Heterogeneous data source integration for smart grid ecosystems based on metadata mining

The arrival of new technologies related to smart grids and the resulting ecosystem of applications and management systems pose many new problems. The databases of the traditional grid and the various initiatives related to new technologies have given rise to many different management systems with several formats and different architectures. A heterogeneous data source integration system is necessary to update these systems for the new smart grid reality. Additionally, it is necessary to take advantage of the information smart grids provide. In this paper, the authors propose a heterogeneous data source integration based on IEC standards and metadata mining. Additionally, an automatic data mining framework is applied to model the integrated information.     

Reflective cholesteric displays: From rigid to flexible

Abstract— Bistable reflective cholesteric liquid‐crystal displays are low‐power displays that are suitable for a variety of applications ranging from signage to high‐resolution electronic books. Recent advancements have included higher brightness, full color, black and white from a single layer, and lighting solutions. Cholesteric displays also lend themselves to simple integration into flexible materials since they may be coated and printed. We have developed reflective cholesteric displays on thin flexible plastic substrates, as well as other unconventional substrates such as paper and drapable fabrics. This paper serves as a review for recent advances in the cholesteric‐display technology at Kent Displays.     

Design and deployment challenges in immersive and wearable technologies

The current century has brought an unimaginable growth in information and communications technology (ICT) and needs of enormous computing. The advancements in computer hardware and software particularly helped fuel the requirements of human beings, and revolutionized the smart products as an outcome. The advent of wearable devices from their development till successful materialisation has only taken less than a quarter of a century. The huge benefits of these smart wearable technologies cannot be fully enjoyed until and unless the reliability of a complete system is ensured. The reliability can be increased by the consistent advancements in hardware and software in parallel. User expectations actually are the challenges that keep the advancements alive while improving at an unmatchable pace. The future of wearable and other smart devices depends on whether they can provide a timely solution that is reliable, richer in resources, smaller in size, and cheaper in price. This paper addresses the threats and opportunities in the development and the acceptance of immersive and wearable technologies. The hardware and software challenges for the purpose of development are discussed to demonstrate the bottlenecks of the current technologies and the limitations that impose those bottlenecks. For the purpose of adoption, social and commercial challenges related to innovation and acceptability are discussed. The paper proposes guidelines that are expected to be applicable in several considerable applications of wearable technologies, for example, social networks, healthcare, and banking.     

基于嵌入式的HART协议智能变送器软件设计

HART协议作为一个开放性的协议,现已成为智能仪表“事实上”的标准;其特点是在现有的模拟信号传输线上实现数字信号通信;嵌入式系统技术是目前电子产品设计领域最为热门的技术之一,目前已经广泛地应用在军事国防、消费电子、网络通信、工业控制等领域,但是在现场总线领域的应用是个新尝试;文章主要探讨了实时嵌入式系统在HART智能变送器中的应用,采用了嵌入式技术的HART智能变送器,不仅能够解决现场总线兼容原有的DCS问题,而且有了嵌入式微处理器和嵌入式实时操作系统,对系统整体的实时性、稳定性、抗干扰性、低功耗等性能有了极大的提高。     

Recent Techniques for Harvesting Energy from the Human Body

The human body contains a near-infinite supply of energy in chemical, thermal, and mechanical forms. However, the majority of implantable and wearable devices are still operated by batteries, whose insufficient capacity and large size limit their lifespan and increase the risk of hazardous material leakage. Such energy can be used to exceed the battery power limits of implantable and wearable devices. Moreover, novel materials and fabrication methods can be used to create various medical therapies and life-enhancing technologies. This review paper focuses on energy-harvesting technologies used in medical and health applications, primarily power collectors from the human body. Current approaches to energy harvesting from the bodies of living subjects for self-powered electronics are summarized. Using the human body as an energy source encompasses numerous topics: thermoelectric generators, power harvesting by kinetic energy, cardiovascular energy harvesting, and blood pressure. The review considers various perspectives on future research, which can provide a new forum for advancing new technologies for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases by integrating different energy harvesters with advanced electronics.     

