Smart Community Wireless Platforms: Costs, Benefits, Drawbacks, Risks

A wireless network covering most of the city is a key component of a smart city. Although the wireless network offers many benefits, a key issue is the costs associated with laying out the infrastructure and services, making the bandwidth available and maintaining the services. We believe community involvement is important in building city-wide wireless networks. Indeed, many community wireless networks have been successful. Could the city inspire and assist the communities with building their wireless networks, and then unite them for a city-wide wireless network? We address the first question by presenting a model where municipality, communities and smart utility providers work together to create a platform, smart community wireless platform, for a community where platform sides work together toward achieving smart community objectives. One challenge is to estimate the total cost, benefits and drawbacks of such platforms. Another challenge is to model risks and mitigation plans for their success. We examine relevant dynamics in measuring the total cost, benefits, drawbacks and risks of smart community wireless platforms and develop models for estimating their success under various scenarios. To develop models, we use an intelligence framework that incorporates systems dynamics modelling with statistical, economical and machine learning methods

Toshihiko Kusano

In this paper, we develop a component-based, distributed software architecture to build a service and network management system for the emerging multimedia applications. This architecture is constructed by using a generic software component model. The generic software component is instantiated in order to derive specific core service and management components. User interactions as well as the inter component interactions are developed on a CORBA/JAVA platform. Keywords: distributed software architecture, service engineering, generic software component, service management layer, CORBA, JAVA, TINA-C. 1. Introduction and Research Goals Advances in the area of software engineering, especially the advent of object-oriented technologies, enabled the specification, design and implementation of software systems with reusable and modular components. When the emergence of different middleware solutions are added to the object and component based software engineering techniques, the developers..

Dissertation Proposal: Management of Multimedia Services Over ATM Networks: A QoS Approach

This dissertation proposes a new service and management architecture and its implementation for the end-to-end management of multimedia services. The underlying networking technology is assumed to be Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network, although the architecture can be applied to different networking technologies. The component model that constitutes the essential elements of the proposed architecture is developed and instantiated for basic core and management components, namely quality of service (QoS) and management, connection service and management, and security service and management. A QoS approach of obtaining the service parameters from the multimedia application and/or customer and mapping them onto the components, has been utilized throughout. Component specification and design are performed using Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Methodologies, Fusion and UML. The issues related to a WEB based implementation of the prototype are addressed. The contributions and the fu..

High Levels of Circulating Endothelial Progenitor Cells Are Associated with Acrotism in Patients with Takayasu Arteritis

Objectives: To investigate the association between endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) and Takayasu arteritis (TA). Subjects and Methods: A total of 39 subjects were included in this study: 12 subjects had been diagnosed with active TA, 11 had active Behcet disease (BD), and 16 were healthy controls. The EPCs, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and C-reactive protein (CRP) levels of all the subjects were measured. MedCalc 15.8 software (MedCalc, Belgium) was used for all statistical analyses. Results: The level of EPCs was higher in TA patients (4.25 +/- 2.56) than in the BD group (2.27 +/- 2.0) and the healthy controls (2.12 +/- 1.2) (p = 0.015). TA patients with acrotism (n = 4) had higher levels of EPCs compared to TA patients without acrotism (n = 8) (6.50 +/- 1.73 vs. 3.12 +/- 2.16, p = 0.02). A positive correlation was found between EPCs and the ESR (r = 0.723, p = 0.0079) and between EPCs and CRP in patients with TA (r = 0.769, p < 0.0034). Conclusion: High levels of circulating EPCs were correlated with the CRP level and the ESR in patients with TA. These cells could be a marker for acrotism and inflammation in patients with TA. (C) 2016 S. Karger AG, Base