Evaluating the Use of Daily Care Notes Software for Older People with Dementia

There has been little research to investigate the impact of software to support the care for older people with dementia care. This article reports the evaluation of software adapted to support one key person-centered task for the care of older residents with dementia – recording and sharing daily care notes. The evaluation on the dementia wing of 1 residential home for over 6 months revealed that use of the software on mobile devices carried by the carers increased the number and volume of daily care notes recorded, but only for the types of content that were already being recorded by carers. Carers reported more advantages that resulted from daily care notes once in digital form than from the documenting task, as well as barriers to the use of mobile digital software to record daily care notes.     

Fast full‐color reflective display via photoluminescent enhancement

Reflective displays are advantageous in applications requiring low power or daylight readability. However, there are no low‐cost reflective technologies capable of displaying bright colors. By employing photoluminescence to more efficiently use ambient light, we created a prototype display that provides bright, full color in a simple, low‐cost architecture. This prototype includes a novel electrokinetic shutter, a layer that incorporates patterned luminescent red, green, and blue sub‐pixel elements, and a novel optical out‐coupling scheme. The luminescent elements convert otherwise‐wasted portions of the incident spectrum to light in the desired color band, resulting in improved color saturation and lightness. This prototype provides a color gamut that is superior to competing reflective display technologies that utilize color filters in single‐layer side‐by‐side sub‐pixel architectures. The current prototype is capable of switching in <0.5 s; future displays based on an alternative electro‐optic shutter technology should achieve video rate operation. A transflective version of this technology has also been prototyped. The transflective version utilizes its backlight with a power efficiency that is at least three times that of a conventional liquid crystal display. These photoluminescence‐based technologies enable a host of applications ranging from low‐power mobile products and retail pricing signage to daylight readable signage for outdoor advertising segments.     

Prospects for fast Rydberg gates on an atom chip

Atom chips are a promising candidate for a scalable architecture for quantum information processing provided a universal set of gates can be implemented with high fidelity. The difficult part in achieving universality is the entangling two-qubit gate. We consider a Rydberg phase gate for two atoms trapped on a chip and employ optimal control theory to find the shortest gate that still yields a reasonable gate error. Our parameters correspond to a situation where the Rydberg blockade regime is not yet reached. We discuss the role of spontaneous emission and the effect of noise from the chip surface on the atoms in the Rydberg state.     

Review Paper: A critical review of the present and future prospects for electronic paper

Abstract— The commercial success of monochrome electronic paper (e‐Paper) is now propelling the development of next‐generation flexible, video, and color e‐Paper products. Unlike the early battles in the 1980s and 1990s between transmissive and emissive display technologies, there is a extraordinary diversity of technologies vying to become the next generation of e‐Paper. A critical review of all major e‐Paper technologies, including a technical breakdown of the performance limitations based on device physics and commentary on possible future breakthroughs, is presented. In addition, the visual requirements for color e‐Paper are provided and compared to standards used in conventional print. It is concluded that researchers have much work remaining in order to bridge the significant gap between reflective electronic displays and print‐on‐paper.     

Non-functional properties in the model-driven development of service-oriented systems

Systems based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles have become an important cornerstone of the development of enterprise-scale software applications. They are characterized by separating functions into distinct software units, called services, which can be published, requested and dynamically combined in the production of business applications. Service-oriented systems (SOSs) promise high flexibility, improved maintainability, and simple re-use of functionality. Achieving these properties requires an understanding not only of the individual artifacts of the system but also their integration. In this context, non-functional aspects play an important role and should be analyzed and modeled as early as possible in the development cycle. In this paper, we discuss modeling of non-functional aspects of service-oriented systems, and the use of these models for analysis and deployment. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we show how services and service compositions may be modeled in UML by using a profile for SOA (UML4SOA) and how non-functional properties of service-oriented systems can be represented using the non-functional extension of UML4SOA (UML4SOA-NFP) and the MARTE profile. This enables modeling of performance, security and reliable messaging. Second, we discuss formal analysis of models which respect this design, in particular we consider performance estimates and reliability analysis using the stochastically timed process algebra PEPA as the underlying analytical engine. Last but not least, our models are the source for the application of deployment mechanisms which comprise model-to-model and model-to-text transformations implemented in the framework VIATRA. All techniques presented in this work are illustrated by a running example from an eUniversity case study.     

