Design of a graphical user interface for home energy monitoring system

Excellent graphics are the instruments used for representing quantitative information. Graphics help people to understand complex things easily. Hence the user interfaces developed should be clear, illustrative and designed from the user point of view with respect to their applications. The thesis work deals with the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) developed for a home energy monitoring system. Design methodologies like user centric design and empathic design are followed while creating the user interface and also the effect of various colors on human perception is studied. Hence the final design of user interface provides the end-users a visualization of the energy produced and consumed in a monitored environment. The monitoring devices are connected to ThereGate system (data logger) via the M-Bus communication protocol. The ThereGate platform uses an Open Source Linux system as the operating language. The other communication platform used over the ThereGate platform is an oBIX bridge, a web based service interface rich in XML support for transferring the data. The interface has been programmed by using Visual basics 2008 and VB.NET, developed by Microsoft. The work progresses with an initial explanation on the availability of various home energy monitoring systems on the market and their comparison. The other units discuss the architecture of the ThereGate system, give a brief overview of the M-bus system, and discuss the development of graphical user interface (GUI) from a user centric design perspective using Microsoft's Visual Basics and VB.NET and configuration of M-Bus. The last unit contains a discussion of the goals achieved at the end of the design and the future developments that can be made to have more user interactions with the user interface

Enhanced Topic Distillation using Text, Markup Tags, and Hyperlinks

Topic distillation is the analysis of hyperlink graph structure to identify mutually reinforcing authorities (popular pages) and hubs (comprehensive lists of links to authorities). Topic distillation is becoming common in Web search engines, but the best-known algorithms model the Web graph at a coarse grain, with whole pages as single nodes. Such models may lose vital details in the markup tag structure of the pages, and thus lead to a tightly linked irrelevant subgraph winning over a relatively sparse relevant subgraph, a phenomenon called topic drift or contamination. The problem gets especially severe in the face of increasingly complex pages with navigation panels and advertisement links. We present an enhanced topic distillation algorithm which analyzes text, the markup tag trees that constitute HTML pages, and hyperlinks between pages. It thereby identifies subtrees which have high text- and hyperlink-based coherence w.r.t. the query. These subtrees get preferential treatment in the mutual reinforcement process. Using over 50 queries, 28 from earlier topic distillation work, we analyzed over 700 000 pages and obtained quantitative and anecdotal evidence that the new algorithm reduces topic drift. Topic areas: Citation and Link Analysis, Machine Learning for IR, Web IR.

The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web

The Web graph is a giant social network whose properties have been measured and modeled extensively in recent years. Most such studies concentrate on the graph structure alone, and do not consider textual properties of the nodes. Consequently, Web communities have been characterized purely in terms of graph structure and not on page content. We propose that a topic taxonomy such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory provides a useful framework for understanding the structure of content-based clusters and communities. In particular, using a topic taxonomy and an automatic classifier, we can measure the background distribution of broad topics on the Web, and analyze the capability of recent random walk algorithms to draw samples which follow such distributions. In addition, we can measure the probability that a page about one broad topic will link to another broad topic. Extending this experiment, we can measure how quickly topic context is lost while walking randomly on the Web graph. Estimates of this topic mixing distance may explain why a global PageRank is still meaningful in the context of broad queries. In general, our measurements may prove valuable in the design of community-specific crawlers and link-based ranking systems

Thickness dependent microstructural and magnetic studies of iron embedded PVA nanocomposite films

This paper presents the structural and magnetic properties of polyvinyl alcohol/iron (PVA/Fe) nanocomposite films. Iron (Fe) films of different thicknesses were deposited on a PVA substrate using ion beam sputtering. The Fe nanoparticle layer thickness ranges from 3 to 50 nm on the PVA substrate. Grazing incidence x-ray diffraction has been carried out to study the structural behavior of the prepared films. An atomic force microscope records the indicated remarkable change in the roughness of the nanocomposite film as a result of initiation of vertical growth of sputtered Fe nanoparticles.Magneto-optic Kerr effect (MOKE) magnetometry and MOKE spectroscopy have been employed to evaluate the magnetic property and simultaneously study the real time growth of the magnetic domain structure for both 0° and 90° azimuthal angles. MOKE microscopic images indicated the magnetization reversal commensurate with the hysteresis loop of the nanocomposites. All the films show soft ferromagnetic behavior. Gradual development of the domain structure is observed in the MOKE micrograph with the increase in the thickness of Fe nanoparticle deposition. Ex situ magnetic force micrographs of the magnetic domain structures supported the observation of MOKE microscopic studies, which indicated switching of in-plane magnetization to out-of-plane magnetization near an Fe nanoparticle deposition thickness of 40 nm. The PVA matrix appears to be an effective material to support the growth of magnetic properties in the PVA/Fe nanocomposite system. The evolution of Fe nanostructures on PVA and the resulting magnetic behavior have been discussed