Delivering knowledge and solutions at your fingertips:strategy for mobile app development in agriculture

The mobile revolution transformed our lives in the ways we socialize and conduct business.  Today, mobile technology is an essential element of every aspect of digital success. More people are accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through wired connections.  Mobile device users are always connected, actively leveraging information, knowledge and social activities.  The rapid growth of mobile usage in the world created many opportunities that leverage the ubiquity of mobile networks.  Clearly mobile revolution will continue, and organizations not only create mobile strategy, they devote more resources to deliver innovative mobile services and next must-have applications (apps) for the agricultural sector.  There are many design challenges and considerations in developing mobile apps that can be widely accepted by users in agricultural communities.  This paper discusses mobile apps in the agricultural domain, considerations and challenges for successful mobile app development and focuses on a cross-platform mobile development approach adopted by University of Florida/Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).  This cross-platform framework is an intuitive approach to developing apps quickly, easily and cost effectively.  A mobile portal and sample mobile apps developed at UF/IFAS are presented.  Effective and quality mobile app deployment in agriculture needs a clear mobile strategy, creative ideas and collective efforts from developers, domain experts and organizations

Technology Trends in ICT – Towards Data-Driven, Farmer-Centered and Knowledge-Based Hybrid Cloud Architectures for Smart Farming

Over the past four decades, advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have resulted in unprecedented opportunity and innovation for improving farming outcomes. Ongoing innovations such as mobile, social media, agricultural drones, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for agribusinesses to redefine and rethink the role of ICT towards achieving better farming outcomes. With recent advances in infrastructure, data (collection, storage and retrieval), and a better understanding of all aspects of the food chain, new challenges and opportunities are presented. Unstructured data is now being generated real time, in large volumes, at high speed and unknown quality that results in challenges to current approaches for decision making, and require a focus on analytics. These new sources of data create the opportunity to inform and drive a change in decision making from one that is highly intuitive to one that is data driven and processed in real-time. This paper highlights recent trends in ICT and introduces a hybrid cloud architecture for smart farming. The proposed architecture emphasizes data-driven, farmer-centered, and knowledge-based decision tools through service integration, aggregation and interoperation. As a customized solution for farmers, the proposed architecture contains components of 1) data integration of on-farm sensors and data from public sources, 2) farm management modules, 3) knowledge-based software solutions from different providers, 4) service integration, aggregation and interoperation, and 5) a customized dashboard focused on usefulness and usability. This cloud-based solution allows the integration of businesses services, things, and technology from any channel and can be used anywhere. At this time, hybrid cloud environments have shown promise to integrate these different services and provide smart farming solutions to both big and smallholder farmers. 

DDIS and Diagnostic Networks: Building Partnerships for Safer Trade

Movement of agricultural products is one of the primary means of introduction of new diseases and pests. The agricultural inspections that take place at the ports of entry target higher-risk commodities, but inspect only an estimated 1-2% of total shipments. According to the Department of Commerce (U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Statistics), U.S. agricultural exports increased 26.72% from 2006 to 2007 and imports increased 10.12% over the same period. Imports from the Caribbean alone totaled $451,098,000 in 2007. The economic impact of trade cannot be underestimated, and neither should the possibilities for newly introduced pests. Early detection and accurate diagnosis of diseases and other pests is vital to any eradication efforts. In addition, communication between countries regarding pest detections increases awareness and allows for targeted survey programs. These efforts cannot happen without robust diagnostic capability and communication systems in place. The National Plant Diagnostic Network (NPDN) was developed by the USDA-CSREES in 2002 to quickly detect and accurately diagnose plant pests and initiate communications, and has become the standard for creation of similar systems such as the International Plant Diagnostic Network (IPDN) and the Caribbean Region Diagnostic Network (CRDN). The CRDN represents this effort in the Caribbean basin, tying diagnostic laboratories and personnel together via technical training and the Digital Diagnostic and Identification System (DDIS). Participants in this network utilize a secure online system to log and share diagnostic data in a confidential environment. This coupled with technical training increases the availability of expertise in the region, and helps to establish a baseline of pest knowledge that will support phytosanitary and trade decisions

Joint Admission Control, Channel Assignment and QoS Routing for Coverage Optimization in Multi-Hop Cognitive Radio Cellular Networks

8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems, MASS 2011, Valencia, 17-22 October 2011In recent years, cognitive radio technology (CR) has been proposed to allow unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access the channels unused by primary users. As a result, there is a lot of recent interests on studying cognitive radio cellular networks (CogCells) that can support both PUs and SUs. Due to the limited transmission range of SUs, in this work we consider supporting Multi-hop infrastructure-based secondary systems (SSs), where SUs can communicate with the BS over multiple hops. The use of SSs improves the reliability and coverage compared to its single-hop counterpart. In addition, SUs are allowed to access multiple channels, which helps to increase transmission reliability and coverage and relieve interference at PUs. To enable multi-hop secondary transmissions, it is also important to support efficient routing. In CogCells, efficient admission control, channel assignment and routing is crucial for the coverage optimization of SSs and to ensure the QoS requirements in CogCells. In this paper, we mathematically formulate the problem of joint admission control, channel assignment and QoS routing to maximize the coverage of SUs in a CogCell system that supports multi-hop secondary transmissions, taking into account the interference constraints and QoS requirements from the PUs and admitted SUs. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to optimize the coverage of SUs in multi-hop CogCells with the concurrent support of the above three important procedures. We show that the problem is NP-hard and propose three different algorithms to solve the coverage optimization problem and give the theoretical analyses of its performances in terms of approximation ratio to the optimum. Our solutions include a greedy heuristic approximation scheme, an algorithm that can provide exact solution, and a new approximation solution with a poly-logarithmic approximation ratio guarantee, e.g., the performance of our algorithm is within a poly-logarithmic factor of that of any optimal algorithm for the problem. Our preliminary simulation results indicate that our new approximation algorithms can effectively exploit the increased number of SUs and channels, and performs much better than the theoretical worst case bound.Department of Computin

