Privacy-enhanced architecture for smart metering

The recent deployment of smart grids promises to bring numerous advantages in terms of energy consumption reduction in both homes and businesses. A more transparent and instantaneous measurement of electricity consumption through smart meters utilization leads to an enhancement in the ability of monitoring, controlling and predicting energy usage. Nevertheless, it also has associated drawbacks related to the privacy of customers, since such management might reveal their personal habits, which electrical appliances they are using at each moment, whether they are at home or not, etc. In this work, we present a privacy-enhanced architecture for smart metering aimed at tackling this threat by means of encrypting individual measurements while allowing the electricity supplier to access the aggregation of the corresponding decrypted values.     

Workflows for Heliophysics

In this paper we describe how we have introduced workflows into the working practices of a community for whom the concept of workflows is very new, namely the heliophysics community. Heliophysics is a branch of astrophysics which studies the Sun and the interactions between the Sun and the planets, by tracking solar events as they travel throughout the Solar system. Heliophysics produces two major challenges for workflow technology. Firstly it is a systems science where research is currently developed by many different communities who need reliable data models and metadata to be able to work together. Thus it has major challenges in the semantics of workflows. Secondly, the problem of time is critical in heliophysics; the workflows must take account of the propagation of events outwards from the sun. They have to address the four dimensional nature of space and time in terms of the indexing of data. We discuss how we have built an environment for Heliophysics workflows building on and extending the Taverna workflow system and utilising the myExperiment site for sharing workflows. We also describe how we have integrated the workflows into the existing practices of the communities involved in Heliophysics by developing a web portal which can hide the technical details from the users, who can concentrate on the data from their scientific point of view rather than on the methods used to integrate and process the data. This work has been developed in the EU Framework 7 project HELIO, and is being disseminated to the worldwide Heliophysics community, since Heliophysics requires integration of effort on a global scale.     

A novel technique for producing metallic microjets and microdrops

A new technique for producing steady metallic jets is proposed. It allows the production of supercritical jets with Weber numbers well below unity, which entails important technological advantages over existing techniques. The metallic liquid is injected through a micrometer converging nozzle located inside a gas stream. Both the liquid jet and the coflowing gas current cross an orifice located in front of the nozzle. The gas stream stabilizes the jet by sweeping away the capillary waves growing on the free surface. In this way, one can steadily produce microjets with a kinetic energy much lower than the interfacial energy, a possibility that has been predicted theoretically (Gañán-Calvo in Phys Rev E 78:026304, 2008). Experiments were conducted with mercury to assess the performance of the new technique. The experimental results agreed remarkably well with the predictions calculated from the convective/absolute instability transition of the jet. The jet breakup mechanism did not correspond to classical Rayleigh instability, but to the growth of surface waves over a capillary column which ends at a fixed location. The results were compared with those obtained with the well-established flow focusing method to show that the new technique considerably favors the jet’s stability.     

Advance human–machine interface automatic evaluation

The need for accessibility evaluation tools is motivated by several endogenous and exogenous reasons coming from the end user (the designer and the developer) and companies releasing information systems. Existing evaluation tools mainly concentrate on examining the code of Web pages: Web pages more and more frequently contain non-HTML parts that entirely escape from being treated by existing techniques. This is the case of the advanced human–machine interface (AHMI), a piece of software programmed in C/C++, used for controlling the advanced flight management system in the aircraft cockpit. Studying this new user interface (UI) requires a structured approach to evaluate and validate AHMI designs. The goal in this work is to develop an evaluation tool to automate the process of evaluating the AHMI. The method addresses: support of multiple bases of guidelines (accessibility or usability or both) on-demand (partial or total evaluation), with different levels of details (a presentation for developers and for those responsible for certifying accessibility). The method goes a step toward the automatic evaluation of UI containing non-HTML parts.     

Interactive visualization of medical volume models in mobile devices

Interactive visualization of volume models in standard mobile devices is a challenging present problem with increasing interest from new application fields like telemedicine. The complexity of present volume models in medical applications is continuously increasing, therefore increasing the gap between the available models and the rendering capabilities in low-end mobile clients. New and efficient rendering algorithms and interaction paradigms are required for these small platforms. In this paper, we propose a transfer function-aware compression and interaction scheme, for client-server architectures with visualization on standard mobile devices. The scheme is block-based, supporting adaptive ray-casting in the client. Our two-level ray-casting allows focusing on small details on targeted regions while keeping bounded memory requirements in the GPU of the client. Our approach includes a transfer function-aware compression scheme based on a local wavelet transformation, together with a bricking scheme that supports interactive inspection and levels of detail in the mobile device client. We also use a quantization technique that takes into account a perceptive metrics of the visual error. Our results show that we can have full interaction with high compression rates and with transmitted model sizes that can be of the order of a single photographic image.     

Evaluation of messaging middleware for high-performance cloud computing

Cloud computing is posing several challenges, such as security, fault tolerance, access interface singularity, and network constraints, both in terms of latency and bandwidth. In this scenario, the performance of communications depends both on the network fabric and its efficient support in virtualized environments, which ultimately determines the overall system performance. To solve the current network constraints in cloud services, their providers are deploying high-speed networks, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This paper presents an evaluation of high-performance computing message-passing middleware on a cloud computing infrastructure, Amazon EC2 cluster compute instances, equipped with 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The analysis of the experimental results, confronted with a similar testbed, has shown the significant impact that virtualized environments still have on communication performance, which demands more efficient communication middleware support to get over the current cloud network limitations.     

集装箱码头三维仿真组件平台

为直观、形象地研究集装箱码头生产优化问题,采用三维仿真的方法实现集装箱码头物流信息与作业过程的可视化．基于不同业务流程的仿真要求,合理地划分静态布局、装卸设备、装卸对象、码头操作、运动学解算、数据访问、通信接口和图形渲染等组件的粒度;建立层次结构形式的组件平台,体现客观对象的逻辑关系;遵循标准COM＋规范设计岸桥、场桥和集卡等集装箱码头主要三维仿真组件．以上海振华重工（集团）股份有限公司自动化集装箱码头为例验证该组件平台的可操作性,结果表明该方法对集装箱码头装卸工艺的改进和管理水平的提升具有实际指导意义．     

基于SEP4020的盲人智能手机短信发送的设计

为了让弱视者和盲人群体能够发送短信,提出了一种基于嵌入式处理器SEP4020的盲文输入方法。针对盲文语言的特征,设计出一种六点盲文输入方法,并给出了在触摸屏上提取盲文的方法和步骤。在此基础上将盲文语言转换成汉语拼音,使会汉语拼音的普通人能够阅读盲人发过来的短信内容。最后以发送内容"你好"为例分析了短信发送的过程和PDU编码形成的方式,并成功地将系统移植到开发平台上。实验结果显示了能够正确获取在触摸屏上输入的盲文,并成功将转换成的汉语拼音通过无线模块发送出去,证明了这个方法的可行性和有效性。     

P2P资源智能查询策略的研究与设计

提高资源搜索效率、提高网络的扩展性一直是P2P网络的关键技术问题。在分析现有的P2P网络资源搜索的算法及其存在的问题的基础上,作者提出并设计了一种基于最近Query消息查询记录表、本地资源推荐路由表相结合的智能查询策略。能在保持原有搜索覆盖率的前提下,提高网络资源搜索效率,减少Query冗余信息,提高了网络的扩展性。