Multiply Charged Conjugated Polyelectrolytes as a Multifunctional Interlayer for Efficient and Scalable Perovskite Solar Cells

A series of anionic conjugated polyelectrolytes (CPEs) is synthesized based on poly(fluorene-co-phenylene) by varying the side-chain ionic density from two to six per repeat units (MPS2-TMA, MPS4-TMA, and MPS6-TMA). The effect of MPS2, 4, 6-TMA as interlayers on top of a hole-extraction layer of poly(bis(4-phenyl)-2,4,6-trimethylphenylamine (PTAA) is investigated in inverted perovskite solar cells (PeSCs). Owing to the improved wettability of perovskites on hydrophobic PTAA with the CPEs, the PeSCs with CPE interlayers demonstrate a significantly enhanced device performance, with negligible device-to-device dependence relative to the reference PeSC without CPEs. By increasing the ionic density in the MPS-TMA interlayers, the wetting, interfacial defect passivation, and crystal growth of the perovskites are significantly improved without increasing the series resistance of the PeSCs. In particular, the open-circuit voltage increases from 1.06 V for the PeSC with MPS2-TMA to 1.11 V for the PeSC with MPS6-TMA. The trap densities of the PeSCs with MPS2,4,6-TMA are further analyzed using frequency-dependent capacitance measurements. Finally, a large-area (1 cm²) PeSC is successfully fabricated with MPS6-TMA, showing a power conversion efficiency of 18.38% with negligible hysteresis and a stable power output under light soaking for 60 s.     

Computation Controllable Mode Decision and Motion Estimation for Scalable Video Coding

This paper proposes an efficient computation‐aware mode decision and search point (SP) allocation algorithm for spatial and quality scalabilities in Scalable Video Coding. In our proposal, a linear model is derived to allocate the computation for macroblocks in enhancement layers by using the rate distortion costs of the base layer. In addition, an adaptive SP decision algorithm is proposed to decide the number of SPs for motion estimation under the constraint of the allocated computation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm allocates the computation resource efficiently and outperforms other works in rate distortion performance under the same computational availability constraint.     

基于特征的业务流程数据可扩展管理机制

为解决在请求密集的关键性业务应用中,业务流程管理系统的可扩展性受到传统的流程数据管理方法制约的问题,提出一种基于特征的业务流程数据可扩展管理机制。该机制充分考虑了业务流程管理系统中各种流程数据的特征,综合利用关系型数据库和分布式键值存储系统的优势管理相应的流程数据,提升了系统的整体性能和可扩展性,并通过抽象的流程数据访问层对流程引擎屏蔽了底层数据模型的差异。通过实验验证了所提机制的有效性。     

Empirical gradient threshold technique for automated segmentation across image modalities and cell lines

New microscopy technologies are enabling image acquisition of terabyte‐sized data sets consisting of hundreds of thousands of images. In order to retrieve and analyze the biological information in these large data sets, segmentation is needed to detect the regions containing cells or cell colonies. Our work with hundreds of large images (each 21 000×21 000 pixels) requires a segmentation method that: (1) yields high segmentation accuracy, (2) is applicable to multiple cell lines with various densities of cells and cell colonies, and several imaging modalities, (3) can process large data sets in a timely manner, (4) has a low memory footprint and (5) has a small number of user‐set parameters that do not require adjustment during the segmentation of large image sets. None of the currently available segmentation methods meet all these requirements. Segmentation based on image gradient thresholding is fast and has a low memory footprint. However, existing techniques that automate the selection of the gradient image threshold do not work across image modalities, multiple cell lines, and a wide range of foreground/background densities (requirement 2) and all failed the requirement for robust parameters that do not require re‐adjustment with time (requirement 5). We present a novel and empirically derived image gradient threshold selection method for separating foreground and background pixels in an image that meets all the requirements listed above. We quantify the difference between our approach and existing ones in terms of accuracy, execution speed, memory usage and number of adjustable parameters on a reference data set. This reference data set consists of 501 validation images with manually determined segmentations and image sizes ranging from 0.36 Megapixels to 850 Megapixels. It includes four different cell lines and two image modalities: phase contrast and fluorescent. Our new technique, called Empirical Gradient Threshold (EGT), is derived from this reference data set with a 10‐fold cross‐validation method. EGT segments cells or colonies with resulting Dice accuracy index measurements above 0.92 for all cross‐validation data sets. EGT results has also been visually verified on a much larger data set that includes bright field and Differential Interference Contrast (DIC) images, 16 cell lines and 61 time‐sequence data sets, for a total of 17 479 images. This method is implemented as an open‐source plugin to ImageJ as well as a standalone executable that can be downloaded from the following link: https://isg.nist.gov/ .     

