User's Desktop Research Articles

Modeap: Moving Desktop Application to Mobile Cloud Service

Thanks to the availability of various mobile applications, lots of users shift from desktop environments, e.g., PCs and laptops, to mobile devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets. However, there are still some desktop applications without counterparts on mobile devices, such as some integrated development environments (e.g., eclipse) and automatic industry control systems. In this paper, we propose Modeap, a platform-independent mobile cloud service that can push all desktop applications developed for various operating systems from cloud servers to mobile devices. Modeap follows a design principle of complete detachment and regeneration of desktop user interface, i.e., the essential graphical primitives of the original desktop applications will be intercepted and then translated into standard web-based graphical primitives such that the interactions between users and remote cloud applications become possible via mobile web browsers. In this way, all desktop applications built upon the same set of graphical primitives can be used on mobile devices in great flexibility without installing any new software. We have developed a proof-of-concept prototype that provides Windows applications from cloud server to mobile web browsers. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve our design goals with low latency and bandwidth consumption.

Mapping Using Multithreading In Graph Search

Cloud computing is a way of delivery any or all information technology from computing power to computing infrastructure, application, business processes and personal collaboration to an user as a service wherever and whenever they need it. The cloud in cloud computing is set of hardware, network, software, storage, service and interfaces that combine to deliver aspects of computing as a service. Shared resource, software and information are providing to computers and other devices on demand basis. It allows people to do things, they want to on a computer without the need for them to build an IT infrastructure or to understand the underline technology. Cloud computing refers to application and services that run on distributed network using virtualized resources and access by common internet protocols and network standards. It is a moving computing and storage from the user desktop or laptop to remote location where as huge collection of server storage system and network equipment from a seamless infrastructure for an application and storage. Online file storage, social networking sites, webmail and online business application are the example of cloud services. Now a day many people are connected to internet and Social networking sites. Social network have become a powerful platform for sharing and communication that focus on real world relationships. Social networking plays a major role in everyday lives of many people. Facebook is one of the best examples of Social networking sites where more than 400 million active users are connected. Thus Social cloud is a scalable computing model where in virtualized resource provided by users dynamically. In this paper we used concept of MapReduce with Multithreading. MapReduce is a paradigm that allows for massive scalability across hundreds or thousands of servers in a cluster. MapReduce job usually split the input data into independent chunks which are processed by the map tasks in completely parallel manner. It sorts the output of the map which are than input to the reduce task. Using mapping techniques is to find out a good performance in terms of cost and time.

LABORATORY BENCH MANIPULATOR CONTROL M10P FROM SCADA SYSTEM TRACE MODE

To improve the quality of the educational process for students majoring in Electromechanical systems of automation and electric drive at Zaporizhzhya National Technical University test machine computer control of manipulator M10P SCADA TRACE MODE system via OPC-server , USB port on your computer and controllers of VIPA was developed. It is possible to increase professional knowledge and skills to work with modern equipment of leading companies. Actuality of modernization, technical description of the stand are given. Stand consists of: mechanical manipulator parts, electrical and pneumatic drives, controllers, position sensor , control panels and computer. The block diagram of the stand, the software features of SCADA system TRACE MODE are shown, the user interface is designed as well as methods of laboratory work are given. The more detailed information as to the arm automatic mode control (setting to zero position. Cycle work ) is presented. The possibility for data encoder to track the movements of the hand pointing in panel desktop user interface is shown.

Design Requirements for Best Effort Backbone IPNetwork

Process control systems for Hydrocarbon Process Automation Applications (HPAA) are implemented in oil and gas fields, plants, refineries, and tank farms in the form of a Local Area Network (LAN) to support control functions. These systems are composed of sensors, actuators, and logic solvers networked together to form a control system platform. Reliable networking plays a key role in supporting such a system infrastructure. The existing network designs consist of multiple, parallel networks with limited interconnectivity supporting different functions. The concept of consolidating HPPA networks on a converged Internet Protocol (IP) and utilize Wide Area Network (WAN) for real time operation was not explored in detail in the past. This paper explores this concept by simulating a WAN network based on Best Effort Quality of Service settings. Simulation and empirical experimentation were conducted to assess the feasibility of such a conceptual design and it showed positive outcomes. HPPA can benefit from a converged IP WAN by minimizing network components and wiring; and provide an integrated control system platform at the end user's desktop. Index Terms—Bandwidth, best effort (BE), converged IP, quality of service (QoS), peer-to-peer, traffic mix, WAN.

