RecAm: a collaborative context-aware framework for multimedia recommendations in an ambient intelligence environment

With an ever-increasing accessibility to different multimedia contents in real-time, it is difficult for users to identify the proper resources from such a vast number of choices. By utilizing the user’s context while consuming diverse multimedia contents, we can identify different personal preferences and settings. However, there is a need to reinforce the recommendation process in a systematic way, with context-adaptive information. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we propose a framework, called RecAm, which enables the collection of contextual information and the delivery of resulted recommendation by adapting the user’s environment using Ambient Intelligent (AmI) Interfaces. Second, we propose a recommendation model that establishes a bridge between the multimedia resources, user joint preferences, and the detected contextual information. Hence, we obtain a comprehensive view of the user’s context, as well as provide a personalized environment to deliver the feedback. We demonstrate the feasibility of RecAm with two prototypes applications that use contextual information for recommendations. The offline experiment conducted shows the improvement of delivering personalized recommendations based on the user’s context on two real-world datasets.     

An energy aware event-driven routing protocol for cognitive radio sensor networks

Cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN) is an intelligent and reasonable combination of cognitive radio technology and wireless sensor networks. It poses significant challenges to the design of topology maintenance techniques due to dynamic primary-user activities, which in turn decreases the data delivery performance of the network as well as it’s lifetime. This paper aims to provide a solution to the CRSN clustering and routing problem using an energy aware event-driven routing protocol (ERP) for CRSN. Upon detection of an event, the ERP determines eligible nodes for clustering according to local positions of CRSN nodes between the event and the sink and their residual energy levels. Cluster-heads are selected from the eligible nodes according to their residual energy values, available channels, neighbors and distance to the sink. In ERP, cluster formation is based on relative spectrum awareness such that channels with lower primary user appearance probability are selected as common data channels for clusters. For data routing, ERP employs hop-by-hop data forwarding approach through the CHs and primary/secondary gateways towards the sink. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed ERP provides with better network performances compared to those of the state-of-the-art protocols under a dynamic spectrum-aware data transmission environment.     

Activation of Meningeal Afferents Relevant to Trigeminal Headache Pain after Photothrombotic Stroke Lesion: A Pilot Study in Mice

Stroke can be followed by immediate severe headaches. As headaches are initiated by the activation of trigeminal meningeal afferents, we assessed changes in the activity of meningeal afferents in mice subjected to cortical photothrombosis. Cortical photothrombosis induced ipsilateral lesions of variable sizes that were associated with contralateral sensorimotor impairment. Nociceptive firing of mechanosensitive Piezo1 channels, activated by the agonist Yoda1, was increased in meningeal afferents in the ischemic hemispheres. These meningeal afferents also had a higher maximal spike frequency at baseline and during activation of the mechanosensitive Piezo1 channel by Yoda1. Moreover, in these meningeal afferents, nociceptive firing was active during the entire induction of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channels by capsaicin. No such activation was observed on the contralateral hemi-skulls of the same group of mice or in control mice. Our data suggest the involvement of mechanosensitive Piezo1 channels capable of maintaining high-frequency spiking activity and of nociceptive TRPV1 channels in trigeminal headache pain responses after experimental ischemic stroke in mice.     

Cooperative vehicle positioning with multi-sensor data fusion and vehicular communications

Wireless Networks - Vehicular positioning with multi-sensor fusion has achieved promising results in recent years. Having potential benefit from the emerging vehicular communications based on IEEE...     

Simultaneously aided diagnosis model for outpatient departments via healthcare big data analytics

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recent real medical datasets show that the number of outpatients in China has sharply increased since 2013, when the Chinese health insurance reform started....     

High surface area and mesoporous activated carbon from KOH-activated dragon fruit peels for methylene blue dye adsorption:Optimization and mechanism study

In tnis study,an alternative precursor for production of activated carbon was introduced using dragon fruit(Hylocereus costaricensis) peel(DFP).Moreover,KOH was used as a chemical activator in the thermal carbonization process to convert DFP into activated carbon(DFPAC).In order to accomplish this research,several approaches were employed to examine the elemental composition,surface properties,amorphous and crystalline nature,essential active group,and surface morphology of the DFPAC.The Brunauer-Emmett-Teller test demonstrated a mesoporous structure of the DFPAC has a high surface area of 756.3 m~2·g~(-1).The cationic dye Methylene Blue(MB) was used as a probe to assess the efficiency of DFPAC towards the removal of MB dye from aqueous solution.The effects of adsorption input factors(e.g.DFPAC dose(A:0.04-0.12 g·L~(-1)), pH(B:3-10),and temperature(C:30-50℃)) were investigated and optimized using statistical analysis(i.e.Box-Behnken design(BBD)).The adsorption kinetic model can be best categorized as the pseudo-first order(PFO).Whereas,the adsorption isotherm model can be best described by Langmuir model,with maximum adsorption capacity of DFPAC for MB dye was 195.2 mg·g~(-1) at 50℃.The adsorption mechanism of MB by DFPAC surface was attributed to the electrostatic interaction,π-π interaction,and H-bonding.Finally,the results support the ability of DFP to be a promising precursor for production of highly porous activated carbon suitable for removal of cationic dyes(e.g.MB).     

Hybrid ARQ schemes for DS spread spectrum systems in the presence of narrow‐band interference

This paper is concerned with a direct sequence spread spectrum system making use of automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes and operating in the presence of narrow‐band (NB) interference and additive white Gaussian noise. In this study, we evaluate the system's throughput efficiency when a suppression filter is employed at the receiver to mitigate the effect of NB interference. Specifically, we investigate how the performance is influenced by various parameters such as the number of filter taps, processing gain, type of interference, and the signal power‐to‐interference power ratio. The simulation results show that using the suppression filter significantly improves the throughput performance of the hybrid ARQ schemes in the presence of NB interference. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maximizing quality of experience through context‐aware mobile application scheduling in cloudlet infrastructure

Application software execution requests, from mobile devices to cloud service providers, are often heterogeneous in terms of device, network, and application runtime contexts. These heterogeneous contexts include the remaining battery level of a mobile device, network signal strength it receives and quality‐of‐service (QoS) requirement of an application software submitted from that device. Scheduling such application software execution requests (from many mobile devices) on competent virtual machines to enhance user quality of experience (QoE) is a multi‐constrained optimization problem. However, existing solutions in the literature either address utility maximization problem for service providers or optimize the application QoS levels, bypassing device‐level and network‐level contextual information. In this paper, a multi‐objective nonlinear programming solution to the context‐aware application software scheduling problem has been developed, namely, QoE and context‐aware scheduling (QCASH) method, which minimizes the application execution times (i.e., maximizes the QoE) and maximizes the application execution success rate. To the best of our knowledge, QCASH is the first work in this domain that inscribes the optimal scheduling problem for mobile application software execution requests with three‐dimensional context parameters. In QCASH, the context priority of each application is measured by applying min–max normalization and multiple linear regression models on three context parameters—battery level, network signal strength, and application QoS. Experimental results, found from simulation runs on CloudSim toolkit, demonstrate that the QCASH outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art works well across the success rate, waiting time, and QoE. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.