Experiences with AR plots: A travel time augmented reality game

Digital games have the potential for changing attitudes towards social issues such as climate change and sustainability. These games don’t have to be based on fixed computing and with the rise of smart phone, they can make use of a range of sensor and augmented reality technologies. This paper presents the experience of developing AR Plots, a prototype locative game with an augmented reality interface. It is a game designed to fit in with the fractured nature of travel time on public transport. This paper discusses technical challenges, usability issues and game design approaches used to work within these constraints

DIAMOnDS - DIstributed Agents for MObile & Dynamic Services

Distributed Services Architecture with support for mobile agents between services, offer significantly improved communication and computational flexibility. The uses of agents allow execution of complex operations that involve large amounts of data to be processed effectively using distributed resources. The prototype system Distributed Agents for Mobile and Dynamic Services (DIAMOnDS), allows a service to send agents on its behalf, to other services, to perform data manipulation and processing. Agents have been implemented as mobile services that are discovered using the Jini Lookup mechanism and used by other services for task management and communication. Agents provide proxies for interaction with other services as well as specific GUI to monitor and control the agent activity. Thus agents acting on behalf of one service cooperate with other services to carry out a job, providing inter-operation of loosely coupled services in a semi-autonomous way. Remote file system access functionality has been incorporated by the agent framework and allows services to dynamically share and browse the file system resources of hosts, running the services. Generic database access functionality has been implemented in the mobile agent framework that allows performing complex data mining and processing operations efficiently in distributed system. A basic data searching agent is also implemented that performs a query based search in a file system. The testing of the framework was carried out on WAN by moving Connectivity Test agents between AgentStations in CERN, Switzerland and NUST, Pakistan.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, CHEP03, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 200

Energy conservation in mobile devices and applications: A case for context parsing, processing and distribution in clouds

Context information consumed and produced by the applications on mobile devices needs to be represented, disseminated, processed and consumed by numerous components in a context-aware system. Significant amounts of context consumption, production and processing takes place on mobile devices and there is limited or no support for collaborative modelling, persistence and processing between device-Cloud ecosystems. In this paper we propose an environment for context processing in a Cloud-based distributed infrastructure that offloads complex context processing from the applications on mobile devices. An experimental analysis of complexity based context-processing categories has been carried out to establish the processing-load boundary. The results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative infrastructure provides significant performance and energy conservation benefits for mobile devices and applications

Context caches in the clouds

In context-aware systems, the contextual information about human and computing situations has a strong temporal aspect i.e. it remains valid for a period of time. This temporal property can be exploited in caching mechanisms that aim to exploit such locality of reference. However, different types of contextual information have varying temporal validity durations and a varied spectrum of access frequencies as well. Such variation affects the suitability of a single caching strategy and an ideal caching mechanism should utilize dynamic strategies based on the type of context data, quality of service heuristics and access patterns and frequencies of context consuming applications. This paper presents an investigation into the utility of various context-caching strategies and proposes a novel bipartite caching mechanism in a Cloud-based context provisioning system. The results demonstrate the relative benefits of different caching strategies under varying context usage scenarios. The utility of the bipartite context caching mechanism is established both through simulation and deployment in a Cloud platform

Provision of an integrated data analysis platform for computational neuroscience experiments

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrated analysis base to facilitate computational neuroscience experiments, following a user-led approach to provide access to the integrated neuroscience data and to enable the analyses demanded by the biomedical research community. Design/methodology/approach – The design and development of the N4U analysis base and related information services addresses the existing research and practical challenges by offering an integrated medical data analysis environment with the necessary building blocks for neuroscientists to optimally exploit neuroscience workflows, large image data sets and algorithms to conduct analyses. Findings – The provision of an integrated e-science environment of computational neuroimaging can enhance the prospects, speed and utility of the data analysis process for neurodegenerative diseases. Originality/value – The N4U analysis base enables conducting biomedical data analyses by indexing and interlinking the neuroimaging and clinical study data sets stored on the grid infrastructure, algorithms and scientific workflow definitions along with their associated provenance information

Dual-band multiple-element MIMO antenna system for next-generation smartphones

This work presents a cost-effective multiple-element multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for next-generation smartphones. The proposed antenna system is developed on a 0.8 mm thin FR-4 substrate with a relative permittivity of 4.4, which consists of one main board and two sideboards. The dimensions of the main board and the two side boards are 150 × 75 mm2 and 150 × 6 mm2, respectively. The radiating elements are printed on the sideboards to provide space for other radio frequency (RF) components to be embedded on the main board. The proposed antenna resonates at two distinct allotted 5G bands, i.e., 3.5 GHz and 5.4 GHz, with impedance bandwidths of 200 MHz and 700 MHz, respectively. The isolation between the antenna elements is noted to be >18 dB and >12 dB for the 3.5 GHz and 5.4 GHz frequency bands. In addition, the proposed MIMO antenna provides pattern and spatial diversity characteristics in both bands with good gain and efficiency. Furthermore, the MIMO parameters such as envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), mean effective gain (MEG), and channel capacity (CC) are calculated, and it is observed that the MIMO antenna offers good diversity performance for the bands of interest. A prototype is fabricated and measured to verify the numerical data. The simulated results were discovered to be in excellent agreement with the measured results. It is also observed that the proposed MIMO antenna system holds promising features, and can be utilized for future generations of smartphones.Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman Universit