Estimating Available Bandwidth in Cooperative Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Part 6: Resource ManagementInternational audienceEstimating available bandwidth (EAB) is an important and challenging task for providing QoS support in wireless networks. Existing works on EAB did not consider cooperative communication which can improve available bandwidth of wireless networks. To fill this void, this paper studies the problem of estimating available bandwidth in cooperative multi-hop wireless networks, which is formulated as an optimization problem, called Cooperative Available Bandwidth Estimation problem (Coop-ABE). Given a new connection request, the Coop-ABE problem targets at finding the maximum available bandwidth that can be provided to the new connection subject to that existing flows are kept free from interference. We propose a centralized algorithm to solve the Coop-ABE problem

Effect of naringenin in Qianggu capsule on population pharmacokinetics in Chinese women with primary osteoporosis

OBJECTIVE: To characterize naringenin (NAR) population pharmacokinetics (PPK) in Chinese women with primary osteoporosis. METHODS: Ninety-eight female patients with primary osteoporosis from the Jingshan, Beixinqiao, Jiaodaokou, Chaoyangmen, and Donghuamen communities in Beijing, China, aged 40 to 80 years, received oral Qianggu capsules (250 mg). Blood samples were collected before and at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 24 h after administration. The concentration of NAR in the blood samples was measured using high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. PPK analyses were performed with nonlinear mixed-effect modeling software (version 7.1.2, PsN3.2.12). The clearance (Cl), central distribution volume (V), absorption rate constant (Ka1), peripheral distribution volume (VII), and inter-compartmental clearance (CLII) were set as parameters and estimated by the base model, covariate model, and final model. Kidney-Yang deficiency [Shenyangxu (SYAX)] and liver-kidney-Yin deficiency (Ganshenyinxu) are patterns of symptoms in Traditional Chinese Medicine that were set as covariates, along with age, height, blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine, alanine transaminase, aspartate transaminase, and hyperlipidemia. Both step-wise forward and backward procedures were accomplished to build models. The final model was evaluated by internal and external validation, visual predictive check, bootstrap, and leverage analysis. RESULTS: A one compartment open model with first order degradation was the best fitted to the concentration-time profiles following oral administration of NAR. The mean of population parameters of the final model, Cl, SYAX on C1, V, Ka1, CLII, and VII, Were measured to be 37.6 L/h, 0.427 L, 123 L/h, 0.12/h, 0.3056, and 1.446, respectively. Inter-individual variability was estimated and SYAX was identified as a significant covariate. CONCLUSION: The population pharmacokinetic model described in this study could effectively characterize the pharmacokinetic profile of NAR following administration of a single dose of oral Qianggu capsules in Chinese women with primary osteoporosis. Among the tested covariates, only SYAX was a significant factor. (C) 2015 JTCM. All rights reserved.Supported by Grant from Significant Drug Research and Development in Important State Science and Technology Specific And Key Technique Research (Key Issues Research on Re-evaluation of Listed Herbal Hedicine),Visiting Fellow Joint Innovation Research Project of The China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (Exploratory Research in Population Pharmacokinetics of Bioactive Compounds of Osteopractic Total Flavone Based on Total Quantum Statistical...)SCI(E)中国科学引文数据库(CSCD)[email protected]

High-field linear magneto-resistance in topological insulator Bi2Se3 thin films

Linear magneto-resistance is observed in high magnetic field in topological insulator Bi2Se3films. As revealed by tilted magnetic field measurement, this linear magneto-resistance is associated with the gapless topological surface states and of quantum origin. In the ultra-thin limit, the inter-surface tunneling induced surface state gap opening quenches the linear magneto-resistance. Instead, weak negative magneto-resistance is observed in high magnetic fields in ultra-thin films

Disorder-induced linear magnetoresistance in (221) topological insulator Bi2Se3 films

A linear magnetoresistance (LMR) with strong temperature dependence and peculiar non-symmetry with respect to the applied magnetic field is observed in high-index (221) Bi2Se3 films. Different from the LMR observed in the previous studies which emphasize the role of gapless linear energy dispersion, this LMR is of disorder origin and possibly arises from the electron surface accumulation layer of the film. Besides, an abnormal negative magneto-resistance that shows a non-monotonic temperature dependence and persists even at high temperatures and in strong magnetic fields is also observed. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC