Measuring Geospatial Properties: Relating Online Content Browsing Behaviors to Users’ Points of Interest

With the growth of the Mobile Internet, people have become active in both the online and offline worlds. Investigating the relationships between users’ online and offline behaviors is critical for personalization and content caching, as well as improving urban planning. Although some studies have measured the spatial properties of online social relationships, there have been few in-depth investigations of the relationships between users’ online content browsing behaviors and their real-life locations. This paper provides the first insight into the geospatial properties of online content browsing behaviors from the perspectives of both geographical regions and individual users. We first analyze the online browsing patterns across geographical regions. Then, a multilayer-network-based model is presented to discover how inter-user distances affect the distributions of users with similar online browsing interests. Drawing upon results from a comprehensive study of users of three popular online content services in a metropolitan city in China, we achieve a broad understanding of the general and specific geospatial properties of users’ various preferences. Specifically, users with similar online browsing interests exhibit, to a large extent, strong geographic correlations, and different services exhibit distinct geospatial properties in terms of their usage patterns. The results of this work can potentially be exploited to improve a vast number of applications.     

Exploring the power of social hub services

World Wide Web - Given the diverse focuses of emerging online social networks (OSNs), it is common that a user has signed up on multiple OSNs. Social hub services, a.k.a., social directory...     

Evaluation of the effect of fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill) essential oil addition on the quality parameters and shelf‐life prediction of yoghurt

Yoghurt was prepared by adding three concentrations of fennel essential oil (FEO) (2.5, 5 and 7.5 µL) in 100 mL of pasteurised milk. Fennel essential oil did not affect the viability of yoghurt starters during fermentation. Based on sensory analysis, only the 5‐µL FEO concentration was incorporated in order to investigate the physicochemical and microbiological properties of enriched yoghurt during storage. Results showed that FEO in yoghurt did not significantly affect the quality after acidification (P > 0.05). However, total solid content, syneresis and lightness (L*) differed significantly (P < 0.05). Bacterial counts indicated that the control yoghurt had the highest values. Fortified yoghurt had an increased shelf life of 29 days.     

Disturbance-observer-based speed control for SPMSM drives using modified super-twisting algorithm and extended state observer

To address the robust speed control problem of the surface-mounted permanent-magnet synchronous motor (SPMSM) drive, a novel composite speed controller (CSC) is proposed, which consists of the modified super-twisting sliding-mode SC (STSM-SC) and the extended state observer (ESO). Regarding the motion dynamics of the SPMSM drive, the unmodeled dynamics, endogenous, and exogenous disturbances are lumped together as the total disturbance. The ESO-based feedforward compensation mechanism is used to deal with the total disturbance for the robustness improvement of the speed control achieved by the modified STSM-SC-based feedback regulation mechanism. On the basis of the field-oriented control strategy, performance comparisons of the standard STSM-SC, the ESO-based standard STSM-SC, the modified STSM-SC, and the proposed CSC are carried out on a suitably developed experimental setup. The experimental results are presented to validate the superiority of the proposed CSC.     

Looking Around First: Localized Potential-Based Clustering in Spontaneous Networks

We propose a new budget-based clustering algorithm for self-organizing networks. The basic idea behind our solution is that nodes first sense the environment using inherent Hello packets before starting forming clusters. In contrast with previous solutions that blindly distribute the budget to nearby nodes, our potential-based clustering algorithm applies a proportional budget distribution based on the connectivity degree of the nodes. This approach matches the principle that nodes in real networks are not uniformly distributed. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms previous ones.     

A GRASP algorithm based new heuristic for the capacitated location routing problem

Abstract

In this paper, the capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP) is studied. CLRP is composed of two hard optimisation problems: the facility location problem and the vehicle routing problem. The objective of CLRP is to determine the best location of multiple depots with their vehicle routes such that the total cost of the solution is minimal. To solve this problem, we propose a greedy randomised adaptive search procedure. The proposed method is based on a new heuristic to construct a feasible CLRP solution, and then a local search-based simulated annealing is used as improvement phase. We have used a new technique to construct the clusters around the depots. To prove the effectiveness of our algorithm, several LRP instances are used. The results found are very encouraging.     

Measuring the capacity of in-car to in-car vehicular networks

A particular class of vehicular networks is the one that includes off-the-shelf end-user equipment (e.g., laptops and PDAs) running from the interior of vehicles: in-car nodes. They are subject to limited communication conditions when compared with nodes specifically designed to this context. Existing works either consider antennas installed on top of the vehicle roof or nodes that operate in infrastructure mode. In this article, we investigate through real experiments the characteristics of links formed by incar nodes running off-the-shelf wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11(a/g) in ad hoc mode. We surprisingly observe that in-car nodes do show enough performance in terms of network capacity to be used in a number of applications, such as file transfer in peer-to-peer applications. Nonetheless, we identify some key performance issues and devise a number of configuration recommendations and future work directions.