Transparent and conducting SWNT thin films for flexible electronics

Abstract— Thin films from low‐density networks of single‐walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are intriguing new two‐dimensional electronic materials because they have excellent tunable electrical, optical, and mechanical properties. Such properties coupled with room‐temperature deposition from solution ensure that the material will have profound impact on emerging technologies such as cheap, flexible plastic electronics and smart fabrics and windows. These optoelectronic properties of SWNT thin films make them a potentially good replacement for indium tin oxide (ITO), used widely in photovoltaics, organic, and inorganic light‐emitting diodes, displays, touch screens, and smart windows.     

Microfabrication of a spherically curved liquid crystal display enabling the integration in a smart contact lens

A spherically curved liquid crystal display based on a guest-host liquid crystal configuration is fabricated. An asymmetric display design is introduced: two flexible display substrates with varying surface area are used, allowing for compact integration of powering and driving electronics. A matrix of spacer structures composed of photosensitive adhesive and defined by photolithography, simultaneously provides the uniform cell gap while acting as glue between both display substrates. Using poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) as transparent, conductive electrode layer and obliquely evaporated SiO₂ as alignment layer, a functional single-pixel display was fabricated. The display can be embedded in a smart contact lens, thereby enabling applications within the emerging biomedical field. An artificial iris, for example, could be designed to help people suffering from iris deficiencies that involve hypersensitivity to light.     

Productivity improvement through the use of industrial microwave technologies

Microwave processing of materials is a relatively new technology advancement alternative that provides new approaches for enhancing material properties as well as economic advantages through energy savings and accelerated product development. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of microwave technologies, processing methods and industrial applications. The characteristics of microwave interactions with materials are outlined together with the challenges that are difficult to process the materials present. To fully realise the potential benefits of microwave and hybrid processes, it is essential to scale-up process and system designs to large batch or continuous processes. This necessitates computational modelling and simulation, system design and integration and a critical assessment of the costs and benefit analysis. Impediments to industrial applications are identified and development opportunities that take advantage of unique performance characteristics of microwaves are discussed. Clearly, advantages in utilising microwave technologies for processing materials include penetrating radiation, controlled electric field distribution and selective and volumetric heating.

The aim of the work presented in this paper is to help guide those interested in using microwaves to improve current materials processing. Microwave fundamentals are described to provide a brief awareness of the advantages and limitations of microwaves in the processing of materials. Furthermore, the limitations in current understanding are included as a guide for potential users and for future research and development activities. Examples of successful applications are given to illustrate the characteristics of materials, equipment and processing methods applicable to industrial microwaves. Economic considerations are described and costs are provided as guidelines in determining the viability of using microwaves for processing materials.     

Open-ended evolution to discover analogue circuits for beyond conventional applications

Analogue circuits synthesised by means of open-ended evolutionary algorithms often have unconventional designs. However, these circuits are typically highly compact, and the general nature of the evolutionary search methodology allows such designs to be used in many applications. Previous work on the evolutionary design of analogue circuits has focused on circuits that lie well within analogue application domain. In contrast, our paper considers the evolution of analogue circuits that are usually synthesised in digital logic. We have developed?four computational circuits, two voltage distributor circuits and a time interval metre circuit. The approach, despite its simplicity, succeeds over the design tasks owing to the employment of substructure reuse and incremental evolution. Our findings expand the range of applications that are considered suitable for evolutionary electronics.     

Recent Advances in Mobile Grid and Cloud Computing

Grid and cloud computing systems have been extensively used to solve large and complex problems in science and engineering fields. These systems include powerful computing resources that are connected through high-speed networks. Due to the recent advances in mobile computing and networking technologies, it has become feasible to integrate various mobile devices, such as robots, aerial vehicles, sensors, and smart phones, with grid and cloud computing systems. This integration enables the design and development of the next generation of applications by sharing of resources in mobile environments and introduces several challenges due to a dynamic and unpredictable network. This paper discusses applications, research challenges involved in the design and development of mobile grid and cloud computing systems, and recent advances in the field.     

Service integration with UPnP agent for an ubiquitous home environment

Consumer electronics and intelligent appliances can be successful and widely used in a smart or ubiquitous home environment. Service integration had become an important issue for system development. In this paper, we present an approach for UPnP devices connecting to outer networks via UPnP aware gateway. We develop service on a smart campus network based on enhanced UPnP technologies as an example. Under such framework, intelligent system provides users individual information at the right place and the right time.     

