Search

Despite basic differences between Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), most research on SNNs involve adapting ANN-based methods for SNNs. Pruning (dropping connections) and quantization (reducing precision) are often used to improve energy efficiency of SNNs. These methods are very effective for ANNs whose energy needs are determined by signals transmitted on synapses. However, the event-driven paradigm in SNNs implies that energy is consumed by spikes. In this paper, we propose a new synapse model whose weights are modulated by Interspike Intervals (ISI) i.e. time difference between two spikes. SNNs composed of this synapse model, termed ISI Modulated SNNs (IMSNN), can use gradient descent to estimate how the ISI of a neuron changes after updating its synaptic parameters. A higher ISI implies fewer spikes and vice-versa. The learning algorithm for IMSNNs exploits this information to selectively propagate gradients such that learning is achieved by increasing the ISIs resulting in a network that generates fewer spikes. The performance of IMSNNs with dense and convolutional layers have been evaluated in terms of classification accuracy and the number of spikes using the MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets. The performance comparison with conventional SNNs shows that IMSNNs exhibit upto 90% reduction in the number of spikes while maintaining similar classification accuracy., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

As the number of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) increases significantly, it leads to an exponential growth in the number of services that need to be processed and stored in the large-scale Cloud-based service repositories. An efficient service indexing model is critical for service retrieval and management of large-scale Cloud-based service repositories. The multilevel index model is the state-of-art service indexing model in recent years to improve service discovery and combination. This paper aims to optimize the model to consider the impact of unequal appearing probability of service retrieval request parameters and service input parameters on service retrieval and service addition operations. The least-used key selection method has been proposed to narrow the search scope of service retrieval and reduce its time. The experimental results show that the proposed least-used key selection method improves the service retrieval efficiency significantly compared with the designated key selection method in the case of the unequal appearing probability of parameters in service retrieval requests under three indexing models.

The COVID19 pandemic has demonstrated a need for remote learning and virtual learning applications such as virtual reality (VR) and tablet-based solutions. Creating complex learning scenarios by developers is highly time-consuming and can take over a year. It is also costly to employ teams of system analysts, developers and 3D artists. There is a requirement to provide a simple method to enable lecturers to create their own content for their laboratory tutorials. Research has been undertaken into developing generic models to enable the semi-automatic creation of a virtual learning tools for subjects that require practical interactions with the lab resources. In addition to the system for creating digital twins, a case study describing the creation of a virtual learning application for an electrical laboratory tutorial has been presented., Comment: 56 pages, 14 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2106.09344. Added version accepted for publication

Object recognition from live video streams comes with numerous challenges such as the variation in illumination conditions and poses. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used to perform intelligent visual object recognition. Yet, CNNs still suffer from severe accuracy degradation, particularly on illumination-variant datasets. To address this problem, we propose a new CNN method based on orientation fusion for visual object recognition. The proposed cloud-based video analytics system pioneers the use of bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition to split a video frame into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). We further propose these IMFs to endure Reisz transform to produce monogenic object components, which are in turn used for the training of CNNs. Past works have demonstrated how the object orientation component may be used to pursue accuracy levels as high as 93\%. Herein we demonstrate how a feature-fusion strategy of the orientation components leads to further improving visual recognition accuracy to 97\%. We also assess the scalability of our method, looking at both the number and the size of the video streams under scrutiny. We carry out extensive experimentation on the publicly available Yale dataset, including also a self generated video datasets, finding significant improvements (both in accuracy and scale), in comparison to AlexNet, LeNet and SE-ResNeXt, which are the three most commonly used deep learning models for visual object recognition and classification.