UW‐MAC: An underwater sensor network MAC protocol

As over 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water, it is desirable to deploy underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) to support oceanic research. UWSNs use acoustic waves and are characterized by long and variable propagation delays, intermittent connectivity, limited bandwidth and low bit rates. Energy savings have always been the primary concern in wireless sensor network protocols; however, there are applications where the latency and throughput are prioritized over energy efficiency and are so significant that the application would not be able to satisfy its requirements without them. Although existing duty‐cycle MAC protocols are power efficient, they introduce significant end‐to‐end delivery latency, provide poor throughput and are not suitable for the challenging environment of a UWSN. In this paper, we utilize CDMA as the underlying multiple access technique, due to its resilience to multi‐path and Doppler's effects prevalent in underwater environments. We propose UW‐MAC, a CDMA‐based power‐controlled medium access protocol that uses both transmitter‐based and receiver‐based CDMA inside a formed cluster, and uses a TDMA schedule to make the cluster heads communicate with the base station. Our MAC algorithm targets the latency and throughput needs in addition to its ability to increase the overall network lifetime. We discuss the design of UW‐MAC, and provide a head‐to‐head comparison with other protocols through extensive simulations focusing on the performance in terms of latency, throughput, and energy consumption. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种自组织的应用层组播层次密钥管理方案

针对现有应用层组播密钥管理方案可扩展性差、时延较大等问题,设计一种适用于大规模的自组织的层次密钥管理方案(SOKM).该方案将密钥服务器(KS)的任务分散给各个簇的特殊节点来完成,将组密钥的更新和管理限制在簇范围内.分析和仿真实验表明,与分层分簇方案MHKM相比,SOKM虽然在一定程度上增加了计算量,却有效降低了KS受攻击的可能性和组密钥分发时延,使整个组播组的安全性和密钥分发效率得到了提高,因此具有较好的可扩展性.     

China＇s National Research Project on Future Internet： Objectives,Ideas, and Progresses

The Internet today was designed in 1970s and is suffering various serious issues such as security, mobility and scalability. In order to deal with these issues, a national research project, supported by the prestigious National Basic Research Program （also called the ＂973 program＂） of China, was launched in May 2007. This project adopts a clean-slate approach and aims to design a novel future Internet that not only inherits the merit of the Internet today but also overcomes the drawbacks of the current Internet. In this paper, we make an overview of this project with a focus on its objectives, basic ideas, and progresses. Although this is a basic research project, its success will bring significant benefits to China as well as all other countries in the world.     

Scalability in Global Mobile Information Systems (GloMo): Issues,Evaluation Methodology and Experiences

The GloMo (Global Mobile Information Systems) project¹ has focused on developing new wireless ad hoc networking technologies. These new technologies rely on a broad and varied set of techniques to help cope with the problems inherent in the wireless environment. One of the most critical design elements of all the various technologies is their applicability in large scale deployments. The main objective of our work is to develop and implement a simulation methodology to help evaluate the scalability of these new ad hoc networking technologies and gain some insight into the various aspects of ad hoc network performance scalability issues. To achieve that we have developed a scalability performance evaluation framework and plan, that spans all the various dimensions of scalability: size (number of nodes and density), traffic, operational environment (i.e. propagation models, terrain etc.), mobility. For demonstration purposes we have applied this process on a representative integrated protocol suite designed to provide communication services in mobile ad hoc wireless networks. The corresponding results of the two most critical aspects of scalability properties in tactical networks (i.e. network initialization time and traffic scalability) are also presented here, and demonstrate that a very extensive evaluation of the corresponding scalability metrics under a combination of the various scalability dimensions defined in this paper, is necessary in order to provide an in-depth analysis of the scalability properties in wireless mobile ad hoc networking environments.     

Scalability of Optical Networks: Crosstalk Limitations

Optical networks represent a promising solution for the future high capacity and flexible transport network. This paper presents a model for the performance evaluation of optical networks with respect to linear crosstalk and accumulated spontaneous emission noise. The proposed model is intended for the evaluation of the crosstalk requirements on the devices needed to support an optical network with a certain number of nodes and with a given level of bit-error rate.