Smart City and IoT

The new Internet of Things (IoT) applications are enabling Smart City initiatives worldwide. It provides the ability to remotely monitor, manage and control devices, and to create new insights and actionable information from massive streams of real-time data. The main features of a smart city include a high degree of information technology integration and a comprehensive application of information resources. The essential components of urban development for a smart city should include smart technology, smart industry, smart services, smart management and smart life. The Internet of Things is about installing sensors (RFID, IR, GPS, laser scanners, etc.) for everything, and connecting them to the internet through specific protocols for information exchange and communications, in order to achieve intelligent recognition, location, tracking, monitoring and management. With the technical support from IoT, smart city need to have three features of being instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Only then a Smart City can be formed by integrating all these intelligent features at its advanced stage of IOT development. The explosive growth of Smart City and Internet of Things applications creates many scientific and engineering challenges that call for ingenious research efforts from both academia and industry, especially for the development of efficient, scalable, and reliable Smart City based on IoT. New protocols, architectures, and services are in dire needs to respond for these challenges. The goal of the special issue is to bring together scholars, professors, researchers, engineers and administrators resorting to the state-of-the-art technologies and ideas to significantly improve the field of Smart City based on IoT.     

Scaling up genetic circuit design for cellular computing: advances and prospects

Synthetic biology aims to engineer and redesign biological systems for useful real-world applications in biomanufacturing, biosensing and biotherapy following a typical design-build-test cycle. Inspired from computer science and electronics, synthetic gene circuits have been designed to exhibit control over the flow of information in biological systems. Two types are Boolean logic inspired TRUE or FALSE digital logic and graded analog computation. Key principles for gene circuit engineering include modularity, orthogonality, predictability and reliability. Initial circuits in the field were small and hampered by a lack of modular and orthogonal components, however in recent years the library of available parts has increased vastly. New tools for high throughput DNA assembly and characterization have been developed enabling rapid prototyping, systematic in situ characterization, as well as automated design and assembly of circuits. Recently implemented computing paradigms in circuit memory and distributed computing using cell consortia will also be discussed. Finally, we will examine existing challenges in building predictable large-scale circuits including modularity, context dependency and metabolic burden as well as tools and methods used to resolve them. These new trends and techniques have the potential to accelerate design of larger gene circuits and result in an increase in our basic understanding of circuit and host behaviour.     

物联网与绿色智能建筑

针对智能建筑的发展模式,结合智慧地球与物联网,本文阐述了物联网与视联网的相关技术,并分析了物联网在智能建筑中的应用,最后指出物联网、视联网是实现智能城市建筑的关键技术,而建筑智能化系统工程是物联网、视联网的应用基础。     

Generation of energy-efficient architecture solutions applying GENE_ARCH: An evolution-based generative design system

As the field of design automation and generative design systems (GDS) evolve, more emphasis is placed on issues of design evaluation. This paper focus on the presentation of different applications of GENE_ARCH, an evolution-based GDS aimed at helping architects to achieve energy-efficient and sustainable architectural solutions. The system applies goal-oriented design, combining a genetic algorithm (GA) as the search engine, with the DOE2.1E building energy simulation software as the evaluation module. Design evaluation is based on energy spent for heating, cooling, ventilation and artificial lighting in the building, and on sustainability issues like greenhouse gas emissions associated with the embodied energy of construction materials. The GA can work either as a standard GA or as a Pareto GA, for multicriteria search and optimization. In order to provide a broad view of the capabilities of the software, different applications are discussed: (1) standard GA: testing and validating the software; (2) standard GA: incorporation of architecture design intentions, using a building by architect Alvaro Siza; (3) Pareto GA: choice of construction materials, considering cost, building energy use, and embodied energy; (4) Pareto GA: application to Siza’s building, considering thermal and lighting behavior separately; (5) standard GA: shape generation with single objective function; (6) Pareto GA: shape generation with multicriteria evaluation; (7) Pareto GA: application to an urban and housing context. Overall conclusions from the different applications are discussed, as well as current challenges and limitations, and directions for further work.     

