IT Center Research Articles

Green Technologies for the Energy-optimized Clouds

Worldwide governments and organizations are earnestly looking out for greener technologies, techniques, and tips in order to considerably cut down the rising energy needs and to ensure the globalized goal of environmental sustainability. With IT is being positioned as the greatest business enabler, organizations are forced to allocate higher budget for meetingrising capital and operational costs on IT centers to support and sustain their business operations, outputs, and offerings without any slowdown and breakdown. However to the surprise of many, it was found that IT data centers are drawing abysmally enormous energy and draining energy sources. Hence, there is a clarion call for green IT products, processes, platforms, and practices to significantly reduce the power consumption and the subsequent heat dissipation into our fragile and failing environment. On the other hand, global entrepreneurs and executives are greatly optimistic and enthusiastic that all the noteworthy advancements in IT will come handy in arresting the risky and catastrophic global warming and in slowing down the climate change and the environmental degradation through a host of greener and cleaner technology solutions and services. Therefore, there are sincere and serious endeavors being contemplated and carried out collaboratively by green-centric professionals and practitioners to evolve a series of remedying and rehabilitating steps in the form of robust energy conservation and harvesting. Further on, they are proposing and putting pragmatic proposals and plans for the sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emission and carbon footprint into the delicate and deteriorating atmosphere. In this paper, we have described the promising, potential and powerful IT infrastructural, architectural, technological, and process innovations that are innately and inspiringly enabling greener environments.

Negotiating Women’s Agency through ICTs: A Comparative Study of Uganda and India

In the early wave of optimism surrounding “ICTs and development” beginning 2000, much attention was paid to the potential of ICTs for empowering women. It was suggested that new technologies could help marginalized women in developing countries in areas ranging from agriculture to education, empowering women both economically and socially. However, subsequent research illustrated that such a straight outcome was not always the case. ICT interventions could equally result in a negligible or even negative impact on existing gender relations. This research argues a third point: In many cases women decide the extent to which they will adopt a particular technology on the basis of how they think it will affect the gender equilibrium. Based on our respective doctoral fieldwork on the use of mobile phones by female street traders in urban Uganda and an IT center and community radio in rural India, we ask: How strategically do women in developing countries negotiate agency through ICTs? Through these two case studies, we apply two concepts of agency, namely, “adaptive preference” and “patriarchal bargain” to understand how women decide to adopt ICTs. Empowerment through ICTs is not unproblematic, nor is it impossible; it is, however, illustrative of contextual, situated agency.

The innovation cluster of ICT start-up companies in developing countries: case of Bandung, Indonesia

Innovation is one of critical success factors in determining industrial productivity and competitiveness. In order to foster its national innovation system, Indonesia, as a developing country, has set a goal to introduce innovations in all social and economic sectors for promoting industries in those sectors and then creating a knowledge-based economy. Among widely-recognised approaches to achieve such kind of goal, clustering is one that offers effectiveness and efficiency in promoting competitiveness and economic growth of a region, hence accelerates the economic growth at national level. Of many economic sectors in Indonesia, ICT is arguably a large and rapidly growing sector in the country. The sector is known as a technologically advanced one and is considered as a strategic driver of national as well as regional economic developments. This study aims to explore clusters of innovation in existing ICT start-up companies in Indonesia. Qualitative method is taken as the research method by conducting in-depth interviews with ICT entrepreneurs in Regional IT Center of Excellence (RICE) Bandung, Indonesia. The paper can be referred by further researches which may attempt to investigate innovation clusters in any kind of ICT-based industries.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers

A witty newspaper correspondent who had visited East Anglia noted that as many market towns contained attractive residences with names like ‘The Old Rectory’, ‘The Old Forge’ and ‘The Old Mill’, will visitors two centuries hence be passing ‘The Old IT Centre’, ‘The Old Burger Bar’ or even ‘The Old Social Services Office’? A scrutiny of child care history raises a similar question as past policies and practices, even those within living memory, can seem quaint and incomprehensible. As a colleague remarked, ‘It’s like a glimpse at a Sunday School prize.’ Some things seem so strange that one cannot imagine how people ever believed in and pursued them with vigour. Dozens of examples spring to mind: the shipment of children to the colonies, the institutional care of infants, the terms used for disabilities, the public flogging of miscreants, etc. At the time, these practices seemed so ‘normal’ that critics could be dismissed as woolly-minded liberals. Part of the problem was that there was hardly any robust research available on the effects of what was being done and children’s voices were unheard, so evidence could be conjured up to support almost anything. People could ‘believe’ in things irrespective of their relevance or context, just as my grandmother didn’t ‘believe’ in Christmas cards for reasons I never understood. Separating children from their families inevitably engenders strong emotions and this ‘believe in’ perspective has affected many policies in a way that is less apparent in more science-based disciplines, such as medicine. No one ‘believes’ in surgery; it saves your life if you’ve got peritonitis, is irrelevant for dermatitis and is a possible option for a broken wrist. Adoption has been especially vulnerable to this type of debate, which is hardly surprising as it is the most radical action – apart from execution – that can be taken about a child. But recent years have seen something new: the emergence of a body of knowledge developed from a set of independent studies all indicating similar results. There have been reports on disruption, concurrent planning, long-term outcomes for abused and neglected infants and an overview of a major research programme, as well as studies of particular groups of adoptees and those from other countries. Never before has there been so much information. This can only be a good thing. But is it enough? Most of the new evidence is empirical in that it focuses on establishing facts rather than offering theoretical explanations or comparisons of contexts and alternatives. Julie Selwyn and colleagues, for example, answer the perennial question ‘How many adoptions from care disrupt?’ and conclude that the rate is low – between two and nine percent (Selwyn, Wijedasa and Meakings, 2014: 275). This is good news since it suggests that ‘adoption works’ despite all the challenges and heartbreak some parents face. But is this result sufficient for us to ‘believe’ in it and act with confidence?

An Optimization Scheme for Bank Batch Processing Based on Cloud Computation

Most commercial banks have put their business and data processing into centralized IT&Data centers. Fast business developments require IT centers to handle increasing number and volumes of batch processing; new challenges are how to make full use of available IT resources and have flexible configurations. Cloud Computation is changing the manner how information system architecture is to be redesigned to meet higher service level and IT cost constraints. The core features of IT resource and application virtualization in cloud computation could increase IT center performance and optimize resource allocation algorithms for batch processing in banking, e_commerce and other tense and large-scaled data processing industries. A batch processing optimization scheme is presented which consists in creating a dynamic model by dividing business process into parallel and independent tasks to whom are allocated adequate IT resources. An experimental environment based on Hadoop/MapReduce framework is set up to simulate the performance of the proposed scheme, the simulation results show inspiring advantages which encourage further research and application work.

Virtualisation of network functions and the SDN: Improving the economics of the network

A 'telco' or telecommunications service provider?s network is both the source of its high cost base and source of differentiation. Telcos incur the high capital and operational costs of customised, vendor-proprietary hardware as they seek differentiation through network capacity addition, service quality and coverage improvement. These decisions to invest in the network are motivated by supply-side competition and demand ? particularly cross-segment demand for data services, much of which is for ?over-the-top? social networking and video streaming services that the telco can only partially monetise. This has created a dichotomy of margin erosion ? a high cost to serve with diminishing returns on additional capacity investments. However, an approach that blends IT, networking and data centre technologies promises to improve this equation, as evidenced by primary research, surveys and proof-of-concepts by Hewlett Packard. Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) offers to immediately lower the capital and operational cost base by implementing a growing set of previously closed network platforms and functions on standard IT hardware. This will set the scene in the next few years for faster ?software-defined network? (SDN) additions which will improve utilisation of network assets and allow lower-cost experiments to flex and scale capacity to improve network services and introduce new innovations. This article provides an introductory view of these emergent developments.

