Convergence: the next big step

Recently, web based multimedia services have gained popularity and have proven themselves to be viable means of communication. This has inspired the telecommunication service providers and network operators to reinvent themselves to try and provide value added IP centric services. There was need for a system which would allow new services to be introduced rapidly with reduced capital expense (CAPEX) and operational expense (OPEX) through increased efficiency in network utilization. Various organizations and standardization agencies have been working together to establish such a system. Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a result of these efforts. IMS is an application level system. It is being developed by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) and 3GPP2 (3rd Generation Partnership Project 2) in collaboration with IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union – Telecommunication Standardization Sector), and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) etc. Initially, the main aim of IMS was to bring together the internet and the cellular world, but it has extended to include traditional wire line telecommunication systems as well. It utilizes existing internet protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting protocol), and COPS (Common Open Policy Service) etc, and modifies them to meet the stringent requirements of reliable, real time communication systems. The advantages of IMS include easy service quality management (QoS), mobility management, service control and integration. At present a lot of attention is being paid to providing bundled up services in the home environment. Service providers have been successful in providing traditional telephony, high speed internet and cable services in a single package. But there is very little integration among these services. IMS can provide a way to integrate them as well as extend the possibility of various other services to be added to allow increased automation in the home environment. This thesis extends the concept of IMS to provide convergence and facilitate internetworking of the various bundled services available in the home environment; this may include but is not limited to communications (wired and wireless), entertainment, security etc. In this thesis, I present a converged home environment which has a number of elements providing a variety of communication and entertainment services. The proposed network would allow effective interworking of these elements, based on IMS architecture. My aim is to depict the possible advantages of using IMS to provide convergence, automation and integration at the residential level

A New Digital Image Compression Algorithm Based on Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

In this paper we discuss the formulation of, and show the results for, a new compression/decompression algorithm called DYNAMAC, that has its basis in nonlinear systems theory. We show that we are able to achieve significant compression of RGB image data while maintaining good image quality. We discuss the implementation of this algorithm in hardware, show that the same process is applicable to other digital forms of data, demonstrate that the decompression process is ideal for streaming applications, and show that the algorithm has an exploitable aspect of encryption useful for digital rights management and secure transmission. We discuss our methodology for the improvement of the performance of this codec

Synthesis, Consolidation and Modelling Study of AA2014-TiB2 Composite Prepared by Powder Metallurgy (P/M) Method

This Aluminum alloy matrix composite reinforced with TiB2 particulates with different volume % of TiB2 (5, 10 and 15) has been successfully synthesized by P/M route. The composite powders were consolidated by cold uniaxial compaction pressure followed by sintering at 590 ?C in nitrogen atmosphere. The effect of reinforcement on the densification was studied and reported in terms of the relative density, densification parameter, tensile rupture strength and Vickers hardness of the composite. The above physical and mechanical properties increase with compaction pressure irrespective of TiB2 content. Scheil cooling and equilibrium calculations were performed using FactSage for qualitative understanding of the microstructural evolution during sintering. The experimental results showed that samples with 5 volume % TiB2 exhibits optimum densities after sintering and correspondingly highest hardness.by Rana Pratap Singh, Gaurav Kumar Gupta, and Manas Paliwa

Genetic algorithm for an optimized weighted voting scheme incorporating k-separated bigram transition probabilities to improve protein fold recognition

In biology, identifying the tertiary structure of a protein helps determine its functions. A step towards tertiary structure identification is predicting a protein's fold. Computational methods have been applied to determine a protein's fold by assembling information from its structural, physicochemical and/or evolutionary properties. It has been shown that evolutionary data helps improve prediction accuracy. In this study, a scheme is proposed that uses the genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize a weighted voting system to improve protein fold recognition. This scheme incorporates k-separated bigram transition probabilities for feature extraction, which are based on the Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM). A set of SVM classifiers are used for initial classification, whereupon their predictions are consolidated using the optimized weighted voting system. This scheme has been demonstrated on the Ding and Dubchak (DD) benchmarked data set

Protein structural class prediction via k - separated bigrams using position specific scoring matrix

Protein structural class prediction (SCP) is as important task in identifying protein tertiary structure and protein functions. In this study, we propose a feature extraction technique to predict secondary structures. The technique utilizes bigram (of adjacent and k-separated amino acids) information derived from Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM). The technique has shown promising results when evaluated on benchmarked Ding and Dubchak dataset

Probabilistic expression of spatially varied amino acid dimers into general form of Chou's pseudo amino acid composition for protein fold recognition

Background Identification of the tertiary structure (3D structure) of a protein is a fundamental problem in biology which helps in identifying its functions. Predicting a protein׳s fold is considered to be an intermediate step for identifying the tertiary structure of a protein. Computational methods have been applied to determine a protein׳s fold by assembling information from its structural, physicochemical and/or evolutionary properties. Methods In this study, we propose a scheme in which a feature extraction technique that extracts probabilistic expressions of amino acid dimers, which have varying degree of spatial separation in the primary sequences of proteins, from the Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM). SVM classifier is used to create a model from extracted features for fold recognition. Results The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated against three benchmarked datasets, namely the Ding and Dubchak, Extended Ding and Dubchak, and Taguchi and Gromiha datasets. Conclusions The proposed scheme performed well in the experiments conducted, providing improvements over previously published results in literature