There is a need for remote learning and virtual learning applications such as virtual reality (VR) and tablet-based solutions which the current pandemic has demonstrated. Creating complex learning scenarios by developers is highly time-consuming and can take over a year. There is a need to provide a simple method to enable lecturers to create their own content for their laboratory tutorials. Research is currently being undertaken into developing generic models to enable the semi-automatic creation of a virtual learning application. A case study describing the creation of a virtual learning application for an electrical laboratory tutorial is presented., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication ICMR2021 18th International Conference in Manufacturing Research Virtual Conference hosted by the University of Derby, UK 7 - 10 September 2021

With the development of Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, edge devices are witnessed to generate data at unprecedented volume. The Edge Intelligence (EI) has led to the emergence of edge devices in various application domains. The EI can provide efficient services to delay-sensitive applications, where the edge devices are deployed as edge nodes to host the majority of execution, which can effectively manage services and improve service discovery efficiency. The multilevel index model is a well-known model used for indexing service, such a model is being introduced and optimized in the edge environments to efficiently services discovery whilst managing large volumes of data. However, effectively updating the multilevel index model by adding new services timely and precisely in the dynamic Edge Computing environments is still a challenge. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes a designated key selection method to improve the efficiency of adding services in the multilevel index models. Our experimental results show that in the partial index and the full index of multilevel index model, our method reduces the service addition time by around 84% and 76%, respectively when compared with the original key selection method and by around 78% and 66%, respectively when compared with the random selection method. Our proposed method significantly improves the service addition efficiency in the multilevel index model, when compared with existing state-of-the-art key selection methods, without compromising the service retrieval stability to any notable level.

Clinical predictions using clinical data by computational methods are common in bioinformatics. However, clinical predictions using information from genomics datasets as well is not a frequently observed phenomenon in research. Precision medicine research requires information from all available datasets to provide intelligent clinical solutions. In this paper, we have attempted to create a prediction model which uses information from both clinical and genomics datasets. We have demonstrated multiclass disease predictions based on combined clinical and genomics datasets using machine learning methods. We have created an integrated dataset, using a clinical (ClinVar) and a genomics (gene expression) dataset, and trained it using instance-based learner to predict clinical diseases. We have used an innovative but simple way for multiclass classification, where the number of output classes is as high as 75. We have used Principal Component Analysis for feature selection. The classifier predicted diseases with 73\% accuracy on the integrated dataset. The results were consistent and competent when compared with other classification models. The results show that genomics information can be reliably included in datasets for clinical predictions and it can prove to be valuable in clinical diagnostics and precision medicine.

Industry 4.0, or Digital Manufacturing, is a vision of inter-connected services to facilitate innovation in the manufacturing sector. A fundamental requirement of innovation is the ability to be able to visualise manufacturing data, in order to discover new insight for increased competitive advantage. This article describes the enabling technologies that facilitate In-Transit Analytics, which is a necessary precursor for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) visualisation., Comment: 8 pages, 10th IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings-2017), Exeter, UK, 2017

We outline the approach being developed in the neuGRID project to use provenance management techniques for the purposes of capturing and preserving the provenance data that emerges in the specification and execution of workflows in biomedical analyses. In the neuGRID project a provenance service has been designed and implemented that is intended to capture, store, retrieve and reconstruct the workflow information needed to facilitate users in conducting user analyses. We describe the architecture of the neuGRID provenance service and discuss how the CRISTAL system from CERN is being adapted to address the requirements of the project and then consider how a generalised approach for provenance management could emerge for more generic application to the (Health)Grid community., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 8th HealthGrid Int. Conference (HG'10). Paris, France. June 2010

The current BDII model relies on information gathering from agents that run on each core node of a Grid. This information is then published into a Grid wide information resource known as Top BDII. The Top level BDIIs are updated typically in cycles of a few minutes each. A new BDDI architecture is proposed and described in this paper based on the hypothesis that only a few attribute values change in each BDDI information cycle and consequently it may not be necessary to update each parameter in a cycle. It has been demonstrated that significant performance gains can be achieved by exchanging only the information about records that changed during a cycle. Our investigations have led us to implement a low latency and fault tolerant BDII system that involves only minimal data transfer and facilitates secure transactions in a Grid environment., Comment: 18 pages; 10 figures; 4 tables