Tissue specific role of calcium sensing receptor

IT Centre of Excellence for Advanced Education and Research,P14, Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, Phase 1, Hinjewadi, Pune, Maharashtra­411057, India.E­mail: sudhirk@isquareit.ac.in; Contact number: +91­20­22933441 December 2013 Key words: CaSR, G protein­coupled receptor, signalingAbstractThe calcium sensing receptor (CaSR) is a member of the largest family of cell surface receptors, the Gprotein­coupled receptors involved in calcium homeostasis. Studies identified a crucial role for the CaSRin systemic calcium homeostasis through its ability to sense small changes in circulating calciumconcentration and to combine this information to intracellular signaling pathways that influenceparathyroid hormone secretion. The CaSR is the target of small molecule allosteric modifiers, eitheractivators, calcimimetics, or inhibitors, calcilytics. The presence of CaSR protein in tissues is not directlyinvolved in regulating mineral ion homeostasis points to a role for the CaSR in other cellular functionsincluding the control of cellular proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. This review will provide acomprehensive exploration of the different aspects of tissue expression patterns, and will relate theirimpact on the functionality of the CaSR from a molecular perspective.Calcium sensing receptorThecalcium­sensingreceptor (CaSR) isaG protein­coupled receptor (GPCR) in the plasma membrane.The CaSR gene is located from base pair 121,902,529 to base pair 122,005,349 on long q arm ofchromosome 3. It plays an essential role in calcium ion homeostasis, cellular proliferation, differentiationand apoptosis (Diez­Fraile et al., 2013). The CaSR is composed of three main regions: a largeextracellular domain, where the interaction with the Ca

Russia’s Surveillance State

Russia’s Surveillance State

EMBnet, the Global Bioinformatics Network, in 2013: A Silver Anniversary

EMBnet’s 2013 Annual General Meeting (AGM) and associated events were hosted in the TRYP Valencia Oceanic Hotel, Valencia, Spain, from 14 to 18 May. The AGM, the silver anniversary of EMBnet’s foundation, provided a timely opportunity both to review our progress since the “ EMBnet Moving Forward: 2010 & beyond ” workshop hosted in Ruvo di Puglia, Italy (Attwood et al ., 2010), and to showcase the work of our allied SeqAhead project. EMBnet has undergone significant changes since 2010: it has rebranded and launched a new website; it has formed new alliances; it has incubated new initiatives (notably, GOBLET) and multidisciplinary research projects (namely, SeqAhead and AllBio); and it has formally introduced structural changes to streamline our activities and broaden our membership. The events allied to the AGM included a full-day EMBnet hands-on tutorial on " RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data analysis " given by Endre Barta (U. of Debrecen, Hungary) and Eija Korpelainen (CSC- IT Center for Science, Finland), and on " NGS and structural Biology ", given by Goran Neshich (EMBRAPA, Brazil), Jose R. Valverde (CNB-CSIC, Spain) and Gert Vried (CMBI, Holland); the two-day SeqAhead “ The Next NGS Challenge: Data Processing and Integration ” conference and Management Committee meeting; a full-day EMBnet workshop; and finally, the business meeting itself. Here, we review the motivation for the EMBnet workshop, and present its main conclusions.

