In the short span of less than a decade the mobile phone has become a ubiquitous feature of life in India. Everyone from the chai-wallah to the CEO has a cell-phone and in recent years many of these are smart-phones capable of running smart-apps. Our focus is on conceiving a practical and useful app that can aid in disaster prevention and actually implementing and testing it. Towards this end we created PhoneGuard – a smart-app that converts the phone into a remote monitoring device – you leave the phone in a sensitive location like on the banks of a river or inside a coal-mine and it periodically takes pictures, does simple image analysis and checks for coherence over time, if warranted (e.g. in case of flooding of the river or buckling of beams in a coal-mine) it raises an alarm and follows an escalation procedure to push live images to a webpage. A complete working system was developed using standardized software and tested using realistic conditions. We believe that the image analysis and its integration into an escalation procedure is a novel aspect of our system.
In sensor networks communication by broadcast methods involves many hazards, especially collision. Several MAC layer protocols have been proposed to resolve the problem of collision namely ARBP, where the best achieved success rate is 90%. We hereby propose a MAC protocol which achieves a greater success rate (Success rate is defined as the percentage of delivered packets at the source reaching the destination successfully) by reducing the number of collisions, but by trading off the average propagation delay of transmission. Our proposed protocols are also shown to be more energy efficient in terms of energy dissipation per message delivery, compared to the currently existing protocol.
In this project we look at combining and compressing a set of workflows, such that computation is minimized. In this context, we look at two novel theoretical problems with applications in workflow systems and services research, which are dual of each other. The first problem looks at merging the maximum number of vertices in two DAGs (directed acyclic grahs) without creating a cycle. We prove that the dual of this problem is the problem of maximizing the length of the LCS (longest common subsequence) between all airs of topological orderings of the two DAGS. This formulation generalizes to a new definition of LCS between complex structures like workflows or XML documents, which we call M-LCS. Subsequently, we present a taxonomy of the different kinds o problems in this set, and find the M-LCS solution for a tree and a chain with dynamic programming algorithm. Along with this theoretical formulation, we implement the algorithm in c++ and run it on representative workflows. We evaluate the performance of the M-LCS algorithm on a set of random workflows of the M-LCS algorithm on a set of random workflows and observe that it is substantially better than traditional AI based approaches.
A google extension called "NEULibraryAccess" to let users login to NEU library supported websites using myNEU credentials. How it works: A set of websites where myNEU credential is accepted is available at "http://ezproxy.neu.edu/menu". Whenever one of these websites is visited this extension takes actions depending on mode selected from options page. If "1 CLICK" option is selected, the extension tries to sign in the user directly on opening the page. Otherwise, if "2 CLICK" option is selected, a small icon is shown at the extreme right side of the address bar and by clicking it an user logs in to the website using myNEU credentials. Moreover, if the user has selected to use this extension only when being used from non-neu network, the extension only tries to sign-in users when being used from outside neu networks. P.S: This extension does not store myNEU credentials.