Ubiquitous computing environments are characterised by smart, interconnected artefacts embedded in our physical world that are projected to provide useful services to human inhabitants unobtrusively. Mobile devices are becoming the primary tools of human interaction with these embedded artefacts and utilisation of services available in smart computing environments such as clouds. Advancements in capabilities of mobile devices allow a number of user and environment related context consumers to be hosted on these devices. Without a coordinating component, these context consumers and providers are a potential burden on device resources; specifically the effect of uncoordinated computation and communication with cloud-enabled services can negatively impact the battery life. Therefore energy conservation is a major concern in realising the collaboration and utilisation of mobile device based context-aware applications and cloud based services. This paper presents the concept of a context-brokering component to aid in coordination and communication of context information between mobile devices and services deployed in a cloud infrastructure. A prototype context broker is experimentally analysed for effects on energy conservation when accessing and coordinating with cloud services on a smart device, with results signifying reduction in energy consumption., Comment: 27 pages; 17 figures; 2 tables. Under review at the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. 2011

We outline the approach being developed in the neuGRID project to use provenance management techniques for the purposes of capturing and preserving the provenance data that emerges in the specification and execution of workflows in biomedical analyses. In the neuGRID project a provenance service has been designed and implemented that is intended to capture, store, retrieve and reconstruct the workflow information needed to facilitate users in conducting user analyses. We describe the architecture of the neuGRID provenance service and discuss how the CRISTAL system from CERN is being adapted to address the requirements of the project and then consider how a generalised approach for provenance management could emerge for more generic application to the (Health)Grid community., Comment: 9 pages; 5 figures. Proceedings of the 8th HealthGrid Int. Conference (HG'10). Paris, France. June 2010

By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised, distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline services as examples., Comment: 6 pages; 3 figures.Proceedings the 7th HealthGrid Int. Conference (HG'09). Berlin, Germany. June 2009

With the emergence of new methodologies and technologies it has now become possible to manage large amounts of environmental sensing data and apply new integrated computing models to acquire information intelligence. This paper advocates the application of cloud capacity to support the information, communication and decision making needs of a wide variety of stakeholders in the complex business of the management of urban and regional development. The complexity lies in the interactions and impacts embodied in the concept of the urban-ecosystem at various governance levels. This highlights the need for more effective integrated environmental management systems. This paper offers a user-orientated approach based on requirements for an effective management of the urban-ecosystem and the potential contributions that can be supported by the cloud computing community. Furthermore, the commonality of the influence of the drivers of change at the urban level offers the opportunity for the cloud computing community to develop generic solutions that can serve the needs of hundreds of cities from Europe and indeed globally., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Complex scientific workflows can process large amounts of data using thousands of tasks. The turnaround times of these workflows are often affected by various latencies such as the resource discovery, scheduling and data access latencies for the individual workflow processes or actors. Minimizing these latencies will improve the overall execution time of a workflow and thus lead to a more efficient and robust processing environment. In this paper, we propose a pilot job based infrastructure that has intelligent data reuse and job execution strategies to minimize the scheduling, queuing, execution and data access latencies. The results have shown that significant improvements in the overall turnaround time of a workflow can be achieved with this approach. The proposed approach has been evaluated, first using the CMS Tier0 data processing workflow, and then simulating the workflows to evaluate its effectiveness in a controlled environment., Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence-based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health-e-Child project., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the 11th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (Ideas2007). Banff, Canada September 2007

Grid Computing has made substantial advances in the past decade; these are primarily due to the adoption of standardized Grid middleware. However Grid computing has not yet become pervasive because of some barriers that we believe have been caused by the adoption of middleware centric approaches. These barriers include: scant support for major types of applications such as interactive applications; lack of flexible, autonomic and scalable Grid architectures; lack of plug-and-play Grid computing and, most importantly, no straightforward way to setup and administer Grids. PhantomOS is a project which aims to address many of these barriers. Its goal is the creation of a user friendly pervasive Grid computing platform that facilitates the rapid deployment and easy maintenance of Grids whilst providing support for major types of applications on Grids of almost any topology. In this paper we present the detailed system architecture and an overview of its implementation., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Presented at the UK eScience All Hands Meeting 2007 (AHM07). Nottingham, UK. September 2007