Process design kit and design automation for flexible hybrid electronics

High‐performance and low‐cost flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) are desirable for applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), wearable electronics, and flexible displays. However, design toolkit, design methodology, and compact models that play an essential role in designing complex FHE circuits and systems are still missing today. To fill this gap, here we report (a) the process design kit (PDK) dedicated to electronic design automation for FHE circuits and systems and (b) solution process–proven intellectual property (IP) blocks, which serves as a stepping stone for designing large‐scale flexible thin‐film transistor (TFT) circuits. The proposed FHE‐PDK is made compatible with modern electronics design tools for users to design, simulate, and verify physical design of flexible hybrid systems.     

User interaction with everyday lighting systems

New lighting technologies create new opportunities that may contribute to people’s experience of light. These opportunities are a result of the increased variety and freedom in terms of colour, form factor and connectivity of the lights. To allow people to fully benefit from the potential of such novel lighting systems, there is a need for a new user interaction paradigm. To develop this paradigm, we have to better understand the aspects that play a part in the interaction with lighting, paying special attention to people’s motivation for interaction. This paper reports on a context-mapping study that was performed to gain insight in these aspects. As result, we present a set of seven themes that regard the interaction with lighting in the current situation and in the future. These themes provide an overview of the relevant aspects in this domain and contain considerations and opportunities for the design of new interfaces for novel lighting systems. We conclude that people have different levels of lighting needs that are highly dependent on context and that also require control at different levels. The context and lighting needs have a large influence on the extent to which people are motivated to adjust their lighting. Moreover, the lighting interface itself has a large effect on this motivation, mainly influenced by the degrees of freedom, the control location and availability, the degree of automation and general interaction qualities.     

Embedded devices for supply chain applications: Towards hardware integration of disparate technologies

The emergence of the RFID technology and its application to supply chain processes has in particular led to the creation of such standards as the EPCglobal’s model of supply networks as a tool for materializing intra- and inter-enterprise visibility of resources and products, collaboration and integration. Among other critical uses, RFID has been deployed by supply networks to improve asset utilization, effectively combat counterfeiting, and advance targeted product recalls. However, new affordable and deployable technologies and microsensors have recently appeared and keep maturing. This paper discusses the needs and the possibilities that exist for leveraging these technologies and sensors with RFID to guarantee continuous and seamless visibility of all assets (fixed and mobile resources and field personnel) of smart enterprises, thereby expanding and complementing the roles of RFID. It examines the design challenges for the integration of these technologies for advanced logistics operations at the level of product classes or their instances. It then outlines our development of an embedded microsystem that combines RFID, GPRS, GPS and environmental sensors for applications in logistics. The prototyped microsystem demonstrated the feasibility of the multi-sensor integration paradigm that the paper proposes.     

The Neural Knowledge DNA Based Smart Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant attention from industry as well as academia during the past decade. Smartness, however, remains a substantial challenge for IoT applications. Recent advances in networked sensor technologies, computing, and machine learning have made it possible for building new smart IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: the Neural Knowledge DNA based Smart Internet of Things that enables IoT to extract knowledge from past experiences, as well as to store, evolve, share, and reuse such knowledge aiming for smart functions. By catching decision events, this approach helps IoT gather its own daily operation experiences, and it uses such experiences for knowledge discovery with the support of machine learning technologies. An initial case study is presented at the end of this paper to demonstrate how this approach can help IoT applications become smart: the proposed approach is applied to fitness wristbands to enable human action recognition.     

基于SOA架构的公安应用集成平台的研究与实现

目前,公安部门对已有信息系统存在统一规划不足、系统建设缺乏规范化及标准化等问题.基于SOA架构的应用集成使得应用系统可以实现灵活的业务流程,快速适应需求变化等业务发展需要.基于SOA架构,提出了针对公安行业的应用集成解决方案,研究并实现了公安应用集成平台.基于SOA架构的公安应用集成平台能够实现公安应用系统、业务数据、业务流程的无缝集成,有效解决公安信息孤岛问题,实现协同办公、办案.