Pervasive brain monitoring and data sharing based on multi-tier distributed computing and linked data technology

EEG-based Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are facing grant challenges in their real-world applications. The technical difficulties in developing truly wearable multi-modal BCI systems that are capable of making reliable real-time prediction of users’ cognitive states under dynamic real-life situations may appear at times almost insurmountable. Fortunately, recent advances in miniature sensors, wireless communication and distributed computing technologies offered promising ways to bridge these chasms. In this paper, we report our attempt to develop a pervasive on-line BCI system by employing state-of-art technologies such as multi-tier fog and cloud computing, semantic Linked Data search and adaptive prediction/classification models. To verify our approach, we implement a pilot system using wireless dry-electrode EEG headsets and MEMS motion sensors as the front-end devices, Android mobile phones as the personal user interfaces, compact personal computers as the near-end fog servers and the computer clusters hosted by the Taiwan National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) as the far-end cloud servers. We succeeded in conducting synchronous multi-modal global data streaming in March and then running a multi-player on-line BCI game in September, 2013. We are currently working with the ARL Translational Neuroscience Branch and the UCSD Movement Disorder Center to use our system in real-life personal stress and in-home Parkinson’s disease patient monitoring experiments. We shall proceed to develop a necessary BCI ontology and add automatic semantic annotation and progressive model refinement capability to our system

Optimal task clustering using Hopfield net

To achieve high performance in a distributed system, the tasks of a program have to be carefully clustered and assigned to processors. In this paper we present a static method to cluster tasks and allocate them to processors. The proposed method relies on the Hopfield neural network to achieve optimum or near-optimum task clustering in terms of load balancing and communication cost. Experimental studies show that this method indeed can find optimal or near-optimal mapping for those programs used in our tests

Task Mapping On Distributed Shared Memory Systems Using Hopfield Neural Network

In order to reduce the execution time of a parallel program, the tasks/threads of the program have to be carefully mapped onto the processors of a system. Most mapping methods used on current Multithreaded Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems only consider the workload balance. Due to the ignorance of the communication between tasks/threads, these methods may lead to such mappings have excessive crossprocessor communication, which degrades the performance. In this paper, we present a static method to map user programs onto a multithreaded DSM system. In contrast with the previous work, this method takes into account both load balance and communication. It applies the Hopfield neural network on the mapping problem of the multithreaded DSM system to find a near-optimum mapping for a program. We have implemented this method on Cohesion which is a DSM system supporting multithreading. Two programs, Successive-Over-Relaxation (SOR) and Vector Quantization (VQ), are used to test the effec..

A Transparent Loss Recovery Scheme Using Packet Redirection for Wireless Video Transmissions

With the wide deployment of wireless networks and the rapid integration of various emerging networking technologies nowadays, Internet video applications must be updated on a sufficiently timely basis to support high end-to-end quality of service (QoS) levels over heterogeneous infrastructures. However, updating the legacy applications to provide QoS support is both complex and expensive since the video applications must communicate with underlying architectures when carrying out QoS provisioning, and furthermore, should be both aware of and adaptive to variations in the network conditions. Accordingly, this paper presents a transparent loss recovery scheme to transparently support the robust video transmission on behalf of real-time streaming video applications. The proposed scheme includes the following two modules: (i) a transparent QoS mechanism which enables the QoS setup of video applications without the requirement for any modification of the existing legacy applications through its use of an efficient packet redirection scheme; and (ii) an instant frame-level FEC technique which performs online FEC bandwidth allocation within TCP-friendly rate constraints in a frame-by-frame basis to minimize the additional FEC processing delay. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves nearly the same video quality that can be obtained by the optimal frame-level FEC under varying network conditions while maintaining low end-to-end delay