In Grids scheduling decisions are often made on the basis of jobs being either data or computation intensive: in data intensive situations jobs may be pushed to the data and in computation intensive situations data may be pulled to the jobs. This kind of scheduling, in which there is no consideration of network characteristics, can lead to performance degradation in a Grid environment and may result in large processing queues and job execution delays due to site overloads. In this paper we describe a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) meta-scheduling approach, which takes into account data, processing power and network characteristics when making scheduling decisions across multiple sites. Through a practical implementation on a Grid testbed, we demonstrate that queue and execution times of data-intensive jobs can be significantly improved when we introduce our proposed DIANA scheduler. The basic scheduling decisions are dictated by a weighting factor for each potential target location which is a calculated function of network characteristics, processing cycles and data location and size. The job scheduler provides a global ranking of the computing resources and then selects an optimal one on the basis of this overall access and execution cost. The DIANA approach considers the Grid as a combination of active network elements and takes network characteristics as a first class criterion in the scheduling decision matrix along with computation and data. The scheduler can then make informed decisions by taking into account the changing state of the network, locality and size of the data and the pool of available processing cycles., Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures. Early draft of paper to be submitted to Journal of Grid Computing

Results from the research and development of a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) scheduling engine, to be used primarily for data intensive sciences such as physics analysis, are described. In Grid analyses, tasks can involve thousands of computing, data handling, and network resources. The central problem in the scheduling of these resources is the coordinated management of computation and data at multiple locations and not just data replication or movement. However, this can prove to be a rather costly operation and efficient sing can be a challenge if compute and data resources are mapped without considering network costs. We have implemented an adaptive algorithm within the so-called DIANA Scheduler which takes into account data location and size, network performance and computation capability in order to enable efficient global scheduling. DIANA is a performance-aware and economy-guided Meta Scheduler. It iteratively allocates each job to the site that is most likely to produce the best performance as well as optimizing the global queue for any remaining jobs. Therefore it is equally suitable whether a single job is being submitted or bulk scheduling is being performed. Results indicate that considerable performance improvements can be gained by adopting the DIANA scheduling approach., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. To be published in the IEEE Transactions in Nuclear Science, IEEE Press. 2006

Grid computing has made substantial advances during the last decade. Grid middleware such as Globus has contributed greatly in making this possible. There are, however, significant barriers to the adoption of Grid computing in other fields, most notably day-to-day user computing environments. We will demonstrate in this paper that this is primarily due to the limitations of the existing Grid middleware which does not take into account the needs of everyday scientific and business users. In this paper we will formally advocate a Grid Operating System and propose an architecture to migrate Grid computing into a Grid operating system which we believe would help remove most of the technical barriers to the adoption of Grid computing and make it relevant to the day-to-day user. We believe this proposed transition to a Grid operating system will drive more pervasive Grid computing research and application development and deployment in future., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Presented at the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing. Changsha, China. October 2006

Results from and progress on the development of a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) Scheduling engine, primarily for data intensive sciences such as physics analysis, are described. Scientific analysis tasks can involve thousands of computing, data handling, and network resources and the size of the input and output files and the amount of overall storage space allocated to a user necessarily can have significant bearing on the scheduling of data intensive applications. If the input or output files must be retrieved from a remote location, then the time required transferring the files must also be taken into consideration when scheduling compute resources for the given application. The central problem in this study is the coordinated management of computation and data at multiple locations and not simply data movement. However, this can be a very costly operation and efficient scheduling can be a challenge if compute and data resources are mapped without network cost. We have implemented an adaptive algorithm within the DIANA Scheduler which takes into account data location and size, network performance and computation capability to make efficient global scheduling decisions. DIANA is a performance-aware as well as an economy-guided Meta Scheduler. It iteratively allocates each job to the site that is likely to produce the best performance as well as optimizing the global queue for any remaining pending jobs. Therefore it is equally suitable whether a single job is being submitted or bulk scheduling is being performed. Results suggest that considerable performance improvements are to be gained by adopting the DIANA scheduling approach., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by the Computing for High Energy Physics Conference. Mumbai, Indai. February 2006

