Device to device power saving

When devices communicate they are usually configured to save power by first choosing an appropriate channel, connecting to each other, and then carrying out power control according to the quality of service (QoS) requirements of each device. However, after they have connected the power requirements of each device have usually dropped or at the very least change and so they are essentially not optimised for efficiency. Research published in the International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing shows how channel and power reallocations can be performed over several iterations until transmission power drops below a threshold to reduce overall power consumption.

Chih-Shun Hsu of the Department of Information Management at Shih Hsin University, in Taipei, Taiwan, discusses the trade-off among transmission power, throughput, and computation costs based on extensive simulations. He suggests that his simulation results justify the energy efficiency of the proposed refining schemes. The scheme may well allow 5G systems to run more effectively as part of the infrastructure of the 5G network will be to utilise unlicensed bandwidth between devices rather than carrying all packets of information as would be normal across the licensed cellular network.

Three power refining protocols are proposed in the paper: refining scheme with power control (RPC), the refining scheme with channel reallocation (RCR), and the refining scheme hybrid channel reallocation and power control (RCRPC). “All the three refining schemes can greatly reduce the total transmission power and enhance the transmission power efficiency of the scheme with no refining phase,” Hsu explains. He adds that of the three refining schemes, the RPC scheme can achieve the highest total throughput with the lowest computation time, the RCR scheme can achieve the lowest total transmission power with the highest computation time, and the RCRPC scheme can achieve a balanced result such that the total throughput of the RCRPC scheme is slightly lower than that of the RPC scheme and the total transmission power is slightly higher than that of the RCR scheme.”

Hsu, C-S. (2020) ‘Refining channel and power allocation for green device-to-device communications’, Int. J. Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp.11–24.

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Advanced Operations Management

The following sample articles from the International Journal of Advanced Operations Management are now available here for free:

• Which practices are lean, agile and resilient? Literature review and practitioners' perspective
• The effect of IT integration on improving agility, integration and performance of supply chain
• Improvement of steel melting operations at a Caribbean company: a lean manufacturing approach
• Trade-off among lean, agile, resilient and green paradigms: an empirical study on pharmaceutical industry in Jordan using a TOPSIS-entropy method
• Green optimisation for LRP problem using a genetic algorithm and a dynamic island model
• Exploring ecosystem network analysis to balance resilience and performance in sustainable supply chain design
• Enhancing stock efficiency and environmental sustainability goals in direct distribution logistic networks

Special issue published: "Business Challenges and Opportunities, Management, Leadership and Innovations: Insights from Emerging Markets"

Journal for Global Business Advancement 12(5) 2019

• Determinants of successful public organisational outcomes: a case of a Vietnamese local government
• A review of the relationship between leadership style and innovation: insights and directions for future research
• Customer-based cold chain equity: the application of customer-based brand equity on the food cold chain
• A survey of investors' share evaluation methods in Nigeria
• Determinants of organisational customers' perceived value and repurchase intention: an empirical study of B2B general insurance across Vietnam
• Partner trust as an evaluative parameter for international joint ventures in Indian setting: insights from meta-analysis

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• Analysis of lean practices in manufacturing industries: an ISM approach
• A review of specification limits and control limits from the perspective of Six Sigma quality processes
• Identification of components and parameters contributing to noise in transmission through the use of Shainin techniques
• Implementation of Lean Six Sigma framework in a large scale industry: a case study
• Applying Lean Six Sigma methods to improve infectious waste management in hospitals

Research pick: Extending Nucleic Acid Memory (NAM) - "Extended nucleic acid memory as the future of data storage technology"

Humanity is creating huge amounts of data every day, billions of emails and social media updates, new websites, documents, images, and scientific and commercial big data amounting to petabytes of storage needs and beyond. It is well recognised that nucleic acids, the RNA and DNA that encode the proteins needed to build living things are seemingly quite efficient in storing information and so taking inspiration from this realm, a team from India writes in the International Journal of Nano and Biomaterials how extended nucleic acid memory (NAM) might be the future of data storage technology.

