From Pronoun to Identity: Tracing the History of the Word Otaku

Words are vessels of power; the power to convey meaning. Words can give shape to the identity of a group, and the same word can stereotype one for generations. This research paper is about one such word – ‘Otaku’. The aim of this research paper is to trace the history of the term ‘otaku’, and understand how it evolved from a second person pronoun to a term that identifies an entire subcultur

Optimal Checkpointing for Secure Intermittently-Powered IoT Devices

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to power Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Due to the intermittent nature of these energy sources, one cannot guarantee forward progress of program execution. Prior work has advocated for checkpointing the intermediate state to off-chip non-volatile memory (NVM). Encrypting checkpoints addresses the security concern, but significantly increases the checkpointing overheads. In this paper, we propose a new online checkpointing policy that judiciously determines when to checkpoint so as to minimize application time to completion while guaranteeing security. Compared to state-of-the-art checkpointing schemes that do not account for the overheads of encrypted checkpoints we improve execution time up to 1.4x.Comment: ICCAD 201

Efficient Inventory Management of Hospital Supply Chains Using a Sim-Heuristic Approach

Inventory management is a vital section of a supply chain system. In a hospital setting, where delivering high quality patient care is a prime concern, inventory management is often overlooked. With the ever increasing demand for products, it becomes challenging to manage inventory in a dynamic facility such as a hospital. Although there is abundant research in supply chain, seldom have the proposed methods found their way into execution in actual hospital settings. Additionally, much of the literature focuses on particular aspects of the supply chain. Current methods used in practice lead to system performance that is suboptimal, resulting in too much or too short inventory in stock, overtime work to manage supplies, expedited shipments and potentially substandard quality of care delivered to patients. Having the right products available at the point-of-use is important to the efficient and effective treatment of patients. With cost and budget constraints, merely managing demand is not sufficient. There is a need to develop a system design which enables hospitals and healthcare institutions to implement and benefit from methods that have been developed or are being developed for optimal inventory management systems. In this research, we study the hospital supply chain from manufacturers/distribution centers to the point-of-use within a hospital unit, taking into account the integration and implementation of the various echelon of the supply chain system. In particular, we design and develop a sim-heuristic methodology using operations research to evaluate inventory and operational decision variables based on service level and operational costs, subject to variability in demand and lead-time. In addition, we demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of the methodology and compare alternate system configurations including a (Q, r) inventory system and Kanban system

Fragility of the Commons under Prospect-Theoretic Risk Attitudes

We study a common-pool resource game where the resource experiences failure with a probability that grows with the aggregate investment in the resource. To capture decision making under such uncertainty, we model each player's risk preference according to the value function from prospect theory. We show the existence and uniqueness of a pure Nash equilibrium when the players have heterogeneous risk preferences and under certain assumptions on the rate of return and failure probability of the resource. Greater competition, vis-a-vis the number of players, increases the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium; we quantify this effect by obtaining bounds on the ratio of the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium to the failure probability under investment by a single user. We further show that heterogeneity in attitudes towards loss aversion leads to higher failure probability of the resource at the equilibrium.Comment: Accepted for publication in Games and Economic Behavior, 201