Query: Data Management Challenges in Cloud Computing Infrastructures

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Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distributed Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web <=SEP=> We describe a family of caching protocols for distrib-uted networks that can be used to decrease or eliminate the occurrence of hot spots in the network. Our protocols are particularly designed for use with very large networks such as the Internet, where delays caused by hot spots can be severe, and where it is not feasible for every server to have complete information about the current state of the entire network. The protocols are easy to implement using existing network protocols such as TCP/fF’,and require very little overhead. The protocols work with local control, make efficient use of existing resources, and scale gracefully as the network grows. Our caching protocols are based on a special kind of hashing that we call consistent hashing. Roughly speaking, a consistent hash function is one which changes nr.inimaflyas the range of the function changes. Through the development of good consistent hash functions, we are able to develop caching protocols which do not require users to have a current or even consistent view of the network. We believe that consistent hash functions may eventually prove to be useful in other applications such as distributed name servers and/or quorum systems.

Paxos made live: an engineering perspective <=SEP=> We describe our experience in building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm. Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.

PNUTS: Yahoo!'s hosted data serving platform <=SEP=> We describe PNUTS, a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!’s web applications. PNUTS provides data storage organized as hashed or ordered tables, low latency for large numbers of concurrent requests including updates and queries, and novel per-record consistency guarantees. It is a hosted, centrally managed, and geographically distributed service, and utilizes automated load-balancing and failover to reduce operational complexity. The first version of the system is currently serving in production. We describe the motivation for PNUTS and the design and implementation of its table storage and replication layers, and then present experimental results.

Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion <=SEP=> Many decades of work have been invested in the area of distributed transactions including protocols such as 2PC, Paxos, and various approaches to quorum. These protocols provide the application programmer a façade of global serializability. Personally, I have invested a nontrivial portion of my career as a strong advocate for the implementation and use of platforms providing guarantees of global serializability. My experience over the last decade has led me to liken these platforms to the Maginot Line. In general, application developers simply do not implement large scalable applications assuming distributed transactions. When they attempt to use distributed transactions, the projects founder because the performance costs and fragility make them impractical. Natural selection kicks in... 1 The Maginot Line was a huge fortress that ran the length of the Franco-German border and was constructed at great expense between World War I and World War II. It successfully kept the German army from directly crossing the border between France and Germany. It was quickly bypassed by the Germans in 1940 who invaded through Belgium. This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/). You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3 Biennial Conference on Innovative DataSystems Research (CIDR) January 7-10, Asilomar, California USA. Instead, applications are built using different techniques which do not provide the same transactional guarantees but still meet the needs of their businesses. This paper explores and names some of the practical approaches used in the implementations of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world which rejects distributed transactions. We discuss the management of fine-grained pieces of application data which may be repartitioned over time as the application grows. We also discuss the design patterns used in sending messages between these repartitionable pieces of data. The reason for starting this discussion is to raise awareness of new patterns for two reasons. First, it is my belief that this awareness can ease the challenges of people hand-crafting very large scalable applications. Second, by observing the patterns, hopefully the industry can work towards the creation of platforms that make it easier to build these very large applications.

The Part-Time Parliament <=SEP=> Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament's protocol provides a new way of implementing the state machine approach to the design of distributed systems.

Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ac DCF with Hidden Nodes <=SEP=> Recently, the IEEE 802.11 standard based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) have become more popular and are widely deployed. It is anticipated that WLAN will play an important rule in the future wireless communication systems in order to provide several gigabits data rate. IEEE 802.11ac is one of the ongoing WLAN standard aiming to support very high throughput (VHT) with data rate of up to 6 Gbps below the 6 GHz band. In the development of IEEE 802.11ac standard, several new physical layer (PHY) and medium access control layer (MAC) features are taken into consideration, such as employing wider bandwidth in PHY and incrementing the limits of frame aggregation in MAC. However, due to the newly introduced features, some traditional techniques used in previous standards could face some problems. This paper presents a performance analysis of 802.11ac Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in presence of hidden nodes in overlapping BSS (OBSS) environment. The effectiveness of DCF in IEEE 802.11ac WLAN when using different primary channels and different frequency bandwidth has also been discussed. Our results indicate that the traditional RTS/CTS handshake mechanism faces shortcomings and needs to be modified in order to support the newly defined 802.11ac amendment.

