rich and poor counties in the US. There are about 250 counties in the US where poverty rates have been above 20 percent for the last 40 years. I look at whether current and past factors, or differences in technologies is the main reason behind persistence of high rates of poverty in these counties. Overall, I find that childhood neighborhood conditions have a big effect in determining the coefficient on the lagged dependent variable, that is, childhood neighborhood conditions affect persistence of income. I find that improving neighborhood poverty rates by one percentage point and father’s education by one year bring the greatest improvement of social welfare. In my second essay, I show the importance of measuring chronic poverty separately from total poverty; for example, between 2000 and 2005, total poverty declined, but chronic poverty rates actually increased, which shows that the long-term poor got worse off during that time period. In my last essay, I find that some US counties remained poor mainly because of differences in factor endowment, and past and present levels of human capital explain most of the differences in current level of income between poor and non-poor counties. Differences in factor endowments explained 80 percent of income between poor and non-poor counties, while technology accounted for only 20 percent of the difference

NFV Based Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensors Networks: A Case Study

Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs. In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built with Openstack as platform is described