By comparison, a computer hard disk has an information storage capacity of 10 to the 13 bits of data per cubic centimetre, that’s about 1.25 terabytes. NAM has the potential to store a million times that amount in the same volume, 1,250,000 terabytes, or 1250 petabytes, 1.25 exabytes. If we consider the information contained in the “big four” of the internet – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook – that is the sum of all the data they have storable in a single cubic centimetre of NAM.

Saptarshi Biswas of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at the Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology, in Kolkata, India, and colleagues Subhrapratim Nath, Jamuna Kanta Sing, and Subir Kumar Sarkar of Jadavpur University have now developed a new encoding approach allowing them to talk of extended NAM. Their method efficiently maps binary data on to a hybrid system of standard as well as using non-standard genetic nucleotides (in addition to the familiar G, A, T, and C (guanosine, adenosine, thymine, and cytosine, of DNA) to achieve a higher data capacity. The natural pairing up of the GATC bases in DNA is what gives us the double-helix and allows information to be encoded for the production of proteins whether in a fungus, a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.

The team has added two new non-standard nucleotides, to give them additional pairings Ds-Px (thienylimidazopyridine and a nitropropynylpyrrole) and Im-Na (an imidazopyrimidine and a naphthyridine). These are very stable units to complement the pairings of A-T and C-G in a natural nucleic acid. They are also highly selective in such a molecule, specifically DNA. This could potentially take the hypothetical storage capacity of that single cubic centimetre of NAM to several times the 1.25 exabyte value mentioned above. Indeed, the team writes that extended RAM would have a capacity of more than 630 exabytes per gram of DNA, which assuming DNA has a density of 1.7 grams per cubic centimetre is more more than 370 exabytes per cubic centimetre of extended NAM. that’s almost 300 times the total information held by the big four of the internet today.

Biswas, S., Nath, S., Sing, J.K. and Sarkar, S.K. (2020) ‘Extended nucleic acid memory as the future of data storage technology’, Int. J. Nano and Biomaterials, Vol. 9, Nos. 1/2, pp.2–17.

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• Theoretical study of anisotropic tunnelling conductance in iron-based orbitally ordered superconductors
• Development of self-assembled polygalacturonic acid-peptide composites and their interactions with mesenchymal stem cells for potential applications in tendon tissue engineering
• The theoretical study of the correlation between band filling and Coulomb interaction in the charge gap of graphene-on-substrate in paramagnetic limit
• The tight-binding model study of the role of electron occupancy on the ferromagnetic gap in graphene-on-substrate
• Microscopic study of the role of second nearest neighbour spin density wave coupling and electron hopping on superconducting gap
• Theoretical study of anisotropy in orbital and antiferromagnetic spin orderings in CMR manganites
• The study of thermal properties of f-electron systems in the ferromagnetic state
• Synthesis of high surface area boehmite and alumina by using walnut shell as template

Special issue published: "Impact of Nanotechnology on Devices for Integrated Circuits"

International Journal of Nano and Biomaterials 9(1/2) 2020

• Extended nucleic acid memory as the future of data storage technology
• Role of stress/strain mapping and random dopant fluctuation in advanced CMOS process technology nodes
• Strain engineering in AlGaN/GaN HEMTs for performance enhancement
• Controlled hardware architecture for fractal image compression
• All optical four bit two's complement generator and single bit comparator using reflective semiconductor optical amplifier
• Polysaccharide capped antibacterial silver nanoparticles synthesis using green chemistry
• Investigation on microstructures and phases of Fe-Ga alloy films deposited by magnetron sputtering

Research pick: The true cost of R&D - "How companies respond to growing research costs: cost control or value creation?"

An analysis of case studies of research and development intensive companies published in the International Journal of Technology Management reveals that companies do not necessarily perceive R&D as a cost, per se. The international team reports and assesses the different strategies companies can employ to respond to growing research costs. Because on the bottom line, R&D is a cost.

