241 research outputs found
Lightweight energy estimation framework for smart-phone applications using static analysis / Raja Wasim Ahmad
Full text linkRecently, the preference of users has shifted the computational platform to resource constrained smart-phone devices as users prefer to work while on the go. The shift of information access paradigm on smart-phone devices demand high functionality applications to enrich user experience. However, increasing applications functionality requires more smart-phone resources. As a result, smart-phone battery consumption increases. Smart-phone application energy estimation investigates energy consumption behavior of smart-phone applications at diversified granularity levels when it is run on the smart-phone device. Traditional energy estimation schemes consider smart-phone component’s power measurement or code analysis methods for energy estimation of smart-phone applications. Code analysis based methods use energy cost of operations within an application to estimate energy consumption. However, smart-phone applications are non-deterministic in nature. Therefore, traditional code analysis based energy estimation schemes run the smart-phone application to record the execution paths in offline mode to estimate its energy consumption. However, running application on hardware platform inefficiently utilizes underlying hardware resources that lead to extended estimation time and energy estimation overhead. To overcome this issue, this study proposes a lightweight 2-tier static analysis based energy estimation framework to minimize high energy overhead of dynamic analysis based energy estimation methods. The proposed framework, called Static analysis based lightweight energy estimation framework (SA-LEEF), proposes storage location analyzer, ARM-IS energy profile as service, and weighted probability based execution paths estimation to handle non-deterministic nature of smart-phone applications. Moreover, the proposed framework considers the energy overhead due to cache eviction during concurrent programs execution on the smart phone device to present more realistic application execution environment for energy estimation. It also considers user system interaction to input required data during application execution on the smart-phone device to improve the energy estimation accuracy. The proposed framework empowers application developers to estimate energy consumption at source code line, functions, execution paths, and application granularity. The proposed study has performed experiments on Google Nexus One smart-phone device to highlight the effectiveness of SA-LEEF framework. The experiments revealed that SA-LEEF has minimized energy estimation time of dynamic analysis methods by 98% for benchmark applications. In terms of energy overhead, SA-LEEF consumes up to 97% less energy than dynamic analysis based energy estimation method. The accuracy of SA-LEEF is up to 88% compared to external physical measurement method. It is also noticed that SA-LEEF consumes 58% less CPU and 97% lower RAM storage during energy estimation of a smart-phone application. SA-LEEF assist developers investigating energy consumption behavior of their application at earlier development stages as it estimates energy consumption based on fine granular instruction energy cost
Inclusive Fitness Theory: is it still relevant in discussions of altruism?
No full textFor nearly 50 years, Inclusive Fitness Theory has provided researchers an avenue to understand altruistic interactions among individuals in a colony. It has recently come under fire by prominent academics suggesting it is unsatisfactory in describing altruism. This thesis aims to provide a history of inclusive fitness theory and dissect the arguments against the theory and in favor of it. Using scientific research articles from such publications as Nature and Science, I have collected information on the history of Inclusive Fitness Theory and the development of the theory over time. Furthermore, this thesis will also delve into the methods of testing Inclusive Fitness Theory as well as fields that have arisen due to the theory. Ultimately, using arguments made by opponents and proponents to the theory, conclusions will be drawn about the validity of the theory. While the arguments against the theory seem sound, they ultimately fail to provide alternative insights into the development of altruism in colonies, and moreover these arguments are successfully refuted by leaders in the field.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Daniel Wasim Awar
A survey on test suite reduction frameworks and tools
Full text linkSoftware testing is a widely accepted practice that ensures the quality of a System under Test (SUT). However, the gradual increase of the test suite size demands high portion of testing budget and time. Test Suite Reduction (TSR) is considered a potential approach to deal with the test suite size problem. Moreover, a complete automation support is highly recommended for software testing to adequately meet the challenges of a resource constrained testing environment. Several TSR frameworks and tools have been proposed to efficiently address the test-suite size problem. The main objective of the paper is to comprehensively review the state-of-the-art TSR frameworks to highlights their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, the paper focuses on devising a detailed thematic taxonomy to classify existing literature that helps in understanding the underlying issues and proof of concept. Moreover, the paper investigates critical aspects and related