PS-Sim: A Framework for Scalable Simulation of Participatory Sensing Data

Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal, which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.Comment: Published and Appeared in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP-2018

The existence and persistence of household financial hardship

We investigate the existence and persistence of financial hardship at the household level using data from the British Household Panel Survey. Our modelling strategy makes three important contributions to the existing literature on household finances. Firstly, we model nine different types of household financial problems within a joint framework, allowing for correlation in the random effects across the nine equations. Secondly, we develop a dynamic framework in order to model the persistence of financial problems over time by extending our multi-equation framework to allow the presence or otherwise of different types of financial problems in the previous time period to influence the probability that the household currently experiences such problems. Our third contribution relates to the possibility that experiencing financial problems may be correlated with sample attrition. We model missing observations in the panel in order to allow for such attrition. Our findings reveal interesting variations in the determinants of experiencing different types of financial problems including demographic and regional differences. Our findings also highlight persistence in experiencing financial problems over time as well as the role that saving on a regular basis in previous time periods can play in mitigating current financial problems

Three Dimensional Gauge Theory with Topological and Non-topological Mass: Hamiltonian and Lagrangian Analysis

Three dimensional (abelian) gauged massive Thirring model is bosonized in the large fermion mass limit. A further integration of the gauge field results in a non-local theory. A truncated version of that is the Maxwell Chern Simons (MCS) theory with a conventional mass term or MCS Proca theory. This gauge invariant theory is completely solved in the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formalism, with the spectra of the modes determined. Since the vector field constituting the model is identified (via bosonization) to the fermion current, the charge current algebra, including the Schwinger term is also computed in the MCS Proca model.Comment: Eight pages, Latex, No figures

Neutrino Emissivity of Dense Stars

The neutrino emissivity of compact stars is investigated in this work. We consider stars consisting of nuclear as well as quark matter for this purpose. Different models are used to calculate the composition of nuclear and quark matter and the neutrino emissivity. Depending on the model under consideration, the neutrino emissivity of nuclear as well as quark matter varies over a wide range. We find that for nuclear matter, the direct URCA processes are allowed for most of the relativistic models without and with strange baryons, whereas for the nonrelativistic models this shows a strong dependence on the type of nuclear interaction employed. When the direct URCA processes are allowed, the neutrino emissivity of hadronic matter is larger than that of the quark matter by several orders of magnitude. We also find that the neutrino emissivity departs from $T^6$ behavior when the temperature is larger than the difference in the Fermi momenta of the particles, participating in the neutrino-producing reactions.Comment: Latex file. 5 figures available on request. accepted in Int. J. Mod. Phys.