Their work shows that companies do see the expense of R&D as a secondary factor. “The main drivers of research investments are based on the expected value of innovations, risk and strategic competence development, and anticipating uncertainty concerning the kind of research that might be needed in the future,” the team writes.

Karl-Heinz Leitner of the Center for Innovation Systems and Policy, at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, in Vienna and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Applied Business Studies at the University of Graz, also in Austria, and colleagues in Italy, The Netherlands, and the USA, emphasise that while there is a large body of research literature on studying the different strategies that might be used to exploit R&D investments, researchers actually know little about the relative importance of controlling costs. Their analysis of case studies of European and US firms that are R&D intensive reveals much about how R&D costs are perceived.

They found that “value creation” is the predominant emphasis of R&D managers and cost does not appear to be a key factor in directing and managing R&D nor in their response to growing R&D costs. However, there is no binary decision to be made between cost control and value creation. They conclude that it is important for R&D managers to develop dynamic capabilities and business models that can adjust the company’s R&D agenda to the changing technological, market and regulatory environment.

Leitner, K-H., Poti, B.M., Wintjes, R.J.M. and Youtie, J. (2020) ‘How companies respond to growing research costs: cost control or value creation?’, Int. J. Technology Management, Vol. 82, No. 1, pp.1–25.

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• Corporate returns to subsidised R&D projects: direct grants vs. tax credit financing
• Investigating technological strategy and relevance of knowledge domains in R&D collaborations
• Citation impact of public and private funding on nanotechnology-related publications
• Are innovation resources and capabilities enough to make businesses sustainable? An empirical study of leading sustainable innovative firms

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• Mathematical model and optimisation for tensile strength of human hair reinforced polyester composites
• Comparative study on effects of slurry erosive parameters on plasma sprayed flyash-Al2O3 and flyash-SiC composite coatings on Al6061 alloy
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• The simulation for ultrasonic testing based on frequency-phase coded excitation
• Numerical analysis of stress-induced and concentration-dependent carbon diffusion in low-temperature surface carburisation of 316L stainless steel
• Deformation control study on H-beam welded by a finite element model
• Latest developments in virtual casting of lightweight metals

Free sample articles newly available from International Journal of Corporate Governance

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• The nexus between effective corporate monitoring and CEO compensation
• Does corporate governance influence the working capital management of firms: evidence from India
• Corporate governance in India - battle of stakes
• Disclosures of unethical practices: framework for the promotion of whistle-blowing in Nigeria's corporate governance

Research pick: Tightening up facial biometrics - "Face spoof detection using feature map superposition and CNN"

Facial biometrics for security applications is an important modern technology. Unfortunately, there is the possibility of “spoofing” a person’s face to the sensor or detection system through the use of a photograph or even video presented to the security system. A team from China has now developed a counter-measure that could preclude face spoofing and make such biometric security systems far less prone to abuse. The team reports details in the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering.

Fei Gu, Zhihua Xia, Jianwei Fei, Chengsheng Yuan, and Qiang Zhang of Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, explain how anti-spoofing technology usually looks to illumination differences, colour differences, or textures differences to spot issues with the presented face to determine whether or not the face is a photo or video rather than a live human in front of the security camera. However, even these approaches are vulnerable.

In order to make a stronger anti-spoofing system, the team has proposed a method based on various feature maps and convolution neural networks for photo and video replay attacks. They explain that facial contour and specularly reflected features are taken into account when verifying a face so that depth and width can be determined, aspects of a living face that are not present in a photograph. Their proof of principle shows remarkable performance against multiple datasets and shows that the method can defend not only photo attack, but also video replay attack with a very low error rate.

Gu, F., Xia, Z., Fei, J., Yuan, C. and Zhang, Q. (2020) ‘Face spoof detection using feature map superposition and CNN’, Int. J. Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 22, Nos. 2/3, pp.355–363.