Impact of caffeine and vitamin D3 on the body-weight of pregnant BALB/c mice

Objective:  To investigate the effect of caffeine and Vitamin D3 on the body weight of pregnant BALB/c mice.  Design of Study:  An RCT (Randomized control trial) in the Lab.  Place and Duration of Study:  The study was carried out at Anatomy Department, Army Medical College (AMC), Rawalpindi, in collaboration with National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, from Oct 2018 to Oct 2019.  Material and Methods:  Six-week old pregnant BALB/c mice, thirty (30) in number, weighing  26-28g, were taken and divided into three groups with 10 pregnant mice in each group.  The control group G1 was given standard diet with water ad libitum for 21 days.  The animals in experimental group G2, in addition to the standard diet, were given 10mg of caffeine per 100g body-weight once a day on alternate days by oral gavage for 21 days.  Similarly, mice in group G3, in addition to the diet of group G2, were given 0.1µg of vitamin D3 per day by oral gavage for 21 days.  The body-weights on 1st day, 7th day, 14th day and 21st day of gestation in all the groups were measured to determine the influence of caffeine and vitamin D3.  Results:  Mean body-weights of mice in control group G1 were noted as 26.8 ± 0.789g,  30.7 ± 0.949g, 36 ± 0.667g and 42 ± 1.054g on 1st, 7th, 14th and 21st day of gestation, respectively.  The mean body-weights of experimental group G2 were recorded to be 26.7 ± 0.675g, 29.9 ± 0.738g, 34.3 ± 0.823g and 39.5 ± 0.972g on 1st, 7th, 14th and 21th day of gestation, respectively.  The mean body-weights of experimental group G3 were determined as 26.8 ± 0.632g, 30.4 ± 0.699g, 34.6 ± 0.516g and 40.5 ± 0.850g on 1st, 7th, 14th and 21st day of gestation, respectively.  In comparison to the control group G1, the body-weights of animals in experimental group G2 showed more decrease in accrual of body-weight than noted in experimental group G3.  Conclusion:  Caffeine intake has decreasing influence on the growth of body-weight in pregnant mice while intake of vitamin D3 somewhat nullifies the harmful effect of caffeine on body-weight.

Survey of context provisioning middleware

In the scope of ubiquitous computing, one of the key issues is the awareness of context, which includes diverse aspects of the user's situation including his activities, physical surroundings, location, emotions and social relations, device and network characteristics and their interaction with each other. This contextual knowledge is typically acquired from physical, virtual or logical sensors. To overcome problems of heterogeneity and hide complexity, a significant number of middleware approaches have been proposed for systematic and coherent access to manifold context parameters. These frameworks deal particularly with context representation, context management and reasoning, i.e. deriving abstract knowledge from raw sensor data. This article surveys not only related work in these three categories but also the required evaluation principles. © 2009-2012 IEEE

H-Shaped Eight-Element Dual-Band MIMO Antenna for Sub-6 GHz 5G Smatphone Applications

The design of an eight-element H-shaped dual-band multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for sub-6 GHz fifth-generation (5G) smartphone applications is presented in this work. The radiating elements are designed on the side edge frame of the smartphone, placed on both sides of the main printed circuit board (PCB). Each side edge consists of four radiating elements, which ensures low mutual coupling between antenna elements. The total size of the main PCB is 150×75 mm 2 , while the size of the side edge frame is 150×7 mm 2 . A single antenna consists of an H-shaped radiating element fed using a 50Ω microstrip feeding line designed on the main board of the smartphone. The results show that, according to −6 dB impedance bandwidth criteria, the designed MIMO antenna radiates at two different frequency ranges within the allocated 5G spectrums, i.e., 3.1–3.78 GHz and 5.43–6.21 GHz with 680 MHz and 780 MHz bandwidths, respectively. It is also observed that the antenna elements are able to provide pattern diversity for both the frequency bands. Furthermore, an isolation of >12 dB is observed between any two given radiating elements. Numerous MIMO critical performance characteristics are assessed, including diversity gain (DG), envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), and channel capacity (CC). A prototype is built, measured, and it is observed that the measured and simulated data correspond well. On the basis of performance characteristics, it can be claimed that the suggested MIMO system may be used in 5G communication networks.Dr. Mohammad Alibakhshikenari acknowledges support from the CONEX-Plus programme funded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801538