Dynamic range and sensitivity adaptation in a silicon spikingneuron

We propose an adaptive procedure that enables a spiking neuron, whether artificial or biological, to make optimal use of its dynamic range and gain. We discuss an analog electronic circuit implementation of this algorithm using a biologically realistic artificial "silicon" neuron. The adaptation procedure adapts the neuron's firing threshold and the sensitivity (or gain) of its current-frequency relationship to match the DC offset (or mean) and the dynamic range (or variance) of the time-varying somatic input current. The neuron extracts the minimum and maximum levels of the reconstructed somatic current signals from the cell's own spike trains. These are used to regulate the somatic leak conductance in order to shift the somatic current-frequency relation and to adjust a calcium-activated potassium conductance to change the dynamic range of the cell's somatic current-frequency relationship. We report experimental data from a test neuron-built using analog subthreshold CMOS VLSI technology-that shows the expected behavior.     

A Parallel Dynamic Binary Translator for Efficient Multi-Core Simulation

In recent years multi-core processors have seen broad adoption in application domains ranging from embedded systems through general-purpose computing to large-scale data centres. Simulation technology for multi-core systems, however, lags behind and does not provide the simulation speed required to effectively support design space exploration and parallel software development. While state-of-the-art instruction set simulators (Iss) for single-core machines reach or exceed the performance levels of speed-optimised silicon implementations of embedded processors, the same does not hold for multi-core simulators where large performance penalties are to be paid. In this paper we develop a fast and scalable simulation methodology for multi-core platforms based on parallel and just-in-time (Jit) dynamic binary translation (Dbt). Our approach can model large-scale multi-core configurations, does not rely on prior profiling, instrumentation, or compilation, and works for all binaries targeting a state-of-the-art embedded multi-core platform implementing the ARCompact instruction set architecture (Isa). We have evaluated our parallel simulation methodology against the industry standard Splash-2 and Eembc MultiBench benchmarks and demonstrate simulation speeds up to 25,307 Mips on a 32-core x86 host machine for as many as 2,048 target processors whilst exhibiting minimal and near constant overhead, including memory considerations.     

An optimal approach to the connection admission control problem

The paper considers the connection admission control (CAC), which is a key resource management procedure, and proposes a solution to the problem based on modelling and control methodologies. The CAC problem will be formulated as an optimal control problem subject to a set of constraints. As a matter of fact, the proposed controller, modelling the CAC mechanism, computes the above-mentioned control variables so that (i) a set of proper constraints, which model the quality of service (QoS) requirements (link availability, blocking probability and dropping probability), are respected and (ii) a proper performance index, which models the exploitation degree of the available bandwidth, is maximized. The proposed CAC successfully compares with other CACs proposed in the literature, and in particular significantly extends the upper limit of the accepted traffic rate.     

An evaluation of Landsat TM spectral data and SAR-derived textural information for lithological discrimination in the Red Sea Hills,Sudan

The effectiveness of spectral and textural information in the identification of surface rock types in an arid region, the Red Sea Hills of Sudan, is evaluated using spectral information from the six Landsat TM optical bands and textural features derived from Shuttle Imaging Radar-C (SIR-C) C-band HH polarization data. An initial classification is derived from Landsat TM data alone using three classification algorithms, Gaussian maximum likelihood, a multi-layer feed-forward neural network and a Kohonen self-organizing feature map (SOM), to generate lithological maps, with classification accuracy being measured using a confusion matrix approach. The feed-forward neural net produced the highest overall classification accuracy of 57 per cent and was, therefore, selected for the second experiment, in which texture measures from SIR-C C-band HH-polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are added to selected TM spectral features. Four methods of measuring texture are employed, based on the Fourier power spectrum, grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), multi-fractal measures, and the multiplicative autoregressive random field (MAR) model. The use of textural information together with a subset of the TM spectral features leads to an increase in classification accuracy to almost 70 per cent. Both the MAR model and the GLCM matrix approach perform better than Fourier and multi-fractal based methods of texture characterization.     

Lost in translation? An actor-network approach to HRIS implementation

Available evidence suggests that the adoption of IT-enabled Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) has not produced the widely predicted transformation of Human Resources (HR) to a strategic business partner. We examine the relationship between HRIS and the HR function by applying actor-network theory (ANT) to an HRIS implementation project. The focus on how actor networks are formed and reformed during implementation may be particularly well suited to explaining why the original aims of the HRIS can be displaced or lost in translation. We suggest that the approach afforded by ANT enables us to better understand the ongoing and contingent process of HRIS implementations.