Real-time acoustic classification of sperm whale clicks and shipping impulses from deep-sea observatories

The automated real-time detection and classification of cetacean and anthropogenic sounds from deep-sea observatories can play a key role to study cetaceans in the field, to quantify the impact of anthropogenic sounds or to initiate mitigation measures during potentially harmful human activities. In the area of the NEMO-ONDE deep-sea observatory, sperm whales are often present together with heavy shipping. The spatial coincidence of both sound sources allows for the long term monitoring of their interaction. Some ships produce impulsive sounds and the automated separation of these impulses from sperm whale clicks is not a trivial task. As part of a detection, classification and localisation system for acoustic data from marine observatories, we present four modules performing the automated real-time classification of clicks from sperm whales and impulsive sounds produced by ships. First, two modules detect segments that contain impulsive sounds within a specifiable frequency band and return the impulses’ positions. Then, two modules classify the detected impulses as sperm whale clicks or ship impulses. Finally, at the level of 22 s segments, the classification outputs from individual impulses are combined into a decision on the presence of sperm whale clicks or ship impulses. The modules’ reliability was tested on data from the NEMO-ONDE observatory. Training and testing data were separated by more than 2 months, enabling to assess the consistency of the predictions over the long term. The automated separation between segments of the two classes was high with area under the ROC curve (AUC) values between 0.94 and 0.98.     

Scattered waves and motions of marine vessels advancing in a seaway

The steady forward motion of a marine vessel modifies the incident and scattered waves as well as its dynamic characteristics in a seaway. Small amplitude assumptions of the surface waves and vessel dynamic responses lead to linearization of the potential flow problem and its solution in the frequency domain. The mathematical formulation adopts a translating coordinate system at the vessel forward speed. The free surface boundary condition accounts for the modification of the uniform current around the vessel and a new radiation condition takes into account the Doppler shift of the scattered waves. A boundary element model, based on the Rankine source distribution, describes the steady and oscillatory flows around the vessel. Stokes’ theorem allows evaluation of the surface integrals involving the so-called m-terms due to oscillation of the vessel in a current. Through a numerical experiment with a Wigley hull form, we establish the convergence of the numerical model, verify the radiation condition, and examine the scattered wave patterns for a full range of forward speeds. Previous laboratory data provides validation of the computed hydrodynamic coefficients and dynamic response as well as the potential flow model for general seakeeping applications.     

Statistical DOE-ILP based power-performance-process (P3) optimization of nano-CMOS SRAM

As technology continues to scale, maintaining important figures of merit of Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs), such as power dissipation and an acceptable Static Noise Margin (SNM), becomes increasingly challenging. In this paper, we address SRAM instability and power (leakage) dissipation in scaled-down technologies by presenting a novel design flow for simultaneous power minimization, performance maximization and process variation tolerance (P3) optimization of nano-CMOS circuits. The 45 and 32 nm technology node standard 6-Transistor (6T) and 8T SRAM cells are used as example circuits for demonstration of the effectiveness of the flow. Thereafter, the SRAM cell is subjected to a dual threshold voltage (dual-V_Th) assignment based on a novel statistical Design of Experiments-Integer Linear Programming (DOE-ILP) approach. Experimental results show 61% leakage power reduction and 13% increase in the read SNM. In addition, process variation analysis of the optimized cell is conducted considering the variability effect in twelve device parameters. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study which makes use of statistical DOE-ILP for optimization of conflicting targets of stability and power in the presence of process variations in SRAMs.     

Employee perception towards electronic monitoring at work place and its impact on job satisfaction of software professionals in Sri Lanka

Electronic monitoring is a rapidly growing phenomenon in Sri Lankan software industry. It allows employers to observe what employees do on the job and review employee communications, including e-mail and internet activity that employees consider private. Often, employers use electronic monitoring to ensure organizational confidentiality, limiting employer liability for employee misconduct. From the perspective of employees, electronic monitoring by employers involves several privacy and confidentiality concerns. Most of the time, employee performance and productivity aspects captured via electronic monitoring are effectively used by the Human Resources Departments, for decision making associated with the employees.Majority of the software development organizations in Sri Lanka today use some means of electronic technology to monitor their employee activities. Most of the time, employee perception towards electronic monitoring at work, contradicts with the need for law enforcement within the organization intended by the top management. Employers justify electronic monitoring at work place in terms of protecting the company’s confidential information, preventing the misuse of the organizational resources while uplifting the quality of work and productivity. On the other hand, the mutual trust that should be there between the employer and the employee is in question. Therefore, this study empirically investigated the relationship that might exist between the software professionals’ perception towards electronic monitoring at work place and its impact on their job satisfaction.Based on disproportionate stratified random sampling, data were collected from 380 software professionals in Sri Lanka, by administrating a structured questionnaire in which items were of 5 point Lickert scale. The data analysis included the univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses.In this study, Perceived Relevance to Work and Personal Judgment of Effectiveness which were two variables used to measure perception of electronic monitoring were positively correlated with Job Satisfaction. This means that the software professionals, who view electronic monitoring as something which is relevant to their work as well as which uplifts the quality of their work, are satisfied in their jobs. Perceived Invasion of Privacy was negatively correlated to Job Satisfaction, which sheds some light in organizational electronic monitoring policy making. Also, Perceived Task Satisfaction was negatively correlated to Job Satisfaction. This means that the software professionals, who thought that working in an electronically monitored environment makes their tasks more complex, are rather dissatisfied in the job. Also, it appeared that the impact of electronic monitoring at work place on the job satisfaction of software professionals becomes less significant along with higher professional experience.The findings of this research can be incorporated in IT security policy making in the software development organizations in Sri Lanka and in similar economics, with a special emphasis on the job satisfaction of their employees, which is the most valuable asset of the organization.     