Embarrassingly Distributed Computing for Symbiotic Weather Forecasts

The spatial resolution of publicly available numerical weather forecasts is largely limited by the computing resources of the originating weather services. Only selected parameters are available to the public from many weather services.We present a scalable system for distributed computation of high resolution symbiotic numerical weather forecasts. Each forecast is computed on the user's desktop computer, independent of other forecasts. Forecasts from the neighborhood may be exchanged between forecast producing peers, and amalgamated into a Symbiotic Forecast. The combination of several fore- casts yields additional insight into the uncertainty introduced by the interaction of the chosen grid placement of the numerical model with geographical features with steep gradients, such as steep terrain.We let forecast producers share forecasts with each other. We assume that a user frequently is interested in the forecast for the area where the user lives and that the produced forecasts are stored at a computer located where the user is. Based on this, we limit the sharing of forecasts to computers within the same geographical area. To find computers with relevant forecasts, we will find most of them at computers located within a limited geographical region. These computers can be located quickly by scanning for them every time forecasts are needed. This approach scales with respect to the number of forecasters by limiting interaction to geographical regions. It also removes the need to maintain a list of computers with relevant forecasts.

Business Benefits from the Virtualization of an ICT Infrastructure

Virtualization is a technique that may be encountered in all parts of an ICT infrastructure. The benefits of virtualization for an infrastructure are recognized by a growing number of companies. In this way, virtualization creates prerequisites for the further improvement of the entire information system. Another reason is the growing awareness of environmental issues at the global level, which has become a large external sponsor of this technology. While virtualization technology has been known about for several decades, its hay day is yet to come. In the following years many jobs will be create because of it, from the user desktop and notebook computers, to the server in all businesses. This article examines the impact of virtualization in business enterprises, with emphasis on infrastructure costs and improved business functions. It points to the large savings that can occur even in medium-sized enterprises. Claims are verifiable quantitative indicators, particularly in the procurement of equipment. It also demonstrates the benefits of virtualization while performing everyday tasks that take place within the IT department. We discuss the correlation of increased flexibility and convenience, and agile response to market demands, while reducing capital and operating costs, and increasing the competitiveness of companies in the market.

BUILDING USER TASK SPACE BY MINING TEMPORALLY PROXIMATE DESKTOP ACTIONS

Awareness of the user's current context, that is, the task the user resides in, can allow for various ways of supporting their work. In this article we present a novel approach for mining user's regular tasks on the basis of temporal proximity of users’ desktop actions without user intervention in a completely automatic, unobtrusive, and unsupervised manner. The proposed method is based on time-based clustering of a user's desktop actions and, in contrast to previous approaches, it does not enforce fixed time constraints on the mined actions, and typical transition times, when they exist, emerge from the logged activity data for that specific user. The performance of our technique was evaluated on a large data set of 724 days of desktop work by five knowledge workers. The results showed that our approach performed very well and was able to cluster those temporally proximate user actions that commonly used fix time window techniques fail to deal with. Notably, the main improvement is in the recall of the tasks, where our approach recalled 10.18% more actions than the predefined time window technique.

Utility-directed resource allocation in virtual desktop clouds

User communities are rapidly transitioning their “traditional desktops” that have dedicated hardware and software installations into “virtual desktop clouds” (VDCs) that are accessible via thin-clients. To allocate and manage VDC resources for Internet-scale desktop delivery, existing works focus mainly on managing server-side resources based on utility functions of CPU and memory loads, and do not consider network health and thin-client user experience. Resource allocations without combined utility-directed information of system loads, network health and thin-client user experience in VDC platforms inevitably results in costly guesswork and over-provisioning of resources. In this paper, we develop an analytical model viz., “Utility-Directed Resource Allocation Model (U-RAM)” to solve the combined utility-directed resource allocation problem within VDCs. Our solution involves an iterative algorithm that leverages utility functions of system, network and human components obtained using a novel virtual desktop performance benchmarking toolkit viz., “VDBench” that we developed. The combined utility functions are used to direct decision schemes based on Kuhn–Tucker optimality conditions for creating user desktop pools and determining optimal resource allocation size/location. We deploy VDBench in a VDC testbed featuring: (a) popular user applications (Spreadsheet Calculator, Internet Browser, Media Player, Interactive Visualization), and (b) TCP/UDP based thin-client protocols (RDP, RGS, PCoIP) under a variety of user load and network health conditions. Simulation results based on the utility functions obtained from the testbed demonstrate that our solution maximizes VDC scalability i.e., ‘VDs per core density’, and ‘user connections quantity’, while delivering satisfactory thin-client user experience.

Anti‐virus in‐the‐cloud service: are we ready for the security evolution?