features of TSR frameworks and tools based on a set of defined parameters. We also rigorously elaborated various testing domains and approaches followed by the extant TSR frameworks. The results reveal that majority of TSR frameworks focused on randomized unit testing, and a considerable number of frameworks lacks in supporting multi-objective optimization problems. Moreover, there is no generalized framework, effective for testing applications developed in any programming domain. Conversely, Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based TSR frameworks provide an optimal solution for multi-objective optimization problems and improve execution time by running multiple ILP in parallel. The study concludes with new insights and provides an unbiased view of the state-of-the-art TSR frameworks. Finally, we present potential research issues for further investigation to anticipate efficient TSR frameworks
Refugee without refuge: Wasim, Phillip Adams, and a nation divided
Full text linkThis study follows on from previous work (Pedersen et al., 2008) that examined the situation of the stateless asylum seeker, Wasim. In the present study, a blog discussion stemming from an editorial about Wasim (Adams, 2008) was analysed. Participants were identified as 'Do-Gooders' and 'Do-Badders'; categories that indicate their orientation to asylum seeker debates (labels originated from the blog itself). We identified several features of the blog discussion. While similar themes and discursive devices were used by the two groups, they were used very differently. The Do-Gooders were more likely to offer accurate information about asylum seekers or Wasim and to show humani- tarian concerns for Wasim and others like him. The Do-Badders were more likely to display emotion, show the 'Phillip Adams Effect' (addressing the author of the editorial, Phillip Adams, in their sub- missions) and name-call. However, there was no significant difference with respect to whether participants addressed Wasim's situation specifically rather than focusing on the general issue of asylum seekers. The blog demonstrates, in microcosm, the divided orientation of Australians regard- ing asylum seekers
Computational offloading mechanism for native and android runtime based mobile applications
Full text linkMobile cloud computing is a promising approach to augment the computational capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-hungry mobile applications. Android-based smartphones have opened real-world venues for mobile cloud applications mainly because of the open source nature of Android. Computational offloading mechanism enables the augmentation of smartphone capabilities. The problem is majority of existing computational offloading solutions for Android-based smartphones heavily depends on Dalvik VM (an application-level VM). Apart from being a discontinued product, Dalvik VM consumes extra time and energy because of the just-in-time (JIT) compilation of bytecode into machine instructions. With regard to this problem, Google has introduced Android Runtime (ART) featuring ahead-of-time (AHOT) compilation to native instructions in place of Dalvik VM. However, current state-of-the-art offloading solutions do not consider AHOT compilations to native binaries in the ART environment. To address the issue in offloading ART-based mobile applications, we propose a computational offloading framework. The proposed framework requires infrastructural support from cloud data centers to provide offloading as a service for heterogeneous mobile devices. Numerical results from proof-of-concept implementation revealed that the proposed framework improves the execution time of the experimental application by 76% and reduces its energy consumption by 70%
An investigation of video communication over bandwidth limited public safety network
No full textApplication performance of video-based services for public safety and security (PSS) systems is of high importance in order to protect citizens, organizations, and institutions against threats to their well-being. Video based services help PSS personnel to efficiently perform their rescue operations. Real-time video streaming of incident-based services over the PSS communication networks facilitates in realistic assessment of the situations and saves many precious lives. However, video communication over PSS networks, such as Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), is a big challenge due to the narrowband and the hostile environment. Thus, specialized codecs have been developed considering the constraints of the PSS networks. This paper presents performance comparisons of two video codecs, namely H.264/AVC and MPEG-4, over TEDS links. The significance of the results is evaluated using SPSS (t-test) to critically analyse the data. It is observed that video quality offered by H.264/AVC over TEDS links is better than the one offered by MPEG-4. Moreover, it is also noticed that TEDS bandwidth limitations substantially affect the quality of reconstructed video containing frequent changes of scenes. Based on the findings of our analyses, we propose a set of applications which are suitable for TEDS networks. The findings of this study would help the researchers to further explore the possibilities of video communication over TEDS links by optimizing the lower level network technologies
A survey on energy estimation and power modeling schemes for smartphone applications
