A Pervasive Computing Curriculum for Engineering and Science Students

Today, there's an urgent need for well-trained pervasive computing engineers and scientists. Pervasive computing has evolved into a critical field, influencing a broad range of industries from healthcare to manufacturing to defense. However, most computer engineering and computer science programs pay marginal attention, at best, to the field. In this issue, the authors of the Rochester Institute of Technology describes a set of courses on pervasive computing topics and a supporting laboratory designed for both computer engineering and computer science students     

A Raman study of CdSe and ZnSe nanostructures

Raman studies have been carried out on CdSe nanotubes and ZnSe nanorods produced by surfactant-assisted synthesis. The Raman spectrum of CdSe nanotubes shows modes at 207.5 and 198 cm-1; the former arises from the longitudinal optic phonon mode red-shifted with respect to the bulk mode because of phonon confinement, and the latter is the l = 1 surface phonon. Analysis based on the phonon confinement model demonstrates that the size of the nanoparticle responsible for the red-shift is about 4 nm, close to the estimate from the blue-shift of the photoluminescence. The Raman spectrum of ZnSe nanorods shows modes at 257 and 213 cm-1, assigned to longitudinal and transverse optic phonons, blue-shifted with respect to the bulk ZnSe modes because of compressive strain. The mode at 237 cm-1 is the surface phonon.     

Benchmarking large-scale data management for Internet of Things

The Journal of Supercomputing - In the current era of the Internet of Things (IoT), massive number of sensors are used in our daily lives. Sensors are everywhere around us. They exist in our homes,...     

GP-based secondary classifiers

Genetic programming (GP) is used to evolve secondary classifiers for disambiguating between pairs of handwritten digit images. The inherent property of feature selection accorded by GP is exploited to make sharper decision between conflicting classes. Classification can be done in several steps with an available feature set and a mixture of strategies. A two-step classification strategy is presented in this paper. After the first step of the classification using the full feature set, the high confidence recognition result will lead to an end of the recognition process. Otherwise a secondary classifier designed using a sub-set of the original feature set and the information available from the earlier classification step will help classify the input further. The feature selection mechanism employed by GP selects important features that provide maximum separability between classes under consideration. In this way, a sharper decision on fewer classes is obtained at the secondary classification stage. The full feature set is still available in both stages of classification to retain complete information. An intuitive motivation and detailed analysis using confusion matrices between digit classes is presented to describe how this strategy leads to improved recognition performance. In comparison with the existing methods, our method is aimed for increasing recognition accuracy and reliability. Results are reported for the BHA test-set and the NIST test-set of handwritten digits.     

"U" curve association of blood pressure and mortality in hemodialysis patients. Medical Directors of Dialysis Clinic, Inc

An immunosuppressant Rapamycin (Rap) has been reported to cause G1 arrest by inhibiting p70 S6 kinase and G1 cyclin/cdks kinase activities when added to quiescent cells with mitogens. However, antiproliferative effects of Rap on exponentially growing cells have been poorly investigated. We examined the intracellular events after the treatment of Rap in exponentially growing T cells and found that Rap upregulated a cdks inhibitor, p27Kip1 at both mRNA and protein levels in Rap-sensitive cells. Antiproliferative effect of Rap was mainly ascribed to the inhibition of cyclin E/cdk2 kinase activity through the formation of cyclin E/cdk2-p27Kip1 complex rather than inhibition of p70 S6 kinase activity. Furthermore, we showed that Rap-sensitive cells with elevated p27Kip1 expression lost sensitivity to Rap when antisense p27Kip1 was introduced, which indicates that the basal level of p27Kip1 is one of the limiting factors that determine the sensitivity to Rap in already cycling cells. These data suggest the presence of a putative threshold level of p27Kip1 at late G1 phase in already cycling cells. Rap may cause G1 arrest by upregulating the amount of p27Kip1 beyond the threshold in some Rap-sensitive cells that are exponentially growing.