ABSTRACTThe ever‐increasing malware variants pose serious challenges for traditional signature‐based anti‐virus (AV) scan engines. To effectively handle the scale and magnitude of new malware variants, AV functionality is being moved from the user desktop into the cloud. AV in‐the‐cloud service is becoming the next‐generation security infrastructure designed to defend against virus threats. It provides reliable protection service delivered through data centers worldwide, which are built on virtualization technologies. Nowadays, cloud‐based security services are gaining bullish projections in both consumer and enterprise markets. However, are we getting ready for the cloud evolution? Security vendors are facing various challenges regarding the architectural design, implementation, and validation. Owing to the lack of operation standards among vendors and very few research works conducted up to this point, researchers have no references of AV cloud testing to rely on. In this paper, the architecture of AV in‐the‐cloud service is described. The challenges and solutions are discussed and illustrated by examples taken from our cutting‐edge research on practical applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Paper Divide

The transition of serial collections from a paper format to an electronic format has created a syndrome of rising expectations in academia. The speed and convenience of accessing peer-reviewed journal articles at the desktop has led to an increasing demand for more electronic serials. Concurrent with improved access to journal articles via locally owned electronic serials, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) services offered by large academic libraries are now routinely providing electronic versions of scholarly documents to the user's desktop in one or two days. This has created a situation where electronic ownership of a serial is the preferred option but electronic delivery via ILL is a reasonable alternative. Locally held paper serials used to be the best option for users. Now paper serials are increasingly viewed as an inconvenience, creating a “Paper Divide” between electronic serial ownership and electronic ILL service. Moreover, published reports indicate that electronic serials are less costly to maintain than paper serials. Because of user preference, cost considerations, and space considerations, the move to electronic serials is inevitable. This article explores the implications of the Paper Divide and how academic libraries are coping with this challenge.

Demonstrating your programs value through success stories: CDC's new internet-based tool

Documenting successful injury prevention and response interventions and their impact in an efficient, compelling way, has not been possible-until now. At CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, one...

Educational treasures in Radiology: A highly customizable Radiology specific literature search engine

This article focuses on PubRad (www.pubrad.org) - a custom defined and Radiology targeted medical literature search software which can be used in multiple ways to adjust to the individual user's needs. PubRad can be used from its website, from the user's desktop, it can be implemented into the user's own website or can be even integrated into third party programs.

Interaction with large ubiquitous displays using camera-equipped mobile phones

In the ubiquitous computing environment, people will interact with everyday objects (or computers embedded in them) in ways different from the usual and familiar desktop user interface. One such typical situation is interacting with applications through large displays such as televisions, mirror displays, and public kiosks. With these applications, the use of the usual keyboard and mouse input is not usually viable (for practical reasons). In this setting, the mobile phone has emerged as an excellent device for novel interaction. This article introduces user interaction techniques using a camera-equipped hand-held device such as a mobile phone or a PDA for large shared displays. In particular, we consider two specific but typical situations (1) sharing the display from a distance and (2) interacting with a touch screen display at a close distance. Using two basic computer vision techniques, motion flow and marker recognition, we show how a camera-equipped hand-held device can effectively be used to replace a mouse and share, select, and manipulate 2D and 3D objects, and navigate within the environment presented through the large display.

Gyanoday Portal: A Virtual Reference Point for Management Knowledge Repository

Librarians are constantly exploring various ways and means of supporting users in the emerging virtual community. The paper discusses how technological developments in libraries have led to the emergence of new service paradigms. Recent trends in electronic libraries, with particular reference to academic libraries to provide value-added library services to support virtual communities. Paper discusses the dynamic nature of reference services in the context of rapidly changing technologies and heightened quality of service/user expectations, and explores the issues associated with planning virtual reference services in an academic environment. With the usage of this Library Portal, the desktop user’s community of IIM Lucknow has been greatly benefited. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/djlit.29.239

NeuroTerrain--a client-server system for browsing 3D biomedical image data sets.

BackgroundThree dimensional biomedical image sets are becoming ubiquitous, along with the canonical atlases providing the necessary spatial context for analysis. To make full use of these 3D image sets, one must be able to present views for 2D display, either surface renderings or 2D cross-sections through the data. Typical display software is limited to presentations along one of the three orthogonal anatomical axes (coronal, horizontal, or sagittal). However, data sets precisely oriented along the major axes are rare. To make fullest use of these datasets, one must reasonably match the atlas' orientation; this involves resampling the atlas in planes matched to the data set. Traditionally, this requires the atlas and browser reside on the user's desktop; unfortunately, in addition to being monolithic programs, these tools often require substantial local resources. In this article, we describe a network-capable, client-server framework to slice and visualize 3D atlases at off-axis angles, along with an open client architecture and development kit to support integration into complex data analysis environments.ResultsHere we describe the basic architecture of a client-server 3D visualization system, consisting of a thin Java client built on a development kit, and a computationally robust, high-performance server written in ANSI C++. The Java client components (NetOStat) support arbitrary-angle viewing and run on readily available desktop computers running Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Linux as a downloadable Java Application. Using the NeuroTerrain Software Development Kit (NT-SDK), sophisticated atlas browsing can be added to any Java-compatible application requiring as little as 50 lines of Java glue code, thus making it eminently re-useable and much more accessible to programmers building more complex, biomedical data analysis tools. The NT-SDK separates the interactive GUI components from the server control and monitoring, so as to support development of non-interactive applications. The server implementation takes full advantage of data center's high-performance hardware, where it can be co-localized with centrally-located, 3D dataset repositories, extending access to the researcher community throughout the Internet.ConclusionThe combination of an optimized server and modular, platform-independent client provides an ideal environment for viewing complex 3D biomedical datasets, taking full advantage of high-performance servers to prepare images and subsets of associated meta-data for viewing, as well as the graphical capabilities in Java to actually display the data.