What do we want specifically from the cell phone? An age related study

This study investigated the evolution of specific cell phone feature preferences among high school, undergraduate and graduate college students in Finland. Following the relevant literature review, the paper analyzed the responses of 118 high school, 268 undergraduate and 84 graduate students from educational institutions located in the metropolitan area of Tampere, Finland. The results indicate that the students in Finland appreciate the specific feature “clock”, “phone”, “high battery life”, “alarm”, and “calendar” as very important, and the specific features “TV connectivity”, “joystick”, “live TV”, “Twitter”, and “small screen size” as unimportant features. There were also significant differences in the specific feature preferences between the students between high school, undergraduate and graduate students. In addition there were differences in the way the respondents conceptualize the specific feature preferences of the cell phone. The paper concludes with a discussion regarding the academic and managerial implications.     

QoS for wireless sensor networks: Enabling service differentiation at the MAC sub-layer using CoSenS

Providing service differentiation in wireless sensor networks while proposing simple and highly scalable solution is a challenging problem. We retain the use of CSMA/CA as access protocol because of its simplicity, versatility and good scalability properties. We developed CoSenS, a Collect then Send burst Scheme, on top of it to address its weaknesses while facilitating the implementation of scheduling policies. In this article, we propose a simple and scalable service differentiation solution; we implement fixed priority and earliest deadline first on top of CoSenS. The simulation analysis shows that our solution self-adapts to the traffic variation and greatly enhances end-to-end delay, reliability and deadline meet ratio for urgent traffic while not degrading best effort traffic compared to IEEE 802.15.4 original protocol and IEEE 802.15.4 implementing these scheduling policies. Additionally, CoSenS is implemented and tested on motes. The real experimentation results validated our simulation analysis.     

Mobility impact in IEEE 802.11p infrastructureless vehicular networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an extreme case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). High speed and frequent network topology changes are the main characteristics of vehicular networks. These characteristics lead to special issues and challenges in the network design, especially at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of mobility impact on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance. The study evaluates basic performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, and delay. An unfairness problem due to the relative speed is identified for both broadcast and unicast scenarios. We propose two dynamic contention window mechanisms to alleviate network performance degradation due to high mobility. The first scheme provides dynamic level of service priority via adaptation to the number of neighboring nodes, while the second scheme provides service priority based on node relative speed. Extensive simulation results demonstrate a significant impact of mobility on the IEEE 802.11p MAC performance, the unfairness problem in the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, and the effectiveness of the proposed MAC schemes.     

QoS provisioning for large-scale multi-ap WLANs

Large-scale deployment of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) with a high density of access points (APs) has become commonplace due mainly to its potential for numerous benefits, such as ubiquitous service coverage, seamless handover, and improved link quality. However, the increased AP density can induce significant channel contention among neighboring cells, thus causing severe performance degradation and throughput imbalance between cells. There have been a plethora of research efforts to improve the WLAN performance, but most of them focused only on single WLAN environments without accounting for inter-cell contention. The de facto QoS-provisioning mechanism for WLANs, i.e., the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), is no exception to this. The EDCA focuses only on inter-flow priority distinction and has not considered the effect of inter-cell contention which significantly restricts its efficiency. This paper presents an enhanced QoS provisioning framework that takes into account inter-cell level differentiation as well as inter-flow level priority, which may be viewed as extension of QoS provisioning from a single-WLAN domain to a multi-WLAN domain. We also propose an architecture for managing multi-AP systems in which a central controller regulates the wireless channel occupancy of APs by adaptively configuring the cell-level QoS parameters. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed inter-AP cooperative QoS scheme overcomes the limit of legacy 802.11e and provides a high level of fairness in large-scale densely-deployed WLANs.     

Nodes organization for channel assignment with topology preservation in multi-radio wireless mesh networks

The wireless mesh network is a new emerging broadband technology providing the last-mile Internet access for mobile users by exploiting the advantage of multiple radios and multiple channels. The throughput improvement of the network relies heavily on the utilizing the orthogonal channels. However, an improper channel assignment scheme may lead to network partition or links failure. In this paper we consider the assignment strategy with topology preservation by organizing the mesh nodes with available channels, and aim at minimizing the co-channel interference in the network. The channel assignment with the topology preservation is proved to be NP-hard and to find the optimized solution in polynomial time is impossible. We have formulated a channel assignment algorithm named as DPSO-CA which is based on the discrete particle swarm optimization and can be used to find the approximate optimized solution. We have shown that our algorithm can be easily extended to the case with uneven traffic load in the network. The impact of radio utilization during the channel assignment process is discussed too. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated that our algorithm has good performance in both dense and sparse networks compared with related works.