EMBnet, the Global Bioinformatics Network, in 2013: A Silver Anniversary

EMBnet’s 2013 Annual General Meeting (AGM) and associated events were hosted in the TRYP Valencia Oceanic Hotel, Valencia, Spain, from 14 to 18 May. The AGM, the silver anniversary of EMBnet’s foundation, provided a timely opportunity both to review our progress since the “ EMBnet Moving Forward: 2010 & beyond ” workshop hosted in Ruvo di Puglia, Italy (Attwood et al ., 2010), and to showcase the work of our allied SeqAhead project. EMBnet has undergone significant changes since 2010: it has rebranded and launched a new website; it has formed new alliances; it has incubated new initiatives (notably, GOBLET) and multidisciplinary research projects (namely, SeqAhead and AllBio); and it has formally introduced structural changes to streamline our activities and broaden our membership. The events allied to the AGM included a full-day EMBnet hands-on tutorial on RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data analysis given by Endre Barta (U. of Debrecen, Hungary) and Eija Korpelainen (CSC- IT Center for Science, Finland), and on NGS and structural Biology , given by Goran Neshich (EMBRAPA, Brazil), Jose R. Valverde (CNB-CSIC, Spain) and Gert Vried (CMBI, Holland); the two-day SeqAhead “ The Next NGS Challenge: Data Processing and Integration ” conference and Management Committee meeting; a full-day EMBnet workshop; and finally, the business meeting itself. Here, we review the motivation for the EMBnet workshop, and present its main conclusions.

Dirk Draheim-University of Innsbruck, IT service Division, Austria

Dirk Draheim is currently head of the IT Center of the University of Innsbruck as well as Adjunct Reader at the Faculty of Information Systems at the University of Mannheim.

Data storage architecture to support various research needs and data lifecycle management

IT architecture and life cycle management is essential when cost-efficient solutions are developed for research data management. The IT center of the University of Helsinki (UH) has an ongoing project to find suitable services for varying needs to handle research data and offer services to researchers with storage needs. Several findings and suggestions have been made during the project.

Do IT service centers promote school enrollment? Evidence from India

Globalization has changed job opportunities in much of the developing world. In India, outsourcing has created a new class of high-skill jobs which have increased overall returns to schooling. Existing evidence suggests education may broadly respond to this change. We use microdata to evaluate the impact of these jobs on local school enrollment in areas outside of major IT centers. We merge panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school-level administrative dataset with detailed data on Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) center location and founding dates. Using school fixed effects, we find that introducing a new ITES center causes a 5% increase in the number of children enrolled in primary school; this effect is localized to within a few kilometers. We show the effect is driven by English-language schools, consistent with the claim that the impacts are due to changes in returns to schooling, and is not driven by changes in population or income resulting from the ITES center. Supplementary survey evidence suggests that the localization of the effects is driven by limited information diffusion.

Cloud Immunization and Security for e-Governance Applications

Different e-Governance applications in India are using Cloud for making the services scalable, stretchable and cost effective. Starting from the IT centres being setup at Panchayat level to the State/National data centres use the Cloud to create a common infrastructure that would be accessible by all. The focus is to enable sharing of resources, ensure security and take technology to the smaller towns and villages. But the major concern is to ensure security. This paper proposes a security solution by using architectural framework, open source products and immunization algorithm. Our interest is to use Artificial Immune System (AIS) with Clonal Selection Algorithm (CLONA) for secure transaction of e-Governance services. The porosed Cloud architecture adopts the learning process and follows security optimization techniques. This technique uses spontaneous action-event transactional state of Cloud Immunization and Security (CIS), defined security services such as Authentication, Firewall and Antivirus. With these technique and services the CIS system is empowered to dynamically determine the best clone and the best antibody. Intruder attacks termed as new antigens when approaches the Cloud, then the cloud system’s antibody known as threat detector follows Hamming Distance calculation to evaluate the threat termed as “affinity”. These affinity alerts and protects the Cloud system through CIS to undertake any kind of future attempt and attacks by the intruders.

Preparing experiments’ software for long term analysis and data preservation

Preserving data from past experiments and preserving the ability to perform analysis with old data is of growing importance in many domains of science, including High Energy Physics (HEP). A study group on this issue, DPHEP, has been established in this field to provide guidelines and a structure for international collaboration on data preservation projects in HEP. This contribution aims at preparing experiments’ software for long term analysis and data preservation. In a first part, we discuss the use of modern techniques like virtualization or Cloud for this purpose. In a second part, we detail the constraints of a supporting IT center for future legacy experiments. In a third part, we present a framework that allows experimentalists to validate their software against a previously defined set of tests in an automated way. We show first usage of the system, and present results gained from the experience with early-bird-users, and future adaptations to the system.

Les fentes labiopalatines à l’est de la République Démocratique du Congo. Aspects épidémiologiques

This study aims to present the epidemiological profile of clefts lip/palate observed in the eastern of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from January 2002 to May 2004, period of civil wars. It is a retrospective study realized at Doctors on Call for service Learning Center (DOCS LC) in Goma/DRC concerning 89 cases of cleft lip/palate operated during the same period. The data processing was facilitated by the software package SPSS 17.0 installed in the IT center of DOCS. The average age of the consultation is 9.9 years with extreme of zero and 42 years. Both sexes are concerned: 50.6% of male and 49.4% of female. The more cleft extends from the superior lip to the palate through the alveolus, the more the frequency of the various types of clefts lips/palate decreases: 59.6% (simple clefts lip), 37.1% (labio-alveolar clefts), and 2.2% (cleft palate). The left incomplete cleft lip variety represents 33.7% of all varieties. Most of clefts lips/palate come from the first to the fifth pregnancy with a peak of frequency (19.1%) in the second pregnancy. No family history about congenital deformation was found from 97% of our patients. The epidemiology of cleft lip/palate in our area would be more connected to environmental factors than genetics: no family history of congenital deformation was seen for most of our patients during this period of civil war.

On the way toward the sector spanning agrifood process traceability

Having overviewed the state-of-art in agrifood traceability, the paper focuses on the multiscale modeling of the underlying problems. The main conclusion is, that there are not really workable sector spanning traceability methods, but the field experts and the computer modeling community seems to be prepared to develop quite new tools in the near future. According to our opinion, the sector encompassing IT centers ought to find a reasonable compromise between the “Schylla” of the simple, step by step passing of traceable unit IDs for the neighboring actors, and the “Carybdis” of accumulating enormously huge databases, containing every relevant data of the actors. The future role of the sector spanning, outside intelligent centers is to provide traceability and trackability service for the actors on cooperative basis of the mutual interests. In addition, the centers have to support the supply chain and value chain management, as well as the work of the authorities, that are responsible for the human health. Present study provides a good basis to our future development of a really sector spanning method. In a following paper we shall outline a sector spanning system on the basis of the Direct Computer Mapping based simulation methodology, in detail.

A Framework for Green Computing

Many organizations attempt to implement Green ICT. Some adopt a deliberate and holistic policy, but most approach it piecemeal. The formal definition and approach to implementing Green ICT remains elusive, because most organizations are unable to properly identify what areas to address. A comprehensive and practical Green ICT framework helps overcome this problem. Measurement is important because it enables benchmarking and comparisons by quantifying the degree of implementation of Green ICT. User organizations can then be compared to each other, or to themselves over time, to determine the extent and effectiveness of their Green ICT strategies. This paper outlines a research-based yet highly practical Green Computing framework. It is based on a 4 x 5 matrix with four vertical “pillars”: Lifecycle, End User IT, Enterprise and Data Center IT, and IT as a Low-Carbon Enabler. Applied against each pillar is a five-level Capability Maturity Model metric which can be based on a detailed survey of the organization’s policies and practices in each area. The five horizontal dimensions, or “actions” are applied across the four pillars: Attitude, Policies, Practices, Technologies and Metrics.

Datacenters in the Desert

Green IT and green data centers will not happen overnight. Achieving greener data centers with lower carbon emissions and be more environmentally sustainable is a daunting task and especially challenging to make facilities running in extreme climatic conditions greener. However, with maturing technologies and availability of greener products, organizations have better options, even in extreme climates.

The Finnish EMBnet node: AGM 2010 report

Node report by Kimmo Mattila CSC - IT Center for Science is a non-profit company owned by the Finnish Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. With the staff of about 200 persons CSC provides a wide range of information technology support and resources for the Finnish academia and research institutes. Currently the services include computing, application, networking and data services for a wide variety of sciences ranging from linguistics to physics.