Advanced Compiler Optimizations for Supercomputers <=SEP=> Compilers for vector or multiprocessor computers must have certain optimization features to successfully generate parallel code.

Cyber security of smart grids modeled through epidemic models in cellular automata <=SEP=> Due to their distributed management, smart grids can be vulnerable to malicious attacks that undermine their cyber security. An adversary can take control of few nodes in the network and spread digital attacks like an infection, whose diffusion is facilitated by the lack of centralized supervision within the smart grid. In this paper, we propose to investigate these phenomena by means of epidemic models applied to cellular automata. We show that the common key parameters of epidemic models, such as the basic reproductive ratio, are also useful in this context to understand the extent of the grid portion that can be compromised. At the same time, the lack of mobility of individuals limits the spreading of the infection. In particular, we evaluate the role of the grid connectivity degree in both containing the epidemics and avoiding its spreading on the entire network, and also increasing the number of nodes that do not get any contact with the cyber attacks.

Simplified high-accuracy calculation of eddy-current loss in round-wire windings <=SEP=> It has recently been shown that the most commonly used methods for calculating high-frequency eddy-current loss in round-wire windings can have substantial error, exceeding 60%. Previous work includes a formula based on a parametric set of finite-element analysis (FEA) simulations that gives proximity-effect loss for a large range of frequencies, using the parameters from a lookup table based on winding geometry. We improve the formula by decreasing the number of parameters in the formula and also, more importantly, by using simple functions to get the parameters from winding geometry such that a large lookup table is not needed. The function we present is exact in the low frequency limit (diameter much smaller than skin depth) and has error less than 4% at higher frequencies. We make our new model complete by examining the field expression needed to get the total proximity-effect loss and by including the skin-effect loss. We also present experimental results confirming the validity of the model and its superiority to standard methods.

Real time lane detection for autonomous vehicles <=SEP=> An increasing safety and reducing road accidents, thereby saving lives are one of great interest in the context of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Apparently, among the complex and challenging tasks of future road vehicles is road lane detection or road boundaries detection. It is based on lane detection (which includes the localization of the road, the determination of the relative position between vehicle and road, and the analysis of the vehiclepsilas heading direction). One of the principal approaches to detect road boundaries and lanes using vision system on the vehicle. However, lane detection is a difficult problem because of the varying road conditions that one can encounter while driving. In this paper, a vision-based lane detection approach capable of reaching real time operation with robustness to lighting change and shadows is presented. The system acquires the front view using a camera mounted on the vehicle then applying few processes in order to detect the lanes. Using a pair of hyperbolas which are fitting to the edges of the lane, those lanes are extracted using Hough transform. The proposed lane detection system can be applied on both painted and unpainted road as well as curved and straight road in different weather conditions. This approach was tested and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme was robust and fast enough for real time requirements. Eventually, a critical overview of the methods were discussed, their potential for future deployment were assist.

