AsTAR: Sustainable Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things through Adaptive Task Scheduling

Battery-free Internet-of-Things devices equipped with energy harvesting hold the promise of extended operational lifetime, reduced maintenance costs, and lower environmental impact. Despite this clear potential, it remains complex to develop applications that deliver sustainable operation in the face of variable energy availability and dynamic energy demands. This article aims to reduce this complexity by introducing AsTAR, an energy-aware task scheduler that automatically adapts task execution rates to match available environmental energy. AsTAR enables the developer to prioritize tasks based upon their importance, energy consumption, or a weighted combination thereof. In contrast to prior approaches, AsTAR is autonomous and self-adaptive, requiring no a priori modeling of the environment or hardware platforms. We evaluate AsTAR based on its capability to efficiently deliver sustainable operation for multiple tasks on heterogeneous platforms under dynamic environmental conditions. Our evaluation shows that (1) comparing to conventional approaches, AsTAR guarantees Sustainability by maintaining a user-defined optimum level of charge, and (2) AsTAR reacts quickly to environmental and platform changes, and achieves Efficiency by allocating all the surplus resources following the developer-specified task priorities. (3) Last, the benefits of AsTAR are achieved with minimal performance overhead in terms of memory, computation, and energy.

A face recognition system using convolutional feature extraction with linear collaborative discriminant regression classification

Face recognition is one of the important biometric authentication research areas for security purposes in many fields such as pattern recognition and image processing. However, the human face recognitions have the major problem in machine learning and deep learning techniques, since input images vary with poses of people, different lighting conditions, various expressions, ages as well as illumination conditions and it makes the face recognition process poor in accuracy. In the present research, the resolution of the image patches is reduced by the max pooling layer in convolutional neural network (CNN) and also used to make the model robust than other traditional feature extraction technique called local multiple pattern (LMP). The extracted features are fed into the linear collaborative discriminant regression classification (LCDRC) for final face recognition. Due to optimization using CNN in LCDRC, the distance ratio between the classes has maximized and the distance of the features inside the class reduces. The results stated that the CNN-LCDRC achieved 93.10% and 87.60% of mean recognition accuracy, where traditional LCDRC achieved 83.35% and 77.70% of mean recognition accuracy on ORL and YALE databases respectively for the training number 8 (i.e. 80% of training and 20% of testing data).

The Conservation and Biogeography of Amphibians in the Caribbean

An expansive and detailed review of the biology of Caribbean amphibians, considering their threats, conservation and outlook in a changing world. Amphibians are the group of vertebrates undergoing the fastest rate of extinction; it is urgent that we understand the causes of this and find means of protecting them. This landmark illustrated volume brings together the leading experts in the field. As well as offering an overview of the region as a whole, individual chapters are devoted to each island or island-group and the measures used to protect their amphibians through legislation or nature reserves. The biological background of insular biogeography, including its methods, analysis and results, is reviewed and applied specifically to the problems of Caribbean amphibians – this includes a re-examination of patterns and general ideas about the status of amphibians in the Anthropocene. The Conservation and Biogeography of Amphibians in the Caribbean offers an important baseline against which future amphibian conservation can be measured in the face of climate change, rising sea level and a burgeoning human population.

English Article Style Recognition and Matching by Using Web Semantics

With the explosion of internet information, people feel helpless and difficult to choose in the face of massive information. However, the traditional method to organize a huge set of original documents is not only time-consuming and laborious, but also not ideal. The automatic text classification can liberate users from the tedious document processing work, recognize and distinguish different document contents more conveniently, make a large number of complicated documents institutionalized and systematized, and greatly improve the utilization rate of information. This paper adopts termed-based model to extract the features in web semantics to represent document. The extracted web semantics features are used to learn a reduced support vector machine. The experimental results show that the proposed method can correctly identify most of the writing styles.

A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire

This book analyses popular imperial culture in the Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the prominent role that the Dutch empire played in many (sometimes unexpected) aspects of civil society, and its significance in mobilising citizens to participate in causes both directly and indirectly related to the overseas colonies, most people seem to have remained indifferent towards imperial affairs. How, then, barring a few jingoist outbursts during the Aceh and Boer Wars, could the empire be simultaneously present and absent in metropolitan life? Drawing upon the works of scholars from fields as diverse as postcolonial studies and Habsburg imperialism, A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire argues that indifference was not an anomaly in the face of an all-permeating imperial culture, but rather the logical consequence of an imperial ideology that treated ‘the metropole’ and ‘the colony’ as entirely separate entities. The various groups and individuals who advocated for imperial or anti-imperial causes – such as missionaries, former colonials, Indonesian students, and boy scouts – had little unmediated contact with one another, and maintained their own distinctive modes of expression. They were all, however, part of what this book terms a ‘fragmented empire’, connected by a Dutch imperial ideology that was common to all of them, and whose central tenet – namely, that the colonies had no bearing on the mother country – they never questioned. What we should not do, the author concludes, is assume that the metropolitan invisibility of colonial culture rendered it powerless.