High Energy Physics (HEP) and other scientific communities have adopted Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as part of a larger Grid computing effort. This effort involves the integration of many legacy applications and programming libraries into a SOA framework. The Grid Analysis Environment (GAE) is such a service oriented architecture based on the Clarens Grid Services Framework and is being developed as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Clarens provides a set of authorization, access control, and discovery services, as well as XMLRPC and SOAP access to all deployed services. Two implementations of the Clarens Web Services Framework (Python and Java) offer integration possibilities for a wide range of programming languages. This paper describes the Java implementation of the Clarens Web Services Framework called JClarens. and several web services of interest to the scientific and Grid community that have been deployed using JClarens., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Paper at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS05). Florida, USA. July 2005

Grid based systems require a database access mechanism that can provide seamless homogeneous access to the requested data through a virtual data access system, i.e. a system which can take care of tracking the data that is stored in geographically distributed heterogeneous databases. This system should provide an integrated view of the data that is stored in the different repositories by using a virtual data access mechanism, i.e. a mechanism which can hide the heterogeneity of the backend databases from the client applications. This paper focuses on accessing data stored in disparate relational databases through a web service interface, and exploits the features of a Data Warehouse and Data Marts. We present a middleware that enables applications to access data stored in geographically distributed relational databases without being aware of their physical locations and underlying schema. A web service interface is provided to enable applications to access this middleware in a language and platform independent way. A prototype implementation was created based on Clarens [4], Unity [7] and POOL [8]. This ability to access the data stored in the distributed relational databases transparently is likely to be a very powerful one for Grid users, especially the scientific community wishing to collate and analyze data distributed over the Grid., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Workshop on Web and Grid Services for Scientific Data Analysis at the Int Conf on Parallel Processing (ICPP05). Norway June 2005

Selecting optimal resources for submitting jobs on a computational Grid or accessing data from a data grid is one of the most important tasks of any Grid middleware. Most modern Grid software today satisfies this responsibility and gives a best-effort performance to solve this problem. Almost all decisions regarding scheduling and data access are made by the software automatically, giving users little or no control over the entire process. To solve this problem, a more interactive set of services and middleware is desired that provides users more information about Grid weather, and gives them more control over the decision making process. This paper presents a set of services that have been developed to provide more interactive resource management capabilities within the Grid Analysis Environment (GAE) being developed collaboratively by Caltech, NUST and several other institutes. These include a steering service, a job monitoring service and an estimator service that have been designed and written using a common Grid-enabled Web Services framework named Clarens. The paper also presents a performance analysis of the developed services to show that they have indeed resulted in a more interactive and powerful system for user-centric Grid-enabled physics analysis., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Workshop on Web and Grid Services for Scientific Data Analysis at the Int Conf on Parallel Processing (ICPP05). Norway June 2005

Handheld devices, while growing rapidly, are inherently constrained and lack the capability of executing resource hungry applications. This paper presents the design and implementation of distributed analysis and load-balancing system for hand-held devices using multi-agents system. This system enables low resource mobile handheld devices to act as potential clients for Grid enabled applications and analysis environments. We propose a system, in which mobile agents will transport, schedule, execute and return results for heavy computational jobs submitted by handheld devices. Moreover, in this way, our system provides high throughput computing environment for hand-held devices., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing (GCC 2004)

This paper was withdrawn by the authors., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn

The concept of coupling geographically distributed resources for solving large scale problems is becoming increasingly popular forming what is popularly called grid computing. Management of resources in the Grid environment becomes complex as the resources are geographically distributed, heterogeneous in nature and owned by different individuals and organizations each having their own resource management policies and different access and cost models. There have been many projects that have designed and implemented the resource management systems with a variety of architectures and services. In this paper we have presented the general requirements that a Resource Management system should satisfy. The taxonomy has also been defined based on which survey of resource management systems in different existing Grid projects has been conducted to identify the key areas where these systems lack the desired functionality., Comment: This article was submitted in error in 2004. The author list is incorrect and the body of the paper should be attributed to another paper. We request withdrawal of the paper forthwith to avoid inconsistency in our records