Research pick: Negapedia - "To beat or not to beat: uncovering the world social battles with Wikipedia"

The rules surrounding information have changed with the ongoing development of the digital world. Information has become accessible to almost everyone around the world, any time of the day or night, at the touch of a mobile phone screen or the click of a mouse.

Writing in the International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, a team from Italy, reiterates this point and points out that at this stage in the evolution of those rules there are now a handful of central hubs providing almost all of the information that the vast majority of the population accesses: the major search engines, such as Google and Baidu, the big social media networks, Facebook and Twitters, and a few other repositories, such as Wikipedia and their more local equivalents in Russia, China, and other parts of the world that have certain barriers to globalization.

Massimo Marchior and Enrico Bonetti Vieno of the University of Padua, explain how a system like Wikipedia has many pros but also various cons. It has been enormously successful as a dynamic, online alternative to conventional encyclopedia. However, the distributed nature of its content, sources, and editors, also gives rise to some problems. Fundamentally, the team writes “everybody can contribute and so also manipulate information in a way that is practically invisible to the general public.”

They describe the “Negapedia” system, which is an online public service that offers a more complete picture of the underlying layers of Wikipedia. It involves big data analysis and the need to overcome information overload, but it also offers novel insights into the important issue of Wikipedia categorisation, analysing the problem of presenting general users with easy and meaningful category information. Negapedia can, the team reports, reveal the social turbulence that underlies much of the content and the editorial battles that take place, particularly surrounding controversial subjects, such as politics, religion, conspiracy theories, and activism and advocacy.

An additional point of interest that emerges from this study is the connection between controversial information and the level of interest in that subject matter. “We found out that there is in fact correlation between topics of high interest to users and conflict, thus showing that controversy seems to be tightly linked with popularity.” They add that perhaps one aspects drives the other. “To some extent, controversy (negativity) can be seen as a natural phenomenon arising from people interest,” they add.

Marchiori, M. and Vieno, E.B. (2020) ‘To beat or not to beat: uncovering the world social battles with Wikipedia’, Int. J. Big Data Intelligence, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.110–125.

Research pick: Cockle shells picked to treat dog cancer - "Targeted delivery of doxorubicin-loaded cockle shell-derived CaCO3 aragonite nanoparticles on dogs with solid tumours"

The calcium mineral from which many shellfish, such as cockles, make their shells can be used to form nanoparticles. These nanoparticles can then be “loaded” with small drug molecules, such as anticancer drugs.

Writing in the International Journal of Nanotechnology a team from Malaysia and Nigeria explains how nanoparticles made from the cockleshell material calcium carbonate aragonite can be used to carry the anticancer drug doxorubicin. These drug-loaded nanoparticles have been used to successfully treat dogs with solid tumours.

Treating solid tumours is problematic in cancer therapy because the malignant mass is often inaccessible to conventional anticancer drugs. High doses are needed to attack the tumour, but this comes at a price in terms of side-effects, such as damage to the heart with doxorubicin, for instance. Finding ways to target the tumour with the drug more directly would mean a lower dose could be used and still have the same effect but without the cardiotoxicity.

Cockle shell-derived calcium carbonate has been shown to have potential as a drug-delivery agent by using it to fabricate nanoparticles to carry the drug. The present team has now carried out a prospective single centre, non-blind open clinical trial of repeated doses of the nanocomposite on dogs with solid tumours in their bones over the course of fifteen weeks.

The team reports no major adverse effects and success was seen in treating bone cancer in the dogs with great improvement in the quality of life of the animals.

Danmaigoro, A., Selvarajah, G.T., Mohd Noor, M.H., Mahmud, R., Ahmed, H., Abubakar, M.Z. ‘Targeted delivery of doxorubicin-loaded cockle shell-derived CaCO3 aragonite nanoparticles on dogs with solid tumours’, Int.J.Nanotechnol., Vol 16, Nos. 11/12, pp. 730-749.