No full textSummaryIn the last decade, the rising trend in the popularity of smartphones motivated software developers to increase application functionality. However, increasing application functionality demands extra power budget that as a result, decreases smartphone battery lifetime. Optimizing energy critical sections of an application creates an opportunity to increase battery lifetime. Smartphone application energy estimation helps investigate energy consumption behavior of an application at diversified granularity (eg, coarse and fine granular) for optimal battery resource use. This study explores energy estimation and modeling schemes to highlight their advantages and shortcomings. It classifies existing smartphone application energy estimation and modeling schemes into 2 categories, ie, code analysis and mobile components power model–based estimation owing to their architectural designs. Moreover, it further classifies code analysis–based modeling and estimation schemes in simulation‐based and profiling‐based categories. It compares existing energy estimation and modeling schemes based on a set of parameters common in most literature to highlight the commonalities and differences among reported literature. Existing application energy estimation schemes are low‐accurate, resource expensive, or non‐scalable, as they consider marginally accurate smart battery's voltage/current sensors, low‐rate power capturing tools, and labor‐driven lab‐setting environment to propose power models for smartphone application energy estimation. Besides, the energy estimation overhead of the components power model–based estimation schemes is very high as they physically run the application on a smartphone for energy profiling. To optimize smartphone application energy estimation, we have highlighted several research issues to help researchers of this domain to understand the problem clearly.As shown in figure, this paper discusses energy estimation methods and techniques for energy estimation of smartphone applications. It estimates energy consumption of applications based on smartphone components power models or source code energy models. It proposes taxonomies and highlights open research issues. It concludes that energy estimation is a resource expensive task owing to high profiling overhead
A Prompt Gamma-ray Neutron Activation Analysis (PGNAA) Facility at Dhruva Reactor for Analytical Applications
No full textPrompt Gamma-ray Neutron Activation Analysis (PGNAA) is an online measurement isotope specific technique capable of simultaneous multielement determination using thermal/cold neutron beam mainly from research reactors. It is practically used for quantifying low Z elements (H, N, P, Si, S), neutron poisons like B, Cd, Gd, Dy, Sm and Eu as well as many transition elements at major to trace concentration level depending on the thermal neutron cross section. A PGNAA facility utilizing thermal reflected neutron beam (0.005 eV) was temporarily set-up by RCD and SPPD, BARC at Guided Tube (GT) Lab, Dhruva reactor. The beam dimension was varied between 1x1 to 1x4 cm2 using a cadmium filter shows the PGNAA set-up with sample holder and HPGe detector arrangements. The experimentally measured thermal neutron flux was found to be ~105n/cm2/s using Indium as the flux monitor, where in the activation product 16In (54 min, 417, 1097 keV) was used. External shield for the detector was set-up using lead bricks along with Cadmium sheets and a 20 mm Pb-collimator was used for on-line gamma-ray measurement from the sampl
Book: Journey to God. Sufis and Dervishes in Islam
No full textJürgen Wasim Frembgen (2008) Journey to God. Sufis and Dervishes in Islam, Karachi, Oxford University Press. Since 1981, the author has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Islamic mysticism and Sufi cults in South Asia and more particularly in Pakistan. His latest book is a revised English version translated of the German one by Jane Ripken. Jürgen Wasim Frembgen here focuses on the role played by Sufis and dervishes in shaping social and cultural environments in the whole Muslim world ..
Ga-Doped LLZO Solid-State Electrolyte with Unique “Plate-like” Morphology Derived from Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) Aquatic Weed: Waste to Wealth Conversion
No full text[Image: see text] An attempt has been made for the first time to convert waste biomass such as water hyacinth (WH) to a functional energy material in a cost-effective way. The present research describes a novel exo-templating methodology to develop engineered microstructure of Ga-doped Li(7)La(3)Zr(2)O(12) (Li(6.25)La(3)Ga(0.25)Zr(2)O(12), referred as WH-Ga-LLZO) solid-state electrolyte for its use in all solid-state lithium batteries (ASSLBs) by mimicking the intercellular structure of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), an invasive and noxious aquatic plant. The developed exo-templated methodology offers a low calcination temperature of 1000 °C in air where all the major peaks could be indexed as cubic garnet, as confirmed by XRD. The FESEM micrographs revealed a unique “plate-like” morphology that mimicked the intercellular structure of water hyacinth fiber. The bulk lithium-ion conductivity in the WH-Ga-LLZO electrolyte was found to be 3.94 × 10(–5) S/cm. Li/WH-Ga-LLZO/Li cells were galvanostatically cycled for a continuous 295 h with increasing step current densities from 28 μA/cm(2) without a short circuit. The highest current density as measured for maximum polarization in a symmetric cell was found to be 452 μA/cm(2). The WH exo-templated methodology was thus developed and optimized and can be extended for synthesizing any application-specific multifunctional materials
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