QoS-Aware Optical Fog-Assisted Cyber-Physical System in the 5G Ready Heterogeneous Network

Wireless Personal Communications - In recent years, the emergence of Internet of things and cyber-physical system provide a proactive and efficacious solution to enable remote monitoring, machine...     

A fine-grain architecture for relational database aggregationoperations

The design and simulation of a bit-sliced processor for relational database aggregation functions, are discussed. The processor, which addresses an important, computationally expensive problem in database computers, takes two tuples as input (one bit at a time) and returns two bits as output every clock cycle. A larger aggregation unit uses a number of identical slice processors, connected according to odd-even network topology, to achieve improved performance on a parallel pipelined processor. The data processing time is completely overlapped with the input and output of data to and from the unit. The design is independent of the tuple size, and since a bit-serial computation is used, the system requires limited interconnection     

Treatment of depressive symptoms during short-term rehabilitation: An attempted replication of the DOUR project.

Objective: To replicate and extend P. A. Lichtenberg and colleagues' (1996) cross-disciplinary intervention to improve physical and mental health among older adults. Participants: 14 depressed older adults (6 treatment, 8 control). Setting: The short-term rehabilitation unit of an urban nursing home. Intervention: Occupational therapists were trained to treat depression using pleasant events and cognitive-behavioral therapies. Outcome Measures: Geriatric Depression Scale, the Short Form-12, and the Multi-Level Assessment Instrument: Activities of Daily Living. Results: No significant group differences were found in physical or mental health. However, more control group members (75%) than treatment group members (33%) were depressed at study completion. Conclusions: The treatment of depressive symptoms can be integrated with a nonmental health treatment modality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Computational complexity of sorting and joining relations withduplicates

It is shown that the existence of duplicate values in some attribute columns has a significant impact on the computational complexity of the sorting and joining operations. This is especially true when the number of distinct tuple values is a small fraction of the total number of tuples. The authors characterize a multirelation M (n, L) by its cardinality n and the number of distinct elements L it contains. Under this characterization, the worst time complexity of sorting such a multirelation with binary comparisons as basic operations is investigated. Upper and lower bounds on the number of three-branch comparisons needed to sort such a multirelation are established. Thereafter, the methodology used to study the complexity of sorting is applied to the natural join operation. It is shown that the existence of duplicate values in the join attribute columns can be exploited to reduce the computational complexity of the natural join operation     

A novel technique for fabrication of metallic structures on polyimide by selective electroless copper plating using ion implantation

The successful use of palladium ion implantation into polyimide to seed an electroless plated film of copper on the polyimide surface is reported. Polyimide (Hitachi PIX 3400) was implanted with palladium ions to doses of 1.5 × 10¹⁵ − 1.2 × 10¹⁷ ions cm⁻² using a MEVVA ion implanter. The implanted ions acted as sites for nucleation of copper film. A copper film was then deposited on implanted polyimide using a commercial electroless plating solution. The ion energy was kept low enough to facilitate a low critical ‘seed’ threshold dose that was measured to be 3.6× 10¹⁶ Pd ions cm⁻². Test patterns were made using polyimide to study the adaptability of this technique to form thick structures. Plated films were studied with optical microscopy, Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) and Profilometry. The adhesion of films was qualitatively assessed by a ‘scotch tape test’. The film growth (thickness) was observed to be linear with plating time. A higher implantation dose led to greater plating rates. The adhesion was found to improve with increasing dose.     

Origin of visible photoluminescence from porous silicon as studied by Raman spectroscopy

In this paper we discuss the different models proposed to explain the visible luminescence in porous silicon (PS). We review our recent photoluminescence and Raman studies on PS as a function of different preparation conditions and isochronal thermal annealing. Our results can be explained by a hybrid model which incorporates both nanostructures for quantum confinement and silicon complexes (such as SiH _x and siloxene) and defects at Si/SiO₂ interfaces as luminescent centres.     

A comparative evaluation of low-cycle fatigue behavior of type 316LN base metal, 316 weld metal,and 316LN/316 weld joint

A comparative evaluation of the low-cycle fatigue (LCF) behavior of type 316LN base metal, 316 weld metal, and 316LN/316 weld joints was carried out at 773 and 873 K. Total strain-controlled LCF tests were conducted at a constant strain rate of 3 × 10⁻³ s⁻¹ with strain amplitudes in the range ±0.20 to ±1.0 pct. Weld pads with single V and double V configuration were prepared by the shielded metal-arc welding (SMAW) process using 316 electrodes for weld-metal and weld-joint specimens. Optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of the untested and tested samples were carried out to elucidate the deformation and the fracture behavior. The cyclic stress response of the base metal shows a very rapid hardening to a maximum stress followed by a saturated stress response. Weld metal undergoes a relatively short initial hardening followed by a gradual softening regime. Weld joints exhibit an initial hardening and a subsequent softening regime at all strain amplitudes, except at low strain amplitudes where a saturation regime is noticed. The initial hardening observed in base metal has been attributed to interaction between dislocations and solute atoms/complexes and cyclic saturation to saturation in the number density of slip bands. From TEM, the cyclic softening in weld metal was ascribed to the annihilation of dislocations during LCF. Type 316LN base metal exhibits better fatigue resistance than weld metal at 773 K, whereas the reverse holds true at 873 K. The weld joint shows the lowest life at both temperatures. The better fatigue resistance of weld metal is related to the brittle transformed delta ferrite structure and the high density of dislocations at the interface, which inhibits the growth rate of cracks by deflecting the crack path. The lower fatigue endurance of the weld joint was ascribed to the shortening of the crack initiation phase caused by surface intergranular crack initiation and to the poor crack propagation resistance of the coarse-grained region in the heat-affected zone.