Interview with Lee Jay Lorenzen

Lee Jay Lorenzen is a highly successful serial entrepreneur with more than 26 years of experience developing software and founding and/or funding numerous software ventures and non-profit organizations. Some of his successful companies include Independent Programming Teams, Ventura Software, Altura Software, Post Digital, Fractal Design Corporation, CoolChat and PGSoft. Lorenzen also developed some of the world's first graphical user interfaces, including icon-based graphical desktop user interface at Xerox Office Products Division and a graphical windowing system and user interface for the PC at Digital Research Inc. In the video interview, you will hear Lee's answers to the following questions:1. You worked on the graphical user interface in the early 80's, what was the motivation behind your work?2. What is the future of the Internet? More e-commerce, education, or entertainment?3. What is the ultimate shopping experience on the Internet like in the future?4. As a successful serial and parallel entrepreneur, what is your advice to a want-to-be entrepreneur in the high-tech business?

Kosha: A Peer-to-Peer Enhancement for the Network File System

The storage needs of modern scientific applications are growing exponentially, and designing economical storage solutions for such applications – especially in Grid environments – is an important research topic. This work presents Kosha, a system that aims to harvest redundant storage space on cluster nodes and user desktops to provide a reliable, shared file system that acts as a large distributed storage. Kosha utilizes peer-to-peer (p2p) mechanisms to enhance the widely-used Network File System (NFS). P2P storage systems provide location transparency, mobility transparency, load balancing, and file replication – features that are not available in NFS. On the other hand, NFS provides hierarchical file organization, directory listings, and file permissions, which are missing from p2p storage systems. By blending the strengths of NFS and p2p storage systems, Kosha provides a low overhead storage solution. Our experiments show that compared to unmodified NFS, Kosha introduces a 3.3% fixed overhead and 4.5% additional overhead as nodes are increased from two to sixteen. For larger number of nodes, the additional overhead increases slowly. Kosha achieves load balancing in distributed directories, and guarantees $99.99\%$ or better file availability.

Language history questionnaire: A Web-based interface for bilingual research

A Web-based interface has been developed to facilitate researchers in collecting language history information online. Most researchers use their own versions of language history questionnaires for specific studies in second language acquisition. Although these versions of questionnaires all differ from one another in some respects, there is a significant amount of overlap between them. Here we identify the crucial dimensions that most investigators consider important to include in such a questionnaire. We have examined the most commonly asked questions in 41 published questionnaires, and on the basis of our analyses we propose a general L2 language history questionnaire. Subjects can enter some or all of the information on the Web, and the results are automatically generated as an RTF output file on the user's desktop.

Visual analysis of statistical results from microarray studies of human breast cancer

Computational and statistical analysis of microarray data is a daunting challenge. Perhaps even more daunting is the biological interpretation of microarray data analysis results. We have previously developed the exploratory visual analysis (EVA) software and database for exploring data analysis results in the context of biological information on each gene available in public databases such as Entrez Gene. EVA brings a flexible combination of statistics and biological annotation to the user's desktop in a straightforward visual interface. Using a publicly available microarray dataset of gene expression response to chemotherapeutic agents in human breast cancer cell lines, we demonstrate the usefulness of the EVA system for interpreting statistical results. EVA can extend previous analyses as well as aid in making novel discoveries. Thus, we anticipate EVA will prove a useful addition to the repertoire of computational methods for microarray data analysis. The EVA software is freely available to academic users.

Privileged operations in the PlanetLab virtualised environment

Virtualised systems have experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years, whether used to support multiple OSes running on a user's desktop, provide commercial application hosting facilities, or isolate a large number of users from each other in global network testbeds. We also see an increasing level of interest in having entities within these virtualised systems interact with each other, either as peers or as helpers providing a service to clients.Very little work has been previously conducted on how such interaction between virtualised environments can take place. We introduce Proper, a service running on the PlanetLab system, that allows unprivileged entities to access privileged operations in a safe, tightly controlled manner.This paper describes our work designing and implementing Proper, including a discussion of the various architectural decisions made. We describe how implementing such a system in a traditional UNIX environment is non-trivial, and provide a number of examples of how services running on PlanetLab actually use Proper.