Antenna Selection for MIMO Nonorthogonal Multiple Access Systems <=SEP=> This paper considers the antenna selection (AS) problem for a multiple-input multiple-output nonorthogonal multiple access system. In particular, we develop new computationally efficient AS algorithms for two commonly used scenarios: NOMA with fixed power allocation (F-NOMA) and NOMA with cognitive radio-inspired power allocation (CR-NOMA). For the F-NOMA scenario, a new max–max–max AS (A<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^3$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-AS) scheme is first proposed to maximize the system sum-rate. This is achieved by selecting one antenna at the base station (BS) and corresponding best receive antenna at each user that maximizes the channel gain of the resulting <italic>strong</italic> user. To improve the user fairness, a new max–min–max AS (AIA-AS) scheme is subsequently developed, in which we jointly select one transmit antenna at BS and corresponding best receive antennas at users to maximize the channel gain of the resulting <italic>weak</italic> user. For the CR-NOMA scenario, we propose another new AS algorithm, termed maximum-channel-gain-based antenna selection (MCG-AS), to maximize the achievable rate of the secondary user, under the condition that the primary user's quality-of-service requirement is satisfied. The asymptotic closed-form expressions of the average sum-rate for A<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^3$</tex-math></inline-formula>-AS and AIA-AS and that of the average rate of the secondary user for MCG-AS are derived. Numerical results demonstrate that the AIA-AS provides better user fairness, whereas the A<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^3$</tex-math></inline-formula>-AS achieves a near-optimal sum-rate in F-NOMA systems. For the CR-NOMA scenario, MCG-AS achieves a near-optimal performance in a wide signal-to-noise-ratio regime. Furthermore, all the proposed AS algorithms yield a significant computational complexity reduction, compared to exhaustive search-based counterparts.

Cloud detection of remote sensing images by deep learning <=SEP=> Cloud detection plays a major role for remote sensing image processing. Most of the existed cloud detection methods use the low-level feature of the cloud, which often cause error result especially for thin cloud and complex scene. In this paper, a novel cloud detection method based on deep learning framework is proposed. The designed deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) consists of four convolutional layers and two fully-connected layers, which can mine the deep features of cloud. The image is firstly clustered into superpixels as sub-region through simple linear iterative cluster (SLIC) method. Through the designed network model, the probability of each superpixel that belongs to cloud region is predicted, so that the cloud probability map of the image is generated. Lastly, the cloud region is obtained according to the gradient of the cloud map. Through the proposed method, both thin cloud and thick cloud can be detected well, and the result is insensitive to complex scene. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is more robust and effective than compared methods.

Incivility, retention and new graduate nurses: an integrated review of the literature. <=SEP=> AIM
To evaluate the influence of incivility on the new graduate nurse transition experience.


BACKGROUND
Incivility in the work environment is a major source of dissatisfaction and new graduate nurses are especially vulnerable. Incivility contributes to the high levels of turnover associated within the first 2 years of new graduate nurse employment.


EVALUATION
An integrated review of the literature was conducted using MEDLINE-EBSCOhost, PsycInfo and CINAHL databases. Relevant articles were reviewed for appropriateness related to inclusion/exclusion criteria and for quality using established criteria. Sixteen studies were included in the final analysis.


KEY ISSUES
Themes that emerged included workplace incivility, nurse residency programmes, mentoring through preceptors and empowerment/work environment. Findings indicated that incivility in the workplace was a significant predictor of low job satisfaction in new graduate nurses transitioning into practice.


CONCLUSIONS
While graduate nurse transition programmes are associated with improved satisfaction and retention, they appear to address incivility by acculturating new graduate nurses to the experience of incivility. There is little evidence that the culture of incivility has been addressed.


IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT
Nurse managers have the responsibility to be aware of the prevalence of incivility, assess for its occurrence, and implement strategies which eliminate workplace incivility and tolerance for uncivil behaviours.

Using Dynamic Programming for Solving Variational Problems in Vision <=SEP=> Variational approaches have been proposed for solving many inverse problems in early vision, such as in the computation of optical flow, shape from shading, and energy-minimizing active contour models. In general however, variational approaches do not guarantee global optimality of the solution, require estimates of higher order derivatives of the discrete data, and do not allow direct and natural enforcement of constraints. In this paper we discuss dynamic programming as a novel approach to solving variational problems in vision. Dynamic programming ensures global optimality of the solution, it is numerically stable, and it allows for hard constraints to be enforced on the behavior of the solution within a natural and straightforward structure. As a specific example of the efficacy of the proposed approach, application of dynamic programming to the energy-minimizing active contours is described. The optimization problem is set up as a discrete multistage decision process and is solved by a " time-delayed " discrete dynamic programming algorithm. A parallel procedure is discussed that can result in savings in computational costs.

A Case for Protecting Computer Games With SGX <=SEP=> The integrity and confidentiality of computer games has long been a concern of game developers, both in preventing players from cheating and from obtaining unlicensed copies of the software. Recently, Intel released SGX, which can provide new security guarantees for software developers to achieve an unprecedented level of software integrity and confidentiality. To explore how SGX can protect a computer game in practice, in this paper we make a first step of exploring new ways to protect the integrity and confidentiality of game code and data, and in doing so we have developed a framework and design principles for integrating games with SGX. We have applied our framework to demonstrate how it can be used to protect a real world computer game.

Semantic Web Services-A Survey <=SEP=> The technology where the meaning of the information and the service of the web is defined by making the web to understand and satisfies the request of the people is called Semantic Web Services. That is the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purpose, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various application .The idea of the semantic is raised to overcome the limitation of the Web services such as Average WWW searches examines only about 25% of potentially relevant sites and return a lot of unwanted information, Information on web is not suitable for software agent and Doubling of size. It is built on top of the Web Services extended with rich semantic representations along with capabilities for automatic reasoning developed in the field of artificial intelligence. This survey attempts to give an overview of the underlying concepts and technologies along with the categorization, selection and discovery of services based on semantic.

High quality lip-sync animation for 3D photo-realistic talking head <=SEP=> We propose a new 3D photo-realistic talking head with high quality, lip-sync animation. It extends our prior high-quality 2D photo-realistic talking head to 3D. An a/v recording of a person speaking a set of prompted sentences with good phonetic coverage for ~20-minutes is first made. We then use a 2D-to-3D reconstruction algorithm to automatically adapt a general 3D head mesh model to the person. In training, super feature vectors consisting of 3D geometry, texture and speech are augmented together to train a statistical, multi-streamed, Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The HMM is then used to synthesize both the trajectories of head motion animation and the corresponding dynamics of texture. The resultant 3D talking head animation can be controlled by the model predicted geometric trajectory while the articulator movements, e.g., lips, are rendered with dynamic 2D texture image sequences. Head motions and facial expression can also be separately controlled by manipulating corresponding parameters. In a real-time demonstration, the life-like 3D talking head can take any input text, convert it into speech and render lip-synced speech animation photo-realistically.

A Review of Human Activity Recognition Methods <=SEP=> Recognizing human activities from video sequences or still images is a challenging task due to problems, such as background clutter, partial occlusion, changes in scale, viewpoint, lighting, and appearance. Many applications, including video surveillance systems, human-computer interaction, and robotics for human behavior characterization, require a multiple activity recognition system. In this work, we provide a detailed review of recent and state-of-the-art research advances in the field of human activity classification. We propose a categorization of human activity methodologies and discuss their advantages and limitations. In particular, we divide human activity classification methods into two large categories according to whether they use data from different modalities or not. Then, each of these categories is further analyzed into sub-categories, which reflect how they model human activities and what type of activities they are interested in. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing, publicly available human activity classification datasets and examine the requirements for an ideal human activity recognition dataset. Finally, we report the characteristics of future research directions and present some open issues on human activity recognition.

Studying Evolution with Self-Replicating Computer Programs <=SEP=> A critical discussion is presented on the use of self-replicating program systems as tools for the formulation of generalised theories of evolution. Results generated by such systems must be treated with caution, but, if used properly, they can ooer us unprecedented opportunities for empirical , comparative studies. A new system called Cosmos is introduced, which is based upon Ray's Tierra 15]. The major diierence between Cosmos and previous systems is that individual self-replicating programs in Cosmos are modelled (in a very simpliied fashion) on cellular organisms. Previous systems have generally used simpler self-replicators. The hope is that Cosmos may be better able to address questions concerning the sudden emergence of complex multicellular biological organisms during the Cambrian explosion. Results of initial exploratory runs are presented, which are somewhat diierent to those of similar runs on Tierra. These diierences were expected , and indicate the sensitivity of such systems to the precise details of the language in which the self-replicating programs are written. With the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology in mind, some directions for future research with Cosmos are discussed. Within the last decade, computers have become powerful and aaordable enough to enable a number of research groups to study the evolution of life in a new way. Rather than following the traditional approach of trying to capture properties of whole populations in mathematical models, the new approach models a large number of individual self-replicating entities which are competing against each other for resources required for replication. This is achieved by creating a computer which can run a large number of self-replicating programs in parallel 1. 1 In practice, a virtual computer is created (i.e. implemented in software), with parallelism simulated by time-slicing between Tom Ray pioneered this approach with his Tierra system 15, 16]. Since then, a number of other systems have also been developed, including Avida, developed by Chris Adami and Titus Brown 2], Computer Zoo, written by Jakob Skipper 18], and John Koza's system of self-replicating LISP-like programs 8]. Using such a methodology to study evolutionary systems is attractive for a number of reasons. For example, as the self-replicators are being modelled individually rather than as populations, the simulation respects the fact that a gene does not work in isolation. Rather, it is part of a large ensemble of genes which must all work together with some degree of cooperation in order for the individual organism …

A Framework for Network Function Virtualization by Chang Lan Research Project <=SEP=> The proliferation of network processing appliances (“Middleboxes”) has been accompanied by a growing recognition of the problems they bring, including expensive hardware and complex management. This recognition led the networking industry to launch a concerted effort towards Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with the goal of bringing greater openness and agility to network dataplanes. However, a closer look under the hood reveals a less rosy picture: NFV is currently replacing, on a one-to-one basis, monolithic hardware with monolithic software. Furthermore, while several efforts are exploring a new model for middlebox deployment in which a third-party offers middlebox processing as a service, no solutions address the confidentiality concerns. In order to process an organizations traffic, the cloud sees the traffic unencrypted. This means that the cloud now has access to potentially sensitive packet payloads and headers. In the first part of this thesis, we present E2, a scalable and application-agnostic scheduling framework for packet processing, and compare its performance to current approaches. E2 brings two benefits: (i) it allows developers to rely on external frameworkbased mechanisms for common tasks, freeing them to focus on their core application logic and (ii) it simplifies the operators responsibilities, as it both automates and consolidates common management tasks. In the following chapter, we then present Embark, the first system that enables a cloud provider to support middlebox outsourcing while maintaining the clients confidentiality. Embark supports a wide-range of middleboxes. Our evaluation shows that Embark supports these applications with competitive performance.

Overconfidence as a cause of diagnostic error in medicine. <=SEP=> The great majority of medical diagnoses are made using automatic, efficient cognitive processes, and these diagnoses are correct most of the time. This analytic review concerns the exceptions: the times when these cognitive processes fail and the final diagnosis is missed or wrong. We argue that physicians in general underappreciate the likelihood that their diagnoses are wrong and that this tendency to overconfidence is related to both intrinsic and systemically reinforced factors. We present a comprehensive review of the available literature and current thinking related to these issues. The review covers the incidence and impact of diagnostic error, data on physician overconfidence as a contributing cause of errors, strategies to improve the accuracy of diagnostic decision making, and recommendations for future research.

A Novel System for Visual Navigation of Educational Videos Using Multimodal Cues <=SEP=> With recent developments and advances in distance learning and MOOCs, the amount of open educational videos on the Internet has grown dramatically in the past decade. However, most of these videos are lengthy and lack of high-quality indexing and annotations, which triggers an urgent demand for efficient and effective tools that facilitate video content navigation and exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel visual navigation system for exploring open educational videos. The system tightly integrates multimodal cues obtained from the visual, audio and textual channels of the video and presents them with a series of interactive visualization components. With the help of this system, users can explore the video content using multiple levels of details to identify content of interest with ease. Extensive experiments and comparisons against previous studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Musical Instrument Recognition in User-generated Videos using a Multimodal Convolutional Neural Network Architecture <=SEP=> This paper presents a method for recognizing musical instruments in user-generated videos. Musical instrument recognition from music signals is a well-known task in the music information retrieval (MIR) field, where current approaches rely on the analysis of the good-quality audio material. This work addresses a real-world scenario with several research challenges, i.e. the analysis of user-generated videos that are varied in terms of recording conditions and quality and may contain multiple instruments sounding simultaneously and background noise. Our approach does not only focus on the analysis of audio information, but we exploit the multimodal information embedded in the audio and visual domains. In order to do so, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which combines learned representations from both modalities at a late fusion stage. Our approach is trained and evaluated on two large-scale video datasets: YouTube-8M and FCVID. The proposed architectures demonstrate state-of-the-art results in audio and video object recognition, provide additional robustness to missing modalities, and remains computationally cheap to train.

VINERy: A Visual IDE for Information Extraction <=SEP=> Information Extraction (IE) is the key technology enabling analytics over unstructured and semi-structured data. Not surprisingly, it is becoming a critical building block for a wide range of emerging applications. To satisfy the rising demands for information extraction in real-world applications, it is crucial to lower the barrier to entry for IE development and enable users with general computer science background to develop higher quality extractors. In this demonstration, we present VINERY, an intuitive yet expressive visual IDE for information extraction. We show how it supports the full cycle of IE development without requiring a single line of code and enables a wide range of users to develop high quality IE extractors with minimal efforts. The extractors visually built in VINERY are automatically translated into semantically equivalent extractors in a state-of-the-art declarative language for IE. We also demonstrate how the auto-generated extractors can then be imported into a conventional Eclipse-based IDE for further enhancement. The results of our user studies indicate that VINERY is a significant step forward in facilitating extractor development for both expert and novice IE developers.

Experiences with an Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot <=SEP=> This article describes the software architecture of an auto nomous, interactive tour-guide robot. It presents a modular and distributed software archi te ture, which integrates localization, mapping, collision avoidance, planning, and vari ous modules concerned with user interaction and Web-based telepresence. At its heart, the s oftware approach relies on probabilistic computation, on-line learning, and any-time alg orithms. It enables robots to operate safely, reliably, and at high speeds in highly dynamic environments, and does not require any modifications of the environment to aid the robot ’s peration. Special emphasis is placed on the design of interactive capabilities that appeal to people’s intuition. The interface provides new means for human-robot interaction w ith crowds of people in public places, and it also provides people all around the world with the ability to establish a “virtual telepresence” using the Web. To illustrate our approac h, results are reported obtained in mid-1997, when our robot “RHINO” was deployed for a period of six days in a densely populated museum. The empirical results demonstrate relia bl operation in public environments. The robot successfully raised the museum’s atten dance by more than 50%. In addition, thousands of people all over the world controlled the robot through the Web. We conjecture that these innovations transcend to a much large r range of application domains for service robots.

Modeling and Analyzing the Reliability and Cost of Service Composition in the IoT: A Probabilistic Approach <=SEP=> Recently, many efforts have been devoted to explore the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). These works allow the real-world devices to provide their functionality as web services. However, two important issues, unreliable service providing and resource constraints, make the modeling and analysis of service composition in IoT a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to formally describe and analyze the reliability and cost-related properties of the service composition in IoT. First, a service composition in IoT is modeled as a finite state machine (FSM) which focuses on the functional part. Then, we extend this FSM model to a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which can specify the reliability of service operations. Furthermore, we extend MDP with cost structure, which can represent the different service quality attributes for each operation, such as energy consumption, communication cost, etc. The desirable quality properties of the service composition are specified by a probabilistic extension of temporal logic PCTL. We adopt a well-established probabilistic model checker PRISM to verify and analyze those properties of our service composition models.

Could on-line voting boost desire to vote? - Technology acceptance perceptions of young Hungarian citizens <=SEP=> Article history: Received 24 May 2015 Received in revised form 2 October 2016 Accepted 18 November 2016 In our paper we develop and test the argument that intent to i-vote (to use on-line voting systems) drives intent to vote, while intent to i-vote is influenced by four key attitudes: performance expectation, perception on ease of use, trust in the internet and trust in the government.We show that these findings contradict thosewhich exclusively identified economical, legal, and cultural drivers to enhance democratic participation in the Central and Eastern European region. Rooted cardinally in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) six hypotheses were set, and then tested with partial least square (PLS) structural equation modelling. In the context of young, educated and internet-ready Hungarian voters the testing of the hypotheses has shown high level of on-line voting intent and that perception of on-line voting would enhance voting desire amongst young Hungarian internet users. Also, our findings show that performance expectation, perception on ease of use and trust in the internet are positively associated with i-voting intent. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Simulink-based robotic toolkit for simulation and control of the PUMA 560 robot manipulator <=SEP=> In this paper, a Simulink Robotic Toolkit (SRTK) for the Puma 560 robot manipulator is developed on the MATLAB/SIMULINK-based platform. Through the use of the Real-Time Linux Target and the Real-Time Windows Target, the SRTK can be executed on the Linux or Win32-based operating systems (e.g., Windows 95/98/NT) in real-time. Moreover, the graphical user-friendly nature of Simulink allows the SRTK to be a flexible tool that can easily be customized to fit the specific needs of the user. That is, based on the layered approach of the SRTK, the user can perform operations such as calibration, joint control, Cartesian control, Cartesian PD control, impedance control, some trajectory generation tasks, and real-time simulation of the Puma 560 through a user-friendly MATLAB-based graphical user interface (GUI) without writing any code. One of the key features of the toolkit is that users can easily incorporate additional functionality and hardware through the simple block diagram interface that Simulink provides. Moreover, the MATLABbased GUI can also easily be modified to allow the user to exploit the added functionality with the GUI by using straightforward MATLAB script files. Hence, the SRTK allows a researcher to use the Puma 560 without the burden of the external issues related to the control, interface, and software issues, while providing for the flexibility for easily modifying components for increased functionality.

A compendium of RNA-binding motifs for decoding gene regulation <=SEP=> RNA-binding proteins are key regulators of gene expression, yet only a small fraction have been functionally characterized. Here we report a systematic analysis of the RNA motifs recognized by RNA-binding proteins, encompassing 205 distinct genes from 24 diverse eukaryotes. The sequence specificities of RNA-binding proteins display deep evolutionary conservation, and the recognition preferences for a large fraction of metazoan RNA-binding proteins can thus be inferred from their RNA-binding domain sequence. The motifs that we identify in vitro correlate well with in vivo RNA-binding data. Moreover, we can associate them with distinct functional roles in diverse types of post-transcriptional regulation, enabling new insights into the functions of RNA-binding proteins both in normal physiology and in human disease. These data provide an unprecedented overview of RNA-binding proteins and their targets, and constitute an invaluable resource for determining post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in eukaryotes.

MPLS based hybridization in SDN <=SEP=> The new paradigm of Software Defined Networking (SDN) although has great potential to address the complex problems presented by enterprise networks, it has its own deployment and scalability issues. Further, a full SDN deployment has its own business and economic challenges. A smooth transition from legacy networks to SDN (disruption free, accommodating budget constraints, with progressive improvement in network management) requires a hybrid networking model as an inevitable intermediate step; that allows heterogeneous paradigms to function together while the full transition is realized in phases. Therefore, the need of the hour is to develop an incremental deployment strategy that caters to the needs of the organization. We present here a class-based hybrid SDN model for Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks. We discuss the model, design, components, their interactions, advantages and drawbacks. We also present a n implementation and evaluation of a prototype. In legacy networks, MPLS architecture closely resembles SDN paradigm in terms of separation of control and data planes, flow-abstraction etc. Moreover, ISPs have preferred MPLS over the years due to benefits of virtual private networks and traffic engineering. The central idea is to partition traffic using forwarding equivalence classes at the ingress router, the rules of which can be updated via a centralized controller using OpenFlow. Therefore, we aim to use the standard MPLS data-plane together with a control-plane based on OpenFlow to come up with a systematic incremental deployment methodology as well as a hybrid operation model