The Impact of Logistics Costs on the Economic Development: The Case of Thailand

Thai economy has been suffering from the low efficiency of its logistics systems, which is revealed by its remarkably high logistics costs in relation to its gross domestic product. Having impacts on both the industrial structure and spatial distribution of the economy, high relative logistics costs in Thailand greatly constrains the sustainable development of Thai economy. While the Thai government are taking proactive measures to reduce its logistics costs in relation to its gross domestic product, special attention should be paid to the relation between the logistics costs and economic development to develop appropriate logistics policies to accommodate the need of economic development

A Critique of Precision Poverty Alleviation: Does China Approach Adequate Policy Tools?

China has achieved laudable progress in poverty reduction since its reform and opening in 1978 Its current precision poverty alleviation program may however encounter challenges and possibly even fail, if the intrinsic weaknesses in its design and difficulties in its implementation re not addressed soon enough. It is pointed out that perfect targeting is not impossible, personalized interventions will not solve structural problems and rapid interventions have little effects on chronic poverty or poverty trap. It is argued that extreme poverty in China cannot be eradicated once and for all by the end of 2020. As with many great goals, time overrun may occur. Some effective countermeasures must be in place to fend off the unfavorable consequences of that policy and to prevent the poor people from getting worse after 2020

A Scalable Hybrid MAC Protocol for Massive M2M Networks

In Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is crucial to enable numerous machine-type devices to concurrently access the channel. Most literatures focus on developing simplex (reservation or contention based)MAC protocols which cannot provide a scalable solution for M2M networks with large number of devices. In this paper, a frame-based Hybrid MAC scheme, which consists of a contention period and a transmission period, is proposed for M2M networks. In the proposed scheme, the devices firstly contend the transmission opportunities during the contention period, only the successful devices will be assigned a time slot for transmission during the transmission period. To balance the tradeoff between the contention and transmission period in each frame, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system throughput by finding the optimal contending probability during contention period and optimal number of devices that can transmit during transmission period. A practical hybrid MAC protocol is designed to implement the proposed scheme. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Hybrid MAC protocol

Real-Time Misbehavior Detection in IEEE 802.11e Based WLANs

The Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) specification in the IEEE 802.11e standard supports heterogeneous backoff parameters and arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS), which makes a selfish node easy to manipulate these parameters and misbehave. In this case, the network-wide fairness cannot be achieved any longer. Many existing misbehavior detectors, primarily designed for legacy IEEE 802.11 networks, become inapplicable in such a heterogeneous network configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hybrid-share (HS) misbehavior detector for IEEE 802.11e based wireless local area networks (WLANs). The detector keeps updating its state based on every successful transmission and makes detection decisions by comparing its state with a threshold. We develop mathematical analysis of the detector performance in terms of both false positive rate and average detection rate. Numerical results show that the proposed detector can effectively detect both contention window based and AIFS based misbehavior with only a short detection window.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Globecom 201

A theoretical study of hetero diels-alder reactions

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Database development and machine learning prediction of pharmaceutical agents

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Energy-Efficient Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Enabled Remote State Estimation Over Wireless Channels

The performance of remote estimation over wireless channels is strongly affected by sensor data losses due to interference. Although the impact of interference can be alleviated by applying cognitive radio technique which features in spectrum sensing and transmitting data only on clear channels, the introduction of spectrum sensing incurs extra energy expenditure. In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy-efficient spectrum sensing for remotely estimating the state of a general linear dynamic system, and formulate an optimization problem which minimizes the total sensor energy consumption while guaranteeing a desired level of estimation performance. We model the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear program and propose a simulated annealing based optimization algorithm which jointly addresses when to perform sensing, which channels to sense, in what order and how long to scan each channel. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm well balances the sensing energy and transmission energy expenditure and can achieve the desired estimation performance

Measures to prevent nosocomial transmissions of COVID-19 based on interpersonal contact data

BACKGROUND: With the global spreading of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), many primary care medical workers have been infected, particularly in the early stages of this pandemic. Although extensive studies have explored the COVID-19 transmission patterns and (non-) pharmaceutical intervention to protect the general public, limited research has analysed the measures to prevent nosocomial transmission based upon detailed interpersonal contacts between medical staff and patients. AIM: This paper aims to develop and evaluate proactive prevention measures to contain the nosocomial transmission of COVID-19. The specific objectives are (1) to understand the virus transmission via interpersonal contacts among medical staff and patients; (2) to define proactive measures to reduce the risk of infection of medical staff and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of these measures to control the COVID-19 epidemic in hospitals. METHODS: We observed the operation of a typical primary hospital in China to understand the interpersonal contacts among medical staff and patients. We defined effective distance as the indicator for risk of transmission. Then three proactive measures were proposed based upon the observations, including a medical staff rotation system, the establishment of a separate fever clinic and medical staff working alone. Finally, the impacts of these measures are evaluated with a modified Susceptible-Exposure-Infected-Removed model accommodating the situation of hospitals and asymptomatic and latent infection of COVID-19. The case study was conducted with the hospital observed in December 2019 and February 2020. FINDINGS: The implementation of the medical staff rotation system has the most significant impact on containing the epidemic. The establishment of a separate fever clinic and medical staff working alone also benefits from inhibiting the epidemic outbreak. The simulation finds that if effective prevention and control measures are not taken in time, it will lead to a surge of infection cases in all